Leinster Team Talk/Gossip/Rumours Thread XII (The Byrne Supremacy)

I’m not setting a bar. I’m judging his full performance as being decent overall with a small number of high profile errors early on. Those moments amounted to about 10-20 seconds of the 60 mins he played and the last one was the defensive error for the Arnold try on 28 mins. He made 3 or 4 botched passes of his 53 passes. It’s okay to judge him on all 53 rather than just those 3 or 4.

I think that because Leinster have been on top for so long, there's a tendency to jump on any negative points as evidence of decline. The posts on boards.ie from the first 20 minutes of Friday's game were iffy at the time but are hilarious in retrospect.

Like, it's only a couple of weeks ago that Luke McGrath was called up to the Ireland squad. He may well still be Leinster's first choice. He's a very decent player.

You're right that they're two decent options but if you ask what they could reasonably hope for then I'd say they're missing a young prospect.

JGP and LM have kept things very competitive for the starting Jersey but they have been lacking a young 9 to push them as they age. Doak in Ulster is better than anyone could reasonably hope for as he went straight from Ireland U20s to Ulster first team action. But Leinster has no real prospects at 9 beyond JPG and LM

Just back to say that I thought HB had a good game on Friday night, now, more game time...

Yet I’m sure I wouldn’t have to search to hard to find posts from you criticizing his passing ability.

Luke is a great SH apart from always having accuracy issues with his pass. In the last 2 weeks those issues have been very much amplified. Although he did sort it out from about 25 minutes in on Friday.

Theres a very obvious reason that happened though. Our pack started winning collisions and creating cleaner ball. Once normal service was resumed, well normal service was resumed.

The worrying aspect about the last two weeks. Was the fact our pack were getting beaten up and our game fell apart. Considering neither team are renowned for having forwards that dominate other teams. That leads to concerns of what happens when we come up against teams that can beat us up, up front. If us being able to play expansively can be negated by a pack fronting up to us, then we will struggle in later stages of the ERC for definite.

A good point. The halves get way more possessions than players in other positions, so more errors from them is to be expected.

I wouldn’t agree personally. I don’t think 3 or 4 bad passes and 1 bad defensive read in 60 minutes of rugby from a scrum half is as bad as some have made out. I’m not trying to say he was great, but he delivered for the vast majority of the game. His performance wasn’t great. It wasn’t terrible. He did what he had to do for the vast majority of the time that he was on the pitch and did so well enough. Those errors would take his performance from good down to decent. Because he was good for the most part.

I like McGrath but 5 bad passes in a game for a scrum half is a very poor performance, against a top European team that could lose you the game.

Bath have been absolutely awful this season, have lost every game so far and shipped 70 point losses twice in the league so far, even with a few injuries Leinster should be looking for a good win here.