Ireland Team Talk XII: Farrell's First Fifteen

Neither did Jackson though. He was not great on that tour to SA and he never came close to ousting Sexton. You made a reference to Madigan above which I found hilarious, he's the original poster boy for gaining maximum hype with very questionable substance.

Carbery might not be as good as we hoped he would be back in 2016/17 but he's the best we have. We just have to get on with it now.

Don't agree with you at all re: jackson. he was quite good on that tour, although he made some mistakes that cost in the end. Madigan was also in very good form in the season leading into the WC. If MOC hadn't brought in Gopperth and backed him fully, I think he would have benefited. Water under the bridge now tho.

Christ can we talk about other team next besides the out half situation, there will be 14 other irish men too

Happy enough with the other 14 selected

The loop plays are all well and good, but England have worked them out in the past, just ignoring dummy runners and in the process making Sexton look like a chump getting caught well behind the line.

France have a great defensive coach who probably has the loop around sussed. My point is, this type of play can generally be figured out, and the other teams will have enough over 2 or 3 games to figure out the tells between a flat pass and a pass in behind. I'm not sure this type of play is sustainable when overused.

Working out loop plays is not the issue. When executed properly they are almost impossible to defend and stop teams from getting over the gain line. It's a difficult skill to master though. The issue Ireland had in the past was that 'dummy' runners were not being respected. Timing was off with runners which allowed teams to just ignore and shoot up and hit us behind the gain line.

Problem for teams facing Ireland at the moment are that they have to respect our runners. We have a pack who are all capable of making that short pass on the gain line to put someone through and we are full of big ball carriers. Our dummy runners are all viable options and we are mixing it brilliantly. If France 'ignore' the dummy runners on Saturday, they are going to find themselves running back towards their own try line a lot.

There is a key match this weekend.

He isn't starting.

He's closed off games against the abs (who notoriously ramp it up towards the end of games) from out half. I don't think your giving him enough credit. He's never really played badly for Ireland.

Jackson a waste of time comparison he won't play for Ireland again you may as well compare him to Dan carter

The only game he "closed off" was the 2016 game, in which he came on around 60 minutes and was excellent.

In 2018 he came on with a minute to go, and we never actually had the ball, we just defended for the rest of the match. He didn't have to do anything.

In 2021 he kicked a great goal from the halfway line. But in his first touch in attack he got in a mix up with Conway, where he tried to cut inside when Conway was running an inside line and they sort of bounced into each other. Luckily Conway managed to get out of trouble because he could very easily have got caught behind the gainline and turned over, and at that point a penalty to NZ could have been devastating. That was pretty much the sum of his involvements with the ball. Because most of the last 15 of that game was us defending.

He wasn't particularly impressive in any of his 3 starts last year (and if you can't look good against a weakened USA team...). I've no idea how he got MOTM v Argentina. He wasn't particularly impressive when he started v Australia in 2018 either.

What I will say is he owes Farrell a big performance, because he's shown an incredible amount of faith in him.

This is true. Which begs the question, why is Farrell putting all of his eggs in the basket of an injury prone 10?. I'd wager the chances of Carbery making it through 5 World Cups games, isn't much better than the chances of a 38 year old Sexton making it.

My worry though is the "big minutes" i.e. European Knockouts and URC playoffs will go to Carbery, when from a Munster point of view, Healy has been the best performing out half this season.

And let's not pretend Carbery didn't have an injury free spell from February to December to show what he could do. He did, and the reality is, he didn't do much.

The problem at Leinster is Sexton plays the big games, and when Sexton isn't around (which is very often), Ross Byrne (who we know isn't good enough) plays all the URC games. So there's more minutes that could be going to a young out half, gone.

Connacht are very settled with Carty, who is the form 10 in Ireland and should be starting tomorrow.

At Ulster, there's the situation with Burns playing every week and nobody challenging him, which I think is a big problem that needs to be addressed.

And then at Munster there's the obvious massive backlog of very good young 10s, but all of them will be behind an injury prone one who has never really impressed after the 6N.

Would a thread to discuss the 10 situation be a good idea?

I don't want to stop the discussion but it completely dominates here and prevents other topics. 3 or 4 posts about something else but then inevitably Outhalf comes up again.

I believe it was Smith who signed Gopperth. Hoist by his own petard in a way there, although, if you ask me, there's no question Gopperth was the superior outhalf.

Great cover tbf. I imagine it was a very last minute change from Sexton to Carbery. Also, they picked a very timid picture of poor Joey.