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

How do you know that with such certainty? You are great at making declarative statements without stating how you know.

How often does it really happen that Leinster are proven wrong when a young guy leaves/is let go/is banished in chains?

There's Beirne, and that's about it really. Maybe Dunne will turn out to be that good but probably not.

Again, our locks next season are Ryan (25), Baird (22), Molony (27), McCarthy (21), Jenkins (26) and Deeny (22). Keeping Dunne would mean depriving some other young player of game time.

TBH I'm a lot more disappointed to be losing Josh Murphy.

I agree with this. There are so many factors at play with these things and mostly unquantifiable.

I would imagine Jenkins, a capped Sprinbbok (albeit a single cap), was signed for much more than to be a URC player. Between his signing and now, we've seen a significant leap forward in terms of our lock options/performances. Pretty much every second row in the squad has had game time and shown real potential. But back at the start of the year, the cupboard was looking a lot more bare/unproven.

Dunne, Murphy, Molony, Baird, Ryan and McCarthy....I think people would be fairly comfortable with any of those guys being in our first choice 23 next season if they were still available. With that said, Jenkins still provides something that none of our options can which is pure power and bulk. He's 124kg Even if he provides 1-2 year tutelage to Joe McCarthy, it will have been a moderate success.

If Jenkins can realise some of his significant potential for Leinster, I wouldn't be surprised whatsoever to see him as a first choice player by this time next year. He's a huge unit who can handle the ball well and carry well with a pretty decent work rate too (43 tackles made without missing a single one in his 177 minutes so far this season).

It wouldn’t be the first time, but it would be the exception more so than the rule. Anyway the biggest issue with Beirne at Leinster was his injury profile. And we’ve seen how moving can, for whatever reason, clear things like that up. Look even as far back as Wilkinson at Newcastle and then at Toulon.

We have no idea the detail behind Dunne’s leaving, but as mentioned above it’s rare that Leinster have been shown to make mistakes in this area. Like every team they will make some mistakes. There’s no need to make a mountain out of a pretty small molehill. Especially when we’ve young lads coming through in that position even with Dunne heading off. There isn’t really an issue here at all, much and all as you seem to want there to be.

Bierne did not look like the player he would go on to become when he left leinster. He was a skinny looking lock. He bulked up in scarlets and his handling and jackling improved immeasurably. Yes it does raise questions around the quality of coaching of certain skills but gametime/player attitude etc etc all changed with the move.

These two posts are completely contradictory.

Don't really know why we're relitigating Beirne but 1) he was injured a lot when at Leinster and 2) I don't think anyone at all, himself included, saw him turn into the player he became. None of the other provinces or anyone in the IRFU did either or else he wouldn't have been let go. You're never going to catch every single future international, people get things wrong from time-to-time.

It’s also entirely possible that if he had stayed he’d have progressed to the level that he’s at too. We simply don’t know. At the end of the day Leinster had to make a call on whether or not to give a contract to a guy who had a poor injury profile and was up against a good deal of competition from experienced and upcoming players.

Its worth noting that Beirne made a name for himself in the back row. Not as a lock. Quite where he’d have gotten game time in the back row for Leinster I’m not sure. We had Conan, Heaslip, Leavy, Murphy, SOB, Ruddock, Dominic Ryan and VDF all in the senior squad at the time. His game time in the back row would have been limited, and would have limited time for guys like Leavy and VDF as well.

Even at lock there was decent competition. Triggs, Toner, McCarthy, Kearney and Molony were all in place at the time with a certain James Ryan coming through the ranks.

Its hard to see how we could have afforded him the time and opportunities that Scarlets gave him given the level of competition he would have been up against. And when you add in his injury profile it really wasn’t that shocking a decision to let him go.

Made his name as a backrow? In his first season with the Scarlets he started three games at 6, and was the bench backrow once. That's versus 14 starts at lock, and wearing 19 four times.

I suppose relative to the gametime he was afforded at Leinster his gametime in the backrow for the Scarlets looks like quite a lot. Cullen gave him four bench appearances for 5, 11, 7 and 16 minutes.