All Blacks v Ireland part II - July 9 8.05am Ireland time

David Havili too.

I've seen multiple people say it now, but the timing of Ed Byrne's call out was when they knew they were without Loughman and thought they might be without Healy too, so they were looking for someone to parachute straight into a match squad potentially. Byrne most likely got the call down to the fact he had the most experience of being in the camp compared to Wycherley or Warwick, and therefore would be the quickest up to speed with calls and systems etc.

On Wycherley, he will likely get his chance. He's far from a finished product though, and that European knock out game you mention he started in was one where the Munster scrum conceded multiple penalties to Toulouse.

Yeah, I generally agree with you here, and I think if it had been a matter of picking a squad before they'd left Ireland, Wycherley probably would have been ahead of Byrne. But the scenario they were working under was one where the player might have jumped off a plane straight into a match squad. Such a scenario I think goes beyond "testing" him, and is closer to actually setting him up to fail.

Obviously the big three would be the line out calls, scrum calls and then the defensive systems. On top of that, players will be expected to slot into the attacking systems the team is using; patterns/pods etc, when you're expected to be there to clear a ruck, when to hold positioning anticipating an attack down a channel a couple of phases time etc.

While the calls will evolve and change slightly all the time, the core systems are in place and one player having had familiarity with them from a training camp before is obviously a big advantage over one who hasn't.

I've no idea how the Irish ones differ from the Munster ones, but it would certainly seem that Ireland aspire to play a very different brand of rugby from Munster.

This is my last time engaging with your repeated nonsense.

Wycherley had a poor game in the scrum against Toulouse. The whole pack struggled, but a number of penalties were specifically on him. That's a fact.

We know a penalty is on him, when the referee calls out the Munster loose head as the culprit when he's awarding the penalty.

The reason I gave, once again, if you'd bothered to read the thread, was that they called up Byrne specifically because they thought it was a scenario where potentially both Loughman and Healy were out of the tour, and they needed to call someone up to potentially just hop off a plane and straight into a match day squad, with virtually no time to train, no time to get to know the other squad members, familiarise yourself with scrum & lineout calls, defensive systems, attacking shapes etc. Byrne likely got the call in this instance because he had previously been part of the squad, and therefore, making the best of a bad situation, would be quicker to jump in if required.

I'm all for backing young players when they show they're ready, and wouldn't have objected to Wycherley being brought on this tour from the starrt, but calling him out late and potentially straight into a test team in the situation the management thought they might be doing would do him absolutely no favours whatsoever, it would be likelier to see him exposed badly, and shatter his confidence.

Andy Farrell, Simon Easterby, Paul O'Connell and John Fogarty know these players better than you or I, so I'm going to trust their judgment in this scenario, while you carry on with your conspiracies.

That's ridiculously over the top. He didn't play well last week (when only about 3 Irish players did play well), but wasn't so noticeably worse than a lot of what was around him to justify this level of comment either.

Yeah, can't argue with either of those points. The Sexton decision just looks wrong.