Ireland Team Talk XII: Farrell's First Fifteen

Ah lads, Coombes is a lineout option, great to steal ball on the ground, an offensive weapon with ball in hand and makes his tackles and then some.

He's not just some big lump that runs at the opposition, he's got plenty of strings to his bow.

Hopefully he'll bounce back from this and become an option again.

That assertion is so disingenuous it's barely worth debating. If we were to measure the international quality of every player on a one off game then test matches would have ceased to exist long ago.

Coombes was the outstanding Irish player against the Maori. He's been phenomenal for the last two and a half seasons. Maybe he isn't what Farrell is looking for, fair enough, I think it's a poor choice but fair enough. However, the suggestion that Coombes is somehow lacking as a player is very wide of the mark. He's a fantastic tight carrier with excellent hands who's great over the ball. He's also a fine line out option.

Coombes is an interesting one. He was talked up last year as a live option for the 23 in the AI but was unlucky with injury and has been at various times since. I wasn’t particularly impressed with him in first test against Māori in the summer but he was much improved for the second game.

One concern I’d have with him is his dynamism. He’s a big strong lad with a powerful close in game but he’s more like Rhys Ruddock than Doris/Conan which doesn’t seem to be what Farrell and co are looking for.

I say that as a big fan of Rhys Ruddock so that’s no slight on Coombes but Ruddock is a player who has been there or thereabouts for 10 years+ but never nailed down a position as he found himself behind more dynamic players and also had unfortunate timing with injury.

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Doris overtaking him coincided with him getting injured, which gave Doris more game time. Which is different from Doris simply blowing past him, yes?

SA will be a much better team at the World Cup. So will NZ, Wales, France, Argentina, England and Australia. We need to keep innovating and improving, not stand still like 4 years ago. And hopefully unearth one or two more players. The SA game and the summer series will mean f*ck all if we embarrass ourselves at the world cup again. Our scrum and lineout both have massive room for improvement IMO. I'd also be concerned about how easily SA shut down our attack. We need to become better at executing against that sort of defence. I think we need to win the Slam next year. We haven't won a 6N yet under Farrell, we have England and France at home, and Scotland and Wales look pretty average right now. It's the next logical progression from what we've achieved this year. Anything less than that, and we'll have gone backwards IMO.

Will they be a much better team come the world cup? I'm not so sure. I think you will get more of the same from them. They'll play for penalties at set piece time and if they don't get it they begin to look fairly blunt. I don't think they 'shut down' our attack. A lot of our players are not up to speed this season yet. We didn't play well and still won. I think South Africa will be very worried after that.

Worth remembering that SA won the last RWC but absolutely weren't the best team in the tournament.

They have such a massive pool of players that they can always change things up and turn things around but as of now, not too worried about them to be honest