Ireland Team Talk XII: Farrell's First Fifteen

I've actually seen one of the raw datasets that gets gathered from international games, it tracks every single action that every single player takes during the game. And it didn't include the GPS data that they gather from the little units the player wear. The professional teams have absolutely massive quantities of data at their disposal.

Whilst his hands have improved, that doesn't necessarily equate to having good hands. It just means he doesn't spill the ball which was a problem in his earlier career.

Ireland play a dynamic game with a lot of moving the ball away from contact, fixing the defender and then trying to make sure there's quick ruck ball etc. In 4 European matches, Kleyn has passed the ball twice. He has made 11m with ball in hand which suggests that he's generally just trucking it back to the gain line and recycling.

If you compare that with the Irish incumbent locks, Beirne has passed the ball 26 times and Ryan passed 16 times. Both have significantly more ground made with ball in hand (56m and 42m respectively) which suggests they're getting over the gain line and giving front foot ball to the scrum half which is quicker and there's a resetting defence. These are massive elements of the Irish game plan.

McCarthy and Henderson have similar involvements in the loose (Henderson being the closest to Kleyn in terms of passing but still more prominent).

Kleyn is having an excellent season but he's not playing the type of game that he needs to if he wants to be involved in green. Whether that's by design or through any limitations is another question but the fact that Beirne is the most prominent lock around in terms of handling and carrying suggests that it's not something that Munster would have any issue with.

I think you are massively overthinking this.

Just saying you're theory makes no sense whatsoever, explain it for me?

That’s basically it. 9 seems about right. I wouldn’t have JGP but i think he’s a fantastic style fit.

I think the essential guys on that list are the forwards and sexton though. I think we probably could replace ringrose and keenan if we absolutely had to and still win.

i dunno about this though, its an argument you regularly hear on here and from pundits - lets play some bigger lads against the bigger packs like SA and France. Stick Gavin Coombes etc, in because we wont match them physically

the problem i see with that is that we still wont match them physically in all likelihood (maybe France but SA almost definitely not) and we might move too far away from our normal game to challenge them. im not saying its an idea completely devoid of merit but i would question if it would actually be effective in reality

I wasn’t saying that we could lose on the basis of a single incident. I’m just saying that just because something has a bad outcome, it doesn’t mean everything about it was bad. Not everything is in our control. That was just an example of that. I wasn’t trying to define it as some match defining moment though.

As I said, we should be aiming for a GS. But we shouldn’t be too down on not winning one if the circumstances are positive in the main. The main thing right now is a trophy. We need to show ourselves as much as anyone else that we can win one, or more accurately the team need to show themselves. That’s what we need going into the RWC. From there we can judge the merits of a GS or no GS after the fact on what happened rather than setting a minimum target as the maximum possible result.

EDIT: Maybe in the interests of clarity I should reiterate that I was responding to the idea that no GS means we’ve gone backwards. It doesn’t. Just like a Championship win doesn’t mean we’ve progressed. Good teams get bad results and bad teams get good results. We need to judge Ireland on both results and performance, because we want to be a good team that gets good results.

Dropping Carbery is a good call given the other options Farrell has. RB deserves his shot with the season he is having, his game has really come on and he is playing better than Carbery and playing a style of game that is close to what Farrell is doing with Ireland. Carbery has always been solid in green coming on as a sub. He was very reliable in NZ last Summer and has rarely made mistakes, but that's about all you can say for him. He has had a massive opportunity over the last 6 years and has never really pushed Johnny or owned the understudy jersey, it's always been defaulted to him for the absence of alternatives. With RB playing as well as he is and Crowley emerging as a realistic option Carbery suddenly has real competition. I'm sure he knows where he has to improve and it will be interesting to see how he does over the next few months and whether he can impress enough to get back into the mix for the WC.