Italy V Ireland Match thread

Maybe Casey needs to play with Sexton a few times and see how that goes.

I mean, he wouldn’t do it to sexton. What has byrne done to warrant that level of respect?

Yes

Lowe should have caught it, but it was still a bad pass.

Lol, primarily his fault? If lowe normally dropped balls that would hit him on his knees they would drop him.

This is complete nonsense lol.

Would like to know where the hyperbole about Ross Byrne was over the last few weeks?

It’s not ‘attitude’ its putting width on the ball. Sexton gets to tell the 9 what to do basically all the time because hes a legend. Usually the 9 has the latitude to skip the 10 sometimes.

I think you are being very generous. For the disallowed Lowe try he does a pop pass to Aki who then frees Doris to break the line, there are two more passes to get the ball to Lowe. For the Ryan try he doesn’t touch the ball at all in the phase and it’s Aki again whos pass sets Lowe free to set up the try. His best attacking involvement is in the Keenan try where does a lovely backdoor pass to Hansen who reacts brilliantly to put Aki free. The two involvements for the Aki try are pretty straightforward, the first is a simple ship pass to Henderson that actually puts him on the back foot but Henderson reacts brilliantly with a quick offload to Kelleher to get go forward ball. On the next phase Ryan is the first receiver and he gives a nice backdoor pass to Byrne who follows up with another backdoor pass to McCloskey who gives a flat pass to VDF to set up the try. For the Hansen try Byrne again has no involvement. For the disallowed Aki try you mentioned he was instrumental in, his first involvement is to be second receiver off another nice backdoor pass from Ryan, he then pops a pass to Henderson who is tackled. On the second phase he is first receiver and gives a nice short pass to Hansen who is unmarked and he puts Aki free. For the second Hansen try he isn’t involved in the final phase. His primary role in attack was to give simple pop passes to players outside him, occasionally he gave backdoor passes, he didn’t give a single offload. I can only think of one occasion where he gave a pass that ended up breaking the line and that was to Hansen, who was unmarked, for the disallowed Aki try. I’m not sure you could say he unpicked the Italy defence, Aki was the key man in most of the line breaks with Lowe, Hansen, Murray and McCoskey each popping up to make the crucial pass at different times.

Defensively he was poor. For the first Italy try he is caught in two minds covering the backfield and makes the wrong read and ends up unnecessarily doubling up on a tackle with Keenan which leaves a gap for Italy to score in the next phase. For Italys second try it’s a mix up between Aki and Byrne that causes the intercept, Aki throws a no look pass so is primarily to blame but Byrne looks a step behind where he should be on a pre planned move. Byrne missed a tackle on the Menoncello break where he got absolutely burned which leads to Italy making 20 metres off the carry and a kick which puts Casey under pressure and gives Italy 3 points. He ended with six tackles made and two missed.

I’d say this game illustrated why he was left out in the cold for so long. Offensively Byrne takes very few risks and relies heavily on players outside him to make the key pass to create a linebreak. He is extremely limited athletically at this level and offers absolutely no running threat. Defensively he is a minus. Carbury is as good a facilitator as Byrne but offers a far superior running and offload threat and is a better defender. Crowley will make far more errors with ball in hand than Byrne but will also make things happen himself, and we’ll as being a far superior athlete and defender.

I think frawley and crowley are better honestly. Athleticism is a component to defense and both those guys could legitimately be 12s. I’ve been really impressed by both of them defensively. In fact, id say they are both more advanced on that side of the ball.

However, defense isn’t really a selection criteria at 10 unless its disasterous.