Ireland Team Talk XII: Farrell's First Fifteen

Injury at 13 - move aki to 13 and crowley to 12

Murray can cover 10 at a push

This is a massive RWC game. Not a URC game against the Dragons where you've an injury depleted team and ask someone to cover a position they've never started a professional game in because you've no other choice.

You could argue that he'll pull some previously unused variation out against SA to stump them by using a 6-2, but I don't see it. It's an area he's been comfortably consistent on, and everything the coaching team have built are strongly focused on "play your own game, to your own plan" and confidence that that plan is good enough, and adaptable enough, to beat multiple opposition approaches. I think he'll stick to 5-3, and what you'll likely see to take the sting out of that boks blitz is a huge amount of variation in first receiver, and some smart kicking periodically, to try and make them wary of rushing at full tilt - and that game plan needs agility over size.

He's a serious prospect but also their third choice 13, though I'm not sure we'll see a citing for Kriel.

No real need to reinvent the wheel against SA. Possibly go with Henderson/ Ryan with McCarthy bench. O'Mahony, Doris and Beirne with VDF bench.

Bench selection will be critical.

as much as I like AKI starting. Would there be a benefit for him coming on after 45-50 mins?

Leaving VdF on bench is reinventing the wheel

Yes and no. Fickou was a centre from the off. Ioane was mixing between wing and centre (primarily a centre at NPC level) when he first came through. Nonu was an outside centre who played a few times on the wing.

But if Moodie starts and we get as much success as teams got out of Ioane when NZ first moved him to 13, we're in business. There were major issues around his defending for the first year.

There is no way Earls was more to blame for that try than Sexton was. He didn't get on the wrong side of his man, he was going for to collect the ball on the tramlines but it was a poorly executed kick, partially due to a bounce that brought it back in field, but also because the space Sexton kicked it into wasn't there. Earls could have done nothing except maybe slow down and let the Fiji player gather the ball and then tackle him, but if that was Earls's fault, then it was also Sexton's fault for over running even when he could see that Earls was not gonna get to the kick in time, and Sexton was then the man who should have covered the counter attack, but he completely missed that.

Again, no big deal, the game was well and truly won, but that was on Sexton, not Earls.

Which, again, is fine, it was his first play in 6 months, he made a mistake. No need to blame that on Earls.

Perhaps. Australia is a lot closer to NZ than Ireland so you probably got to see more of those guys.

Looking at the online stats though, Ioane played exclusively at 13 for Auckland in his first two seasons in the NPC. His first season for the Blues (2016), all 5 of his starts were on the wing. His second season for the Blues, 7 starts on the wing, 6 starts in the centre.

Nonu started at centre but swapped around a bit after his first couple of seasons. I don't think he ever started a game on the wing for NZ (according to ESPN, anyway).