World cup 2027. Were do Ireland go?

Taoiseach?

Predergast has to be favourite by a distance, even if he was overseas he would be

Other option maybe Nigel Carolan at Glasgow, they have a nice attack

Prendergast would change the entire style of ireland.

So, would Farrell hire him and let him do that, because that would def lead to selection going in different directions. If he doesn’t want to give Prendergast a big say in hiring, then that would be a bad call as system offensively tends to drive selection.

Secondly, that severs the link between ireland and leinster. We currently play a system that at least shares large elements with leinster. Leinster have spent a long time optimizing all the way down to schools for certain player types in certain roles.

Thirdly, that knocks on to hurt the cohesive element of leinster-Ireland.

I think it will be someone who suits what ireland do now mostly.

edit; if you are a munster fan and this happened, its bad but probably increases the amount of players in ireland camp. You basically have a ton of guys who now have intimate knowledge of how the system works that the international team plays. That makes it way easier to walk into practice and outplay someone who has spent the majority of his rugby life playing lancaster ball for leinster or lancaster ball+ for ireland.

It would also prob make casey-crowley a cert. they both really suit prendergast’s game.

Joe McCarthy would be amazing as well actually in that style. Let him keep adding weight.

Catt could be an alien from Mars. You can just watch ireland and leinster play, and see that they have the same style. That’s changed somewhat over the last year but especially when ireland started getting better it was very pronounced.

They basically both play a transition game based on long kicking. Prendergast plays like a french style ball possession game.

When i mean it severs the link, you can no longer say that a Leinster winger will have an intuitive understanding on how to slot in. Also on the lancaster ball thing, we’ll see on that. That is embedded pretty deep.

if they hire prendergast and try to implement the pure version of the system, then i don’t think it will work very well with the current squad.

These questions would look very different if Leinster take a dip in performance while Munster continue to improve. Leinster have a production line of players but that doesn’t guarantee success, while the other provinces are all capable of improving and contributing players to the Irish setup. I don’t think the exaggerated Leinster Ireland pipeline is a necessary component if Irish success.

Argentina's attack hasn't looked too hot at the World Cup.

What about David Knox?

Struggling to see Mike Catt's links to Leinster (or any of the Irish coaching team's)

You also must not rate Prendergast very highly as a coach if you think he's only capable of coaching one style of attack. Or, you know, sometimes teams make changes to how they play.

The IRFU are going to take a look at the coaching ticket top to bottom and see what changes need to be made in order to push the Irish team to even further heights moving forward.

If Mike Catt is indeed leaving, which would be a terrible shame as he has been immense in his role, I can see the IRFU reaching out to Andrew Goodman from Leinster. With Jacques Nienaber coming in, I can see Nienaber wanting to bring in a different attacking coach (with Leo's blessing)to Leinster to fully execute the brand of Rugby he wants Leinster to play. Goodman has done a great job with Leinster and with a large number of Leinster players in the squad, it would be a relatively hand in glove fit for Ireland.

I can see the IRFU moving on from John Fogarty who might go back to Leinster.

With Scott Robertson taking over the All-Blacks job and him expecting to overhaul the coaching staff, Ireland should try get Greg Feek back into the set up as the Scrum Coach. Farrell and Feek worked together under Schmidt, He turned the Irish scrum from a weakness to a strength in the past and I think he could do it again.

I think they keep Paul O'Connell as a forwards/Lineout coach for the moment but I can see them wanting to bring in someone like Jerry Flannery in the future to add some added experience to the Irish ticket alongside O'Connell

I agree that they could change. That would be interesting. I just think we would be surprisingly bad or mediocre in the transition because a lot of our players wouldn’t be ideal for his system.

The similarities are there but to me they are kind of superficial. The kick strategy would be different. The underlying philosophy is different. The whole point of how munster play is ‘we are willing to hold onto the ball’. With ireland, we can do that but generally only in very specific areas and we will tend to not want go into a really high amount of phases. To make this more simple, Munster’s philosophy is based on holding onto the ball. Ireland (and leinster, and connacht) is based on kicking and then reacting to that. That’s not a value judgement, there’s no such thing as the ‘right’ strategy but to me that’s just the way it is.

I think those two things are harder to marry together than you think. I also think that clear underlying philosophies are really important.

You could see a bit of that in the NZ game. We kicked way less in that game than usual and imo that was one of the reasons we lost. We got knocked off our underlying philosophy and it hurt us.

Although one point in your favour is that i will say ireland did trend more towards ball possession over the last year.