Ireland Team Talk XII: Farrell's First Fifteen

So invite them to squads or do a summer tour its absolutely asenine to take established players out of the urc in order to play the toyota wildebeasts just so that nucifora can claim hes made them

6th July - SA v Ireland

13th July - SA v Ireland

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September - EI tour to SA

Couldn't the EI lads have toured with the Senior lads, trained together for some parts of the training and then stayed on after the 13th and played their EI games.

Also, wonder why SA didn't return the favour and tour Ireland this year

Im suggesting its a bad reason to pull people out of games against actual competitive teams

Excellent news, the EI tour was a huge success and the more of these tours we have the better, even a full Ireland A/EI fixture list with games during the international windows. Maybe move them around stadiums in Ireland as well

In fairness, using terms like "asinine" and "stupid and dumb" is pretty strong criticism. If it doesn't meet the threshold for outrage, it's pretty close.

Players being taken out of squads outside international windows is part and parcel of Irish rugby and this is not new. The provinces exist primarily to serve the national team, and like it or not, URC matches in September and October are a long way down the food chain.

For a lot of the guys who end up going on the tour, this will be the best shot they'll get at impressing Easterby, POC and Goodman. If we can accelerate even three or four guys into the national set-up for the November tests, it'll be worth it.

If you asked Calvin Nash or Jack Crowley was it worth a trip to SA last year, what do you think they'd say?

The players picked the last time, just a quick look, 4 have gone on to full caps and now part of the full squad or in consideration. A number of others should probably push into the full squad soon like Ahern

At the time the list of players, most of them IMO, would have been sitting on the bench at most with a lot of them not even in the squad for the provinces.

THe provinces have been saying for years the number of games have reduced because of the URC so is it really that big of an issue?

I said at the time if one player went from the EI tour into the WC it would be seen as a success and I think we ended up with 2, Crowley and Big Joe

You're almost saying that whatever a player does for his province is irrelevant, it's all down to an EI tour, just to prove it was a success.

But even if Ireland got 5+ players from the tour, that in itself doesn't mean the timing of the tour was a success

I thought the head coach didn't travel last time, did he?

I mean we could always just select them in a squad. 

We brought 35 players on the last EI tour, maybe 3 or 4 were in the mix for senior squads at that point. How would you propose to add 30 extra players into a senior squad?

The same way every other team does by not playing the same 23 every game. You dont have to put in 35 players just 1 every game or two over 4 years