Ireland Team Talk XII: Farrell's First Fifteen

There's a difference between "the IRFU gets questioned" and making comments like:

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

Dragging them across the world to SA to play meaningless games during the URC season is stupid and dumb and 100% cost Munster vital league points in 2022/2023.

Its a poor sign of a coaching staff that they cant tell if a players good unless they have them for weeks on end no?

Thats a pretty damning endightment of the irish coaching staff

If mins is the concern we can go down a whole other rabbit hole but itd deflecting from my point which is a good coaching staff shouldnt need to take players mid season to play in a much lower level competition to know of their talented

if a coaching staff cant see the ability without taking them away for two months with an assistant coach not even andy farrell the its a bad sign and suggests were missing out on some world class talent elsewhere because they havent gone on a tour with irish coaches

And that suggests an issue with the irish coaching teamtalent evaluation

None of the above comments are simply "questioning" the IRFU or Irish management team, they're just throwing muck and making silly insinuations and suggestions that they are poor at evaluating talent.

Yeah, it's a fair point, and I don't rule out the possibility that in a different time in the cycle, Crowley could have just broken through as a utility player, and later proven himself at 10, but I think by that time they were in scramble mode.

If you think back - Frawley was never really the main plan either. Harry Byrne was capped against USA in July '21, played against Argentina in Nov '21, and was brought to NZ as the intended starter for the Maori games. He got injured down there (in typical HB fashion), and they shunted in Frawley last minute. Frawley was announced on that tour (NZ 2022) as a centre. The fact Frawley went reasonably well there in those games is what prompted Ireland to then start thinking of him as a 10.

Part of the reason for the EI tour was ostensibly to give Frawley a chance to build more experience in the Irish coaching system at 10, but he got injured right before it. Even still then, he started the Maori game in the RDS, and got injured which is when Crowley came in.

I think though by that stage, we were less than 12 months out from a RWC and if you think of the 10 jersey we had a 37-year old and really nothing else. They'd utterly lost faith in Carbery, Ross Byrne was in the Irish wilderness, and they'd tried guys like Carty and Burns without success. They were casting around to try and find an answer at 10, and that's where the gap was in the squad, I just don't think Crowley would have gotten that spot by playing (really well incidentally) at 12 or 15 for Munster.