Leinster Team Talk Thread (Love you Furlong time)

Leinster teasing a big reveal at 3 today.
I would think it’s just shots of Snyman in kit or some such

yeah ‘twas Snyman in kit

Interesting piece with Leinster's CEO Shane Nolan in the business section of the Irish Times today:

As it's a business centric interview it focuses relatively heavily on the commercial aspects of the role, with little enough reference to the rugby pieces.

Some of the interesting nuggets IMO though:

-season ticket sales up around 30% YoY, to c. 15,000 for the forthcoming season

-gate receipts generally account for around half of Leinster's income

Also - really glad to see him push back on the utterly stupid narrative that is pushed by the English clubs frequently (but relatively regularly from other parts of Ireland too) about Leinster being the "best resourced club in the world" etc.

On that point specifically he says:

“I won’t lie to you, it’s frustrating when I hear that and it not being challenged because it’s just not true,” he says. “I’ve heard lines around Leinster being the most resourced club in the world. Any Google search will show you that, never mind the Japanese clubs because they’re on a different level, but the French clubs are all, you know, minimum 50 per cent more funded than any of the Irish clubs. That’s just fact.

The narrative does my head-in, like a lot of things around rugby punditry, where people are happy to state things as fact with no basis in reality. Literally no one has a clue so why do people keep saying it? And I'm not saying they're wrong on this all but they literally haven't got any idea so why put forward your opinion. The English media are terrible for it

The biggest assumption of course being that every single player in Leinster is paid their top-end market rate (i..e they decided to pack in Irish aspirations and go aborad) which is patently not the case.

and no report of game.. they dont care about fans who are interested in preseason

no one is interested in preseason.

The team sheet is “every fit and available player”, the match report is “the lads were rusty as f**k but it doesn’t matter cos it’s only preseason”.

Edit: the team for Bordeaux was announced the day before the game, just like today. Friday announcements for Saturday games is absolutely standard, so what’s the problem?