Ray Donovan wrote: ↑January 8th, 2023, 5:09 pm
Blue Man wrote: ↑January 8th, 2023, 5:02 pm
Lots of rugby to be played but all indications are that if we beat the Stormers in the RDS we will secure URC top seeding and can send a development side to SA in April, giving the front liners three weeks to focus on a Heineken Cup semi final.
Obviously there are a number of assumptions and risks to this (not least reaching a H Cup semi final) but this would appear to be the objective of the coaching team.
Of course, the big question that arises is would we be under cooked for a semi final? Probably better than the front liners getting E. coli in SA!
That’s pretty much how we ended the regular season last year. We needed 1 bonus point from 2 games down there to guarantee top seeding and the young guns got it. And the common refrain then was our frontliners weren’t exposed to enough high intensity games come the business end of the campaign.
Having said that I still think sending a developmental side to SA is the more favourable option.
The common refrain was a load of nonsense though. A lot of people searching for a narrative, some of them honestly, some of them with an axe to grind.
With regards to high intensity games? We beat the English champions elect on their home patch in the quarter final, then absolutely hammered the French champions elect in the semi-final. We got beaten in the last play of the game away in France, to a really good French team, in front of a French crowd.
It's knock-out rugby, if you're playing a good team, they play great and you don't play great, you get beaten. It doesn't take an awful lot. It's a one-off match.
We played an obviously injured James Lowe in the European final and it wasn't far off playing with fourteen men. He had 13 carries for 105m and two tries in the semi final against Toulouse, got a bad bang on the leg in the last minute of that game and in the final he had 1 carry for 0m. We didn't pass him the ball because he couldn't run. He didn't come looking for the ball because he couldn't run. We took a risk playing him, it completely didn't pay off.
Lowe is the best try-scorer in the history of Leinster Rugby - 50 tries in 69 games. The only people ahead of him are Shaggy [69 in 203 games], Drico [61 in 186 games], Darce [60 in 257 games] and DK [54 in 178 games]. You can see why a coach would take the risk.
We didn't really even have a suitable sub on the bench, opting for Frawley at No23 – Frawley had made 13 of his 14 starts at No12 that season [the other one at No10]. We ended up not using him. Kearney was injured, Tommy O'Brien was injured, Larmour had just played his first game in 11 weeks, we hadn't picked either O'Loughlin or Adam Byrne in any of the previous games of the competition. There's a real temptation to imagine those guys [AB & Locko] at their peak and think what they might have contributed, but the reality was that their form that season had seen them passed out by pretty much every other threequarter in the senior squad.
We probably should have picked Larmour on the bench, but this is 20-20 hindsight stuff. Frawley was the form player, but he didn't really give us the coverage where we needed it. We had actually had Tommy on the bench for the QF against Leicester, but unfortunately he got injured in training before the Toulouse game.