Dave Cahill wrote: ↑June 2nd, 2023, 9:45 pm
hugonaut wrote: ↑June 2nd, 2023, 7:07 pm
Beyond that, Munster and Ulster have been allowed to sign World Cup winners [De Allende, Snyman, Vermeulen, Kitshoff]; there's no ban on Irish provinces signing big name players, there has just been a de facto ban on Leinster doing it. And if those teams can spring the cash for that sort of player, it's difficult to believe that we can't.
Other provinces sign world class players because they don't produce them. We produce world class players, we're not going to sign players that are, as in at least 50% of the examples you gave above, inferior to what we produce locally.
The reality is that we could sign all the players in the world, but if they aren't well coached then you're Paris Saint Germain - and for the last couple of years we've been a lot more PSG than Real Madrid. Look great in facile wins in the league, unable to get the job done when it matters.
Yeah, I disagree.
The idea that we're not, or haven't been, well-coached ... I can't agree with that at all. It's acute disappointment speaking.
Lose two European cup finals by 3 points and 1 point respectively with the game in the mix until the absolute death of it, against a team who have made the last three European finals in a row, and doing that with a team full of local lads and three journeymen NIQ players with a total of 14 caps between them – 12 of those caps for Samoa, currently ranked 12th in the world - and we aren't well-coached? The main reason we are there is
because we are well-coached.
I saw Hugo Keenan's first pro game for Leinster, against Northampton in a pre-season friendly in Donnybrook. It was a f*cking disaster. There was incredibly little difference between Hugo Keenan and Matt Byrne who played on opposite wings for the Irish U20s in the JWC in 2016. They were the same player. The difference between them started when Hugo Keenan went into the Leinster academy. It turns out that Keenan had waaaaaaay more upside than Matt, but identifying upside is a massive part of coaching.
Shane Daly was a hell of a talent as an U20 – more talented by a stretch than either Keenan or Byrne – and he's only beginning to play to his potential at Munster. Bill Johnson was another player who had buckets of talent in that same team and made SFA progress as a pro. Jack O'Sullivan looked almost as good as Doris for the Irish U20s [for example:
https://www.the42.ie/jack-osullivan-ire ... 6-Mar2018/ ], but he hasn't done anything even comparable as a pro. You can take coaching for granted when it's good coaching and all your ugly ducklings turn into swans, but it's a real rarity across the game.
We've got a number of players who were big natural talents before they came into Leinster – Porter, Furlong, Ryan, Doris, Henshaw, Ringrose – but we have also got a fair few lads who'd be comme ci comme ca if they were playing elsewhere and weren't being coached exceptionally well in a really competitive environment.
Jimmy O'Brien could barely make the Irish U20s squad as an inside centre. Dan Sheehan
didn't make the Irish U20s as an anything. Josh van der Flier was an undersized runaround openside who wouldn't say boo to a goose when he was an U20. Jamison Gibson Park had made all of six Super 15 starts when he joined Leinster. James Lowe couldn't make the New Zealand U20s.
Look at how Carbery did outside the Leinster environment. He looked like a phenomenal talent at Leinster. You move him to another big, well-resourced club and he stumbled gradually downwards until he fell off the bottom step. Injuries? Do you honestly think that torn ankle ligaments and a broken wrist at Leinster would have meant his career corpsing? Nah. You take him from an environment where he was really well-coached to an environment where he was averagely coached and you see a much bigger fall-off than you would expect.
We're not perfect, we've got a couple issues to figure out ... but we're the second best team in Europe and a seriously short fingernail away from being the best team in Europe. We are doing a hell of a lot of things right.
My take on it is that the season's end has been really disappointing, but I am disappointed for the lads, not by the lads. I don't think that they have let us down, and I don't think that the coaches have let them down. It's knock-out rugby, it can be tough on the guts. To borrow several boxing idioms, we've got to get back off the canvas next season, bite down on the gumshield, and finish the round strong.
And on the pragmatic side of things, you look at the years when we have won the European Cup - 2009, 2011, 2012, 2018 – and you see the contributions that Elsom, Hines, Thorn and Fardy made, all of them big men, all of them experienced foreign internationals, and it is not irrational to think that we could do with same again to get us the extra per cent that we need.
