MylesNaGapoleen wrote: ↑November 20th, 2022, 1:31 pm
Brilliant year for Irish rugby....nice to end it in a win, albeit fierce scrappy.
Possible farrell scaled back the game plan just before KO so crowley wouldn't be overwhelmed?
We looked really nervy and didn't really get into our groove at all. Simply slowing down our ball at rucks completely nullified our attack. reminded me of LAR in marseille. A major worry if there wasn't a logical reason for the performance. I guess we will find out in feb when the 6N kicks off.
It looked quite obvious to me that we were playing around Crowley in the first half, which I totally understand. He wasn't supposed to be starting and has played very little first grade rugby at No10 [just one start for Munster there this season]. He hasn't spent a long time in the training squad and he doesn't train on a daily basis with most of the other players, as Frawley and Ross Byrne do at Leinster.
The long and the short of it was that he wasn't capable of running the sophisticated attack that Sexton makes look easy, his kicking was very mixed, he gave a couple of hospital passes and he conceded a lot of yards defending. The positives were that he didn't make any bad errors [no unforced knock-ons, no kicks or restarts straight out, no shanks, no horrible missed tackles for scores] and he came through the 70 minutes with us level on the board. That's not a bad result from him at all.
I remember Joey Carbery's first start for Ireland. It was against the US on tour in June 2017, the game in which Keith Earls ran for 220m and made 9 clean breaks [source:
https://www.espn.com/rugby/playerstats? ... gue=289234 ]. Carbery had an absolute f*cking mare. He had two kicks blocked down for tries, had a couple of other shanks and then went off injured. He was about a year younger than Crowley and we were missing players because it was on at the same time as the Lions tour, but the US Eagles can't compare to the Wallabies. They're easy-beats, and the Wallabies are two-time World Cup winners.
To get a win with a complete rookie outhalf against a pretty decent Australia team is a good result. It was a tough game to watch with a lot of breaks in play, a lot of injuries and a lot of penalties, so to come out with a win is sort of the only positive we can really take from it ... but it's a big positive.