Yeah, I have been thinking of what happened in Ulster when Dan McFarland took over, before the 2018-19 season.LeRouxIsPHat wrote: ↑October 2nd, 2022, 5:54 pm I do appreciate that it’ll take time for the coaches to leave their mark but I struggle to downplay how big a deal it is that Rowntree was already part of a failing environment and has somehow been promoted ... [t]o me the Munster situation is different and needed a clean sweep.
The league was in two conferences at the time [2017-18 season] and Ulster finished fourth in Con B; they would have finished seventh in a combined ladder: 12 wins from 21 matches, 62 points. They won 4 of 6 games in their EPCR pool [featuring La Rochelle, Wasps and Harlequins] but missed out on the European knockouts.
We did an article about it at the time, which is handy because it collected a bunch of information in one place: https://dementedmole.com/2018/12/18/sho ... ravenhill/
The long and the short of it is that in the first four months of his stint, five in-contract players decided to either retire or were laid off: Chris Henry, Jean Deysel, Pete Browne, Rodney Ah You and Schalk van der Merwe. The latter two were released from their respective contracts, and my feeling is that McFarland sat down with the other three and told them, professional to professional, that he respected what they had done in the game, but that they weren't going to feature in his plans. He hadn't signed them, he had been brought in to make significant changes, they were all on the wrong side of 30, and he wouldn't be playing them.
Not that there is any evidence of Rowntree taking the same ruthless approach, but his selections at this point of the season are worth examining closely.
His starting XV for the game against the Dragons featured nine of the same team who started Munster's QF against Toulouse last year: Haley, Earls and Zebo in the back three, then Scannell and Archer in the front row, Kleyn and Wycherley in the second row, and O'Mahony and O'Donoghue in the backrow. Chris Farrell isn't available for selection; de Allende has left the province; Josh Wycherley was away with Emerging Ireland; Kendellen is injured; Carbery was selected on the bench; and Murray wasn't selected. To put it more succinctly, 11 of the players who started their biggest game last season were available for selection, and he picked 9 of them.
Earls and Kleyn both got injured in that game and weren't available for selection for the Zebre game. The only other two changes from the starting lineup were Archer getting dropped to the bench on the occasion of his 250th Munster appearance, and Zebo getting dropped out of the squad entirely in favour of a 20 year old academy fullback playing on the left wing for the first time at pro level. Bear in mind that Zebo is the only available Munster back that Mike Prendergast has any significant experience of coaching previously, having had him for two years at Racing [he has previously coached Chris Farrell at Grenoble as well].
You can overthink some selections as an on-looker and someone familiar with the influences of the Irish coaching staff on provincial selections. Sometimes things are what they appear to be. In this instance, iIf Peter O'Mahony, who played 220 minutes over three tests against New Zealand this summer, is available for selection, it's very likely that Joey Carbery [62 minutes] is as well. If Tadhg Beirne [219 mins in NZ] is available, Conor Murray [30 mins] probably is too. Carbery and Murray are Farrell's back-up halfbacks, and they may be Rowntree's too.
