cormac wrote: ↑October 15th, 2021, 9:08 pm
Timoney has played very well.
Yeah, he has looked great. It's really difficult to quantify what getting capped can do to a player's form – cap a player at the right time and you can see his confidence go through the roof. The narrative around him changes, everything becomes very positive and for a few months or half a season or a full season it's just a spiral of improvement and fulfilment. Think of Stockdale from June 2017 through to November 2018 – the sky was the limit.
On the other hand, ignore a player in great form and people think that there's something wrong with him ... even when there's obviously nothing wrong with him! Listening to the commentary about young Doak this evening, I couldn't get over how Johnny Cooney was, if not quite written out, certainly having his recent role in Ulster's history revised. So many references to Doak as Pienaar's successor.
My hot take is that Cooney has been a better No9, a better player and a bigger contributor for Ulster than Pienaar was. But because he was [bizarrely] overlooked by successive Irish coaches, and because he was a provincial transplant, and because he wound up in Ulster rather than Munster, he didn't – and now won't – get the credit his awesome form should have earned him. Now you have two scrum-halves in Casey and Doak in Munster and Ulster respectively who are the sons of former players and coaches [Ger and Neil] and there is a lot of media noise gathering behind them.
