Time for Darcy to hang up the boots. No point embarrassing a guy in front of an international audience.
Wouldn’t mind seeing a few changes for Twickers as well, Sexton needs the start…Court should be given a start as well as Hayes can’t keep going forever…Flannery will probably be cited(and suspended)…Kearney will probably be out injured…Wouldn’t mind seeing Boss starting, in better form than either Reddan or O’Leary…
Wouldn’t mind a team of
Bowe
Horgan
O’Driscoll
D’Arcy
Earls
Sexton
Boss
Heaslip
O’Brien(wallace was the pick of the back rows today but isn’t getting any younger)
Ferris
O’Connell
Cullen
Court
Best
Healy
Subs: Cronin, Horan, O’Callaghan, Henry, O’Leary, O’ Gara, Wallace
Hate to say I told you so. But I did last Tuesday on Page 21.
Really poor team selection and the same conservative, territorial kicking gameplan with the usual rigid, slow and indecisive pick and drive stuff around the fringes thrown in too.
When Plan A didn’t work we reverted to Plan A. No ambition, no imagination, no flair.
We had short term success with this basic gameplan last season. While it WAS effective, teams are always going to react to it and devise ways of dealing with it.
They put it up to us and we had nothing in response. This is all an indictment on Kidney, the man who was negotiating his return to Munster while still employed by Leinster.
Brent Pope has nothing to offer anymore.
Sending Tracey Piggott to Paris hardly represents a good use of licence payers fees in such straitened economic times.
The boring dross played by Leinster seeping into the Irish setup.
Were there any positives to come out of that?
Were there any positives?
Very few. I think we were shown what to expect at the next world cup.
Tough one…
Hopefully after that performance the penny has finally dropped around O’Leary and his outrageous lack of passing ability.
I’d already amended my ‘was’ / ‘were’ error.
Leo Cullen stealing some French line-out ball perhaps.
Oh, and Gordon D’Arcy was probably our best player. Pity he had to go to the left wing after the reshuffle when Kearney went off.
Too little too late. Like many of your Leinster brethren today you think stupid mistakes are acceptable if you put your hands up. Looked like the french were afraid of touching Leo Cullen for fear of catching that spudhead disease he seems to have. His ugliness will only get him so far though.
you know more about the sport than the commentators on tv
don’t like to complain about the legend drico but his defense today was shocking. he raced out of the line far too often and allowed the french to race through massive gaps. they clearly had our defense plan worked out.
That’s the defensive system we’ve been playing for the last good while though. The outside centre blitzes forward to try to prevent skip passess and options in terms of passing it wide. Of course, France read us like a book and Trinh-Duc mixed it up with a few chips in behind and cross kicks and he also sold a couple of dummies and ran through O’Gara on a few occasions too. The blitzer is pretty much out of the game in those situations. As I say, we’ve rolled out last year’s gameplan again.
Thom Evans seems to have taken a really bad back injury today.
Banter:
[b]Rugby star says sorry after homophobic outburst on Twitter
‘No malicious intent’ in post about gay referee, says lock forward[/b]
By Chris Green and James Corrigan
A Welsh international rugby player was last night forced to apologise after posting a homophobic comment on the social networking website Twitter, just two months after his Wales team-mate Gareth Thomas became the first professional rugby player in Britain to reveal that he was gay.
Lock forward Jonathan Thomas, 27, who has 51 caps for Wales and is set to play in the second row against Scotland in the Six Nations in Cardiff on Saturday, wrote the offensive remarks during an exchange on Twitter yesterday morning with Ian Evans, one of his team-mates at the Welsh club Ospreys.
Evans wrote: “Legs and ass are in bits, can’t move.” Thomas posted in reply: “U gotta stop hanging round with Nigel Owens!” [a top Welsh referee who came out in 2007]. Evans then made an apology of sorts on behalf of Thomas: “For those ppl [people] who got the wrong end of the stick… it was from our savage training day yesterday, sorry about my friend fellow ppl.”
That Evans injury sounds very serious.
New article on the front page on today’s game.
Scotland winger Thom Evans has undergone neck surgery after being injured in the 31-24 loss to Wales.
The 24-year-old Glasgow player was carried from the Millennium Stadium pitch on a stretcher following lengthy treatment in the first half.
Team doctor James Robson told Scottish Rugby’s official website: "Thom has sustained damage to his neck that has required surgery.
“He is moving his arms and legs and we are hoping for a speedy recovery.”