Aix en provence. Close enough to marseille
That far south and they needing a 5G at all is a bit weird.to my mind.
Anyway, cracking match
Incredible
Performance
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Some match
That was some balls up
https://twitter.com/rutgerblume/status/1753881896356868402?s=46&t=YOfhVM10W0bcyIiYSLI3Wg
Gleeson is a beast
Lads on here will be seething. Will bring up 4 year cycles and world cups. Agree about Gleeson, he’s an animal, pride of Loughmore.
Madigan has a Gerlock type neck in a suit.
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Just realised this fella is a Cork hurler, Jaysus.
Great scenes at the end here
How many
- New caps
- Irish
I think Coach Andy has got this fairly spot on bar Loughman on the bench. We badly need to try developing new faces to cover Porter. Loughman and Kilcoyne aren’t the answer to life post @ProperChurch imo
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Those of us working in the Irish rugby media were spoilt for upbeat storylines last weekend but none so heartwarmingly positive as the one generated by Joe McCarthy — or just plain “Big Joe”, as the 22-year-old is now identified in Dublin, and beyond.
The beauty of this script is that it was not confined to the way Big Joe thundered around Marseille’s Stade Vélodrome, skittling Frenchmen with the power of his clean-outs and consistently smashing through the first tackle — although this was an impressively dominant performance by a Six Nations debutant.
Working as a TV pundit on Virgin Media, the former international Andrew Trimble captured McCarthy’s raw belligerence rather well. “He runs with aggression, he wants to hurt people, he’s got that kind of thuggery about him that we don’t see with Irish athletes,” Trimble said.
There was McCarthy’s mullet to consider too. Over on ITV, Brian O’Driscoll said of his fellow Blackrock College alumnus: “Speaking from experience, when you have a barnet like that, you have to play well. But my God, did that boy play well.” But it wasn’t just that.
No, the best bit was that McCarthy could go from playground wrecking ball to caring and compassionate sibling within the space of a few minutes. As soon as he had received his man-of-the-match medal and conducted pitch-side interviews, he sought out his family and hung the medal around the neck of his brother, Andrew.
Andrew, who has Down’s syndrome, is Big Joe’s biggest fan. He is also Leinster’s official “culture captain”, an initiative designed to encourage people with physical or learning disabilities to enjoy rugby. He wears the Leinster blazer and makes regular appearances in the dressing room after matches.
Last Friday, though, Andrew was kitted out in green. “He was looking like a leprechaun in the crowd,” Joe said. “A big Irish blazer. It was special to see the family after the game.”
Later, in the mixed zone, Dan Sheehan described what it’s like to play alongside McCarthy, and also revealed their shared history as late bloomers.
“Joe’s amazing,” Sheehan said. “He is just pure energy — excited about every physical point of the game. He’s able to rip teams apart on his own, it seems. We just need to hold him back, [that] is the main problem.
“No, it’s great to see someone like him, who probably didn’t have the career laid out in front of him like a lot of other lads did, doing so well. He was late into the schools’ pathway, probably always an underdog, so to be able to bounce on to the scene like he has is incredible. He’s a huge asset for us.”
To say that McCarthy was “late into the pathway” is an understatement. His solitary winner’s medal, thus far anyway, was for the Blackrock Junior (Under-15) 4th XV, when he came off in the bench in a final against Mount Temple Comprehensive.
After a growth spurt and a lot of time spent in the school weights room, he did make the school’s senior XV in his final year and his progress has been startling since: from selection for Ireland Under-20 to a place in the Leinster Academy and then, just over two years ago, his senior Leinster debut in Cardiff.
The Ireland squad were in Portugal at the time, preparing for the Six Nations, and the coaching team watched the Leinster game on the TV in the hotel bar. According to a witness, Andy Farrell’s first question was something along the lines of: “Oo’s the big lad?”
McCarthy is big, all right: just under two metres tall and weighing in at about 120kg. Ireland hardly ever produces locks who are both tall and blocky, such as France’s Paul Willemse or Australia’s Will Skelton — the powerhouse on the right side of the engine room, who can flip a game with a brutal counterruck, who can cause mayhem at the maul. The enforcer, in other words.
Farrell duly pushed the young enforcer on to the fast track. By September 2022, he had been selected for an Emerging Ireland tour to South Africa. That November, he made his Test debut, against the Wallabies. While he missed the Six Nations through injury, he did feature at the World Cup, without having a significant impact.
Leinster missed his heft against Stade Rochelais in the Champions Cup final in May. When they won in La Rochelle a couple of months ago, it felt like he had laid down a marker. This was surely the moment that Farrell realised he needed to start the youngster against France.
In an interview more than 12 months ago, McCarthy showed that he had a clear understanding of the fine line that exists between ferocious aggression and the type of lawlessness that got Willemse into trouble last week.
“Maybe one of your strengths is playing on the edge,” he said. “You’re trying to be physical and obviously you can easily overstep that line. It’s something I’m still working on.
“I do like those players like Willemse. I do like watching how physical he is, and bits of Skelton’s game. I love scrumming, I really love mauling. Those are the things that are maybe my strengths, things that maybe people don’t see.”
As he prepares for his seventh Test appearance, against Italy in Dublin on Sunday, visibility is not an issue for McCarthy. He is front, centre, left, right, straight ahead. And the most exciting bit for Leinster and Ireland fans is that he has a younger brother who is designed along similarly muscular lines. Paddy McCarthy, 20, was loose-head prop on a grand slam-winning Ireland Under-20 side last season and has already made four appearances for Leinster in the United Rugby Championship.
It’s easy to imagine that Joe and Paddy have benefited from their sibling rivalry. Meanwhile they are both inspired and well grounded by Andrew’s devotion and love.
“He’s really just a big sports fan,” Joe said last year. “He plays tag rugby with the special needs team in Seapoint, plays tennis. On a Sunday we’ll bring him down to Blackrock for a run, get him to try and lift a few weights. He was there for my first cap — into the Shelbourne Hotel before the game to meet the players. He loved all that.
“He’s just so chilled out. When you come home from training, nothing else really matters. He doesn’t judge you about anything. He’s great for me and Paddy. We love him.”
Big love. Big power. Big Joe.
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There is always a certain frisson that passes through a club rugby training session when promising academy players are given their first chance to test themselves against the seniors. The young bucks are sized up by their more experienced colleagues in the most literal sense: just how physical could they be and how much damage could they do? Chests out, shoulders back. As the established full back at Clermont Auvergne, Nick Abendanon has a vivid recollection of the first time Damian Penaud was brought in to train with the first-team squad.
“I didn’t know what position he played at first and I thought he was a back-rower,” Abendanon said. “He’d have been 18 at the time. The ball got shipped into midfield, I was on his team and he made an outside break. I went at full pace trying to keep up with him and he just left me in his wake. I thought, ‘Jesus Christ, he’s quick for a back rower’. But it turned out that he wasn’t.”
The sight of Penaud disappearing off towards the tryline was soon to become a familiar one in French rugby. With his 6ft 4in, 15st frame, which could easily have enabled him to pack down as a flanker, he has the size and strength to break out of first-up tackles, assets that led him to be initially employed as an outside centre.
He is blessed with remarkable acceleration and an acute spatial awareness to guide him once he finds open space, qualities that really would look out of place in the back row. And the package is completed by a finisher’s instinct, a nose for the tryline that has helped to make him probably the most dangerous wing in the game, a shoo-in for a world XV.
After scoring against Ireland in Marseille in round one of the Six Nations, a bright spot in an otherwise underwhelming opening French defeat, Penaud has now scored 36 tries in only 49 appearances for France. Going into Saturday’s game against Scotland at Murrayfield, he is only two tries short of the national record, held by Serge Blanco since 1991. Blanco, the legendary full back, played 93 times, while Vincent Clerc, third on the list, needed 67 appearances to score his 34 tries.
While Penaud has been fortunate to have established himself at a time when France have become a resurgent force under the coaching of Fabien Galthié, with the likes of Antoine Dupont and Matthieu Jalibert creating scoring opportunities, his strike-rate is outstanding nevertheless. At 27, he has plenty of power to add, and he should soon disappear off into the distance with that tryscoring record, much as he did at that first training session with Clermont.
With his socks rolled down, an instinctive desire to counterattack and a touch of showmanship about his finishing, Penaud is something of a throwback to some of those illustrious names that he has passed on the list of France’s greatest tryscorers.
“If you look back to those teams in the 1980s and early 1990s, all those silky running backs like Blanco, [Philippe] Sella, [Patrice] Lagisquet, Damian is a bit like that,” Neil McIlroy, the former Clermont team manager, said. “As a physical specimen, he’s a step or two up from those days, given where professional rugby is now. But there’s a naturalness there and he’s become one of the first names on the team sheet for France.”
At a time when England are wondering aloud how to reconnect with a disenchanted rugby public, France have shown the way in the four years since the revival under Galthié began. Their success has been underpinned by a spirit of adventure, which not only draws spectators to the edge of their seats, but also taps into the nation’s heritage for playing with a dash of flair, and Penaud embodies that as much as anyone. At Murrayfield, those supporters will be hoping for a performance to reassure them that momentum has not been lost after the heavy defeat by Ireland.
Penaud’s craving to run the ball from deep was evident in his first full season with the Clermont first team, when they won the Top 14 title. In the early stages of the final against Toulon, Abendanon ripped the ball free in a tackle five metres from the Clermont line, the ball was moved swiftly to Penaud, playing outside centre, and in the blink of an eye he had scythed through Toulon’s turning defence, making it past halfway before handing on to Alivereti Raka for a stunning try. “He’s got speed, power, agility,” Abendanon, now skills coach at Bayonne, said. “To have the ability to beat someone that easily, it’s something you can’t really teach.”
His approach to the game could also be seen as something of a throwback. In an age where the game has become hyper-professionalised, there has always been something of the free spirit in Penaud’s attitude.
“He took a bit of bit of managing in the early days,” McIlroy said. “Like a lot of kids, [with] the day-to-day stuff, like being on time, he needed a bit of patience. He’d be looking at the sky, looking at the stars, he just needed a bit of help to focus and organise his life a bit.”
Penaud grew up in Brive, coming through the junior ranks at a club where his father was a local legend, as the captain and fly half of the team that won the Heineken Cup in 1997. Penaud Sr, a left-footed kicker and skilful playmaker, won 32 caps for France from 1992 to 2000. He is still a fixture at Brive’s home matches in ProD2 and there were high hopes that his son would follow in his father’s footsteps but Clermont were a bigger club 1½ hours’ drive away.
“Our academy set-up was not as good as it might have been at the time and it was probably inevitable that a player of Damian’s ability should move on,” Simon Gillham, the Brive president, said. “It was a disappointment that he went to our big-brother club at Clermont but he’s still got lots of friends in Brive and we’re hopeful that one day he might come back. He’d be welcomed with open arms.”
Much of his early senior rugby was played at outside centre, making his international debut against South Africa at No 13, aged 20, but it was once he settled on the right wing for Clermont in 2019 that he nailed down his place in the national team.
When France won the grand slam in 2022, Penaud was the tournament’s joint-leading tryscorer, including two in a 36-17 win at Murrayfield. Last season he was out on his own as the Six Nations’ top scorer with five tries and he followed up with six more at the World Cup, a tally that was second only to Will Jordan, of New Zealand.
Every opposing team knows now that any possession kicked loosely away to Penaud or ball turned over somewhere near him is asking for trouble. At a time when so much of the game is pre-programmed and scripted from coaches’ laptops, this free spirit needs no second invitation to set off on another adventure.
“You’d never find him being the first on the training field, or sitting looking at videotape for hours on end,” Abendanon said. “He’s more like: ‘Give me the ball, I’ll show what I can do with it’. He much prefers to play off the cuff. The talent he’s got is breathtaking.”
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Manx lad on here for the Ireland u20s.
They are playing rubbish.
Hard to understand why the Italians didn’t go for a winning drop goal there.
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Lack of rugby IQ
Who would you suggest?
Dooley for a start has had a fantastic season but the rotation at Connacht has fucked him. He might not be a test start quality player but he can’t be any worse than Killer anyways.