Hot on the heels of Iain Henderson, Stuart Olding’s development suggests Ulster’s Academy is doing the business

This cohort of u20s finished 2-1-2 in the u20 Championship. The forwards occasionally struggled to establish dominance but a number of the backs caught the eye. Following from last year’s group, we thought we’d do a 4 Up 2013, concentrating on a player from each of the provinces.

Stuart Olding

Olding travelled to the JWC12 and started at second centre for the last two games, victories over England and France. He was involved with Ulster upon his return, landing a conversion against Munster down in Thomond in December 2012. Olding got his first full start against the Ospreys at out half in a 12-16 loss and started five league games straight as injuries to Luke Marshall and Paddy Wallace opened the door to the twelve jersey. Olding came on against Saracens in the dying minutes of the Heineken Cup quarter final and looked classy.

Olding made two appearances for the u20s in the 2013 Championship, both at full back in matches against Wales (15-17) and France (22-5). Olding’s versatility is striking and suggests real football ability which is reinforced when watching him. He looks capable of stepping straight into Paddy Wallace’s shoes at first centre and creating real competition for both Paddy Jackson and Luke Marshall.

BRA alumni Olding is playing his club rugby with Belfast Harlequins and is in the Ulster Academy. The 88kg 1.78m Olding follows in the footsteps of recent URSC Jack Kyle bursary winners Craig Gilroy and Iain Henderson and looks set for a successful professional career with representative honours at the highest level.

Rory Scannell

Rory follows in brother Niall’s footsteps as an underage international and started all five games in the championship, four at first centre and one at out half. He coolly nailed the conversion of Ireland’s final try against Italy to grab a draw and displayed good habits throughout the competition. Scannell is playing for Dolphin in Division 1A of the AIL and upon his return from the underage championship has bedded down at second centre with Danny Barnes occasionally moving to the wing to accommodate Scannell and Munster academy player Cian Bohane.

Danny Barnes and Scott Deasy are barring his way at A level in the B&I Cup. Barnes is one of the names that crops up when reviewing Scannell’s season. Barnes started 9 of Munster’s first 12 games in 2011-12 scoring four tries and also started in the Magners League final in May 2011. Will Chambers and Keith Earls then got more of a look in at second centre before Casey Laulala’s signing closed the door on Barnes who has started one game under Rob Penney and that on the wing. When comparing Barnes, who is only 23, and Scannell you get an impression of there being a relatively small window of opportunity for professional players to bed down a place in a squad.

As things stand Scannell is on a sub-Academy contract but not yet an Academy one like big brother Niall.

Robbie Henshaw

Henshaw is still listed as a first year Academy member at Connacht but has nailed down a first choice spot at Connacht and signed a deal until 2015 that makes him full time. Before joining Connacht Henshaw captained Marist College to a Connacht Schools’ Cup win as well as playing minor football for Westmeath.

Having come off the bench in the first few games of the league, Henshaw made his starting debut against Glasgow in the centre during September. He has since started 18 matches at full back in both the Rabo Pro 12 and the Heineken Cup.  Henshaw also played full back for the u20s in the Championship win against England.

Henshaw’s name cropped up in the 2012 5 Up series when discussing Shane Layden. Both Buccs men, the big contrast between the two is injuries and Henshaw has proved durable enough to play a lot of senior rugby at a young age thus getting valuable experience and name recognition, which never hurts. Henshaw scored his first try at senior level against Edinburgh and will have a new head coach next season when Pat Lam takes over at Connacht. There will also be a new Ireland coach and it will be interesting if Connacht’s players get more chances in the new regime than when Declan Kidney was in charge.

Tom Daly

We had a look at Daly before and I was very tempted to follow the progress of Steve Crosbie, the Old Belvedere fly half who looks a very tidy footballer. Drico’s retirement weighed the scales in Daly’s favour. Although the General has yet to make a formal decision the day is not long away and if it is not at the end of this season then it will surely be at the end of the next (please let it be next year!). That will leave a gaping hole in Leinster’s midfield and someone will have to fill the 13 shirt. While Eoin O’Malley is the heir apparent he has struggled with injury and Daly is a contender.

At 192cm and 102kg, he is a different build to either O’Malley or O’Driscoll. Daly started all of Ireland’s games in the u20 Championship and also handled the place kicking duties, nailing seven kicks against France.

Daly, who turns 20 in July 2013, is not in the Leinster Academy but made four starts for Lansdowne on their way to a first AIL title. Representative call ups after Christmas prevented him from adding to that total. He also appeared off the bench in the B&I Cup.

Although the AIL has lost a lot of its lustre, it remains a prized league for those involved and provides exposure to senior level competition along with development opportunities for young players. The B&I Cup is also developing into a proper competition that offers a taste of professional rugby. The English teams that compete are from the Championship and many of the line ups feature familiar names with Rabo Pro 12 experience.

Like Henshaw, Daly has an inter-county GAA background and it is interesting to note the number of quality athletes competing in both codes at a young age. Rugby provides the opportunity to make a living as a professional athlete while the legacy created by the likes of Keith Wood and Brian O’Driscoll along with success in the Heineken Cup has increased rugby’s visibility massively. The sport’s ability to attract top quality athletes from outside its traditional catchment area is an encouraging sign for the development of the game in Ireland.

Stephen Ferris looks likely to accept a one year deal to play in Japan next season rather than accept an offer from the IRFU that is contingent on gametime. Having missed out on contention for a Lions tour this summer due to an injury plagued season, it’s not a bad idea to earn good money, play some lower intensity rugby and then come back for a season leading up to RWC15, at which stage he’ll just have turned 30 years old.

If Stephen Ferris makes the rumoured switch to the Top League, he won’t be the first Irish backrower to play in Japan’s top flight rugby competition.

Mark Egan, former Terenure College No8 and current Head of Development and Performance in the IRB spent four years in Japan playing for Kobe Steel in the mid 1990s, having captained Oxford University to success in the 1990 Varsity Match at Twickenham.

Egan’s tenure in Japan owed much to the influence of the remarkable Dr Sokichi Kametaka, then president of Kobe Steel, a passionate supporter of the game in Japan and a man with a deep and abiding connection to Oxford University rugby.

The comparison between Ferris and Egan is fascinating; in many ways, it shows just how much the game has changed socially and commercially in the last twenty-odd years.

Mark Egan taking ball on for Terenure against Eddie Halvey of Shannon in the AIL during 1997, after his return from Japan. Egan had been an Irish U25 representative at one time, and gave up his chance at a full cap to move to Japan and further his career. At the time of his move, rugby was an amateur game; when he returned to Ireland, the game had officially gone open, although the provincial set-ups as we now know them had not yet been established by the IRFU.  [Photo credit: James Meehan at INPHO]

Times have changed; professionalism has changed the game in many ways, not just with regards to players becoming bigger and stronger. However, some things in Japanese rugby haven’t changed too much. Franchises are still owned by corporations – Kobe Steel have become Kobelco Steelers – and gaijin still have an important part to play on the pitch.

The Japanese Top League

The Japanese Top League is composed of fourteen [brilliantly named] teams, many of them instantly recognisable from their parent companies: for example, the Panasonic Wild Knights, Toyota Verblitz, Toshiba Brave Lupus and current champions Suntory Sungoliath.

Each team is allowed three non-Japanese qualified players on the pitch at any one time, with the proviso that one of these is [or will be] eligible to play for Japan under the IRB’s residency rules. In addition, one player from another Asian union can also be on the pitch at the same time as the three ‘foreigners’ [for example, Kobelco Steelers have Wang Sibo of China and Hrishikech Pendse of India under contract]. In practice, each team has between four and nine non-Japanese players on their books.

While a number of super-duper stars have played in the league in recent years – Brad Thorn, Fourie du Preez, Sonny-Bill Williams, Jaque Fourie, Jerry Collins and George Smith amongst them – the regulation that one of the foreign players could possibly play for Japan in the future [which is akin to the IRFU’s ‘project player’ designation] means that there’s room for less well-known or accomplished players too. Leinster’s Andrew Goodman played a season for the Honda Heat, for example, and there’s a decent former Kiwi Super Rugby player in pretty much every squad.

This Stop, Auckland; Next Stop, Tokyo

New Zealand isn’t that close to anywhere, bar Australia. While a flight from Wellington to Tokyo will take in approximately 9825km and cost just about 12 hours of your life, it’s a damn sight closer than flying to Paris or London from the Shaky Isles; that’ll take you a full 24 hours and about 18800 kms away from home.

Plenty of stamps, plenty of stories. Make sure to tell everybody how good the All Blacks are while you’re abroad!

While those distances might be anathema to Europeans who’ve grown up in an era of low-cost, point-to-point airlines, Kiwis have always hankered after their OE – overseas experience  – so much so that it has become an ingrained part of their culture. Getting away from home is now a ritual of young adulthood, and while typically it takes place at a post-third level stage of their lives, that’s the prime of a professional rugby player’s career. While your mates might be doing heading off at 23 or 24 years old, a fledgling representative player would be cutting himself off at the knees by taking a year out at that stage. So, for a lot of Kiwi players, a stint abroad towards the end of their rugby career doubles as an opportunity to get a bit of delayed OE and to earn better money that they would at home.

Cash Money Homie

And the money can be very good. Superstar Sonny-Bill Williams is reputed to have signed the “largest one-season contract in rugby union history” with the Panasonic Wild Knights for the 2012-13 Top League season [although no figures have been published], and the league has become a popular watering hole for top-end southern hemisphere players of all nationalities, not just New Zealanders.

Wallaby centurion George Smith was rumoured to be on €800k p.a. at Suntory Sungoliath, and Springbok centre Jaque Fourie’s two year deal with Kobelco Steelers is reputed to be in the region of  R20-22m [between €845k-€930k p.a].

Of course, just like any aspect of life, you get out what you put into it. While a season in the Top League may be seen by some as an opportunity to featherbed their retirement and nothing else, others find it a profound experience. All Black legend Brad Thorn, who spent the last two Top League seasons with the Fukuoka Sanix Blues, was [to borrow from Munster coach Rob Penney’s vocabulary] rapt with his time in Japan:

“Japan has been awesome. Japan has been a privilege … A guy could be holding a street sign, I see it all the time, and he might have been doing that for 20 or 30 years, but he does that to the best of his ability. He’s proud of what he does.”

Jaque Fourie in action for Kobelco Steelers in the Japanese Top League. Fourie is probably the highest paid rugby player in the world at the moment, although it’s difficult to pinpoint exactly how much he earns. Suffice it to say that he’s not going hungry. And he sleeps on a bed of money. And the bed is very comfortable. And it’s very high off the ground.

Similarly, while one might expect Jaque Fourie to be enthusiastic given the salary he’s on, something about how he describes his time in Japan and his dealings with his club makes The Mole feel like he’s not faking it:

“Everyone goes to Europe. I wanted to do something different… something that didn’t revolve around rugby alone … I haven’t made myself available for the Boks during the two seasons I’ll spend at the Steelers because I want to give my full commitment to the club.”

“The Japanese people have been so welcoming and we love everything about the country, including the rugby. Kobe have been incredibly professional, patient and understanding in all of their dealings with me … so I thank them for that and look forward to enjoying success with the Steelers.”

Big In Italy

David Campese and Michael Lynagh share a joke in October 1992 during a Super 10 game between Amatori Milano and Benetton Treviso. The joke may have been about how they were technically still ‘amateur’.

Harking back to the Mark Egan era, this reminds The Mole of the attitude of various southern hemisphere stars like David Campese, John Kirwan, Michael Lynagh and Zinzan Brooke in the twilight days of amateurism. Back then, Italy was the favoured landing spot of Anzac internationals looking to experience a new culture and earn a few bucks [on the side, naturally].

At the time, the Italian Lira was a relatively strong currency: anecdotally, that explains why Serie A was the best football league in the world at the time, with the best Dutch [Gullit, van Basten, Rijkaard], German [Mattheus, Klinsmann, Bremer], Argentine [Maradona] and Brazilian [Careca] players togging out for Italian clubs. More prosaically, in 1990, 1NZ$ bought roughly 725 Lira.

At the time, house prices in Auckland averaged about NZ$160k, which translated to roughly 116m Lira. It’s informative in trying to establish the relative purchasing power available for a Kiwi plying his trade in Italy: if he could come up to the Northern Hemisphere, earn himself a fair wedge of Lira and get given free accommodation, he would likely look at knocking off as much from a mortgage as possible during his playing career.

John Devereux starred for Wales in the first Rugby World Cup in 1987 as a 21 year old and made the Lions tour to Australia in 1989. That same year, he moved to Widnes and Rugby League in 1989, leaving a huge hole in Welsh rugby.

Because no figures regarding payments to Southern Hemisphere players in Italy in the late 1980s and early 1990s have ever really been discussed publicly – rugby was still supposedly amateur at the time – probably the most valuable exercise to determine what they might have earned is to examine the situation in comparison with the money available from Rugby League at the time.

People of a certain vintage might remember what a huge threat the Northern Code was to Union in the late 1980s, with top class internationals like John Devereux [a strapping Welsh centre in the Danie Gerber/Jaque Fourie mould who represented the British and Irish Lions in 1989] and Jonathan ‘Jiffy’ Davies signing professional forms for Widnes at the peak of their union careers.

Zinzan Brooke might talk about the love of the game, but it was the cash from Italy as well as the opportunity to play for the All Blacks likely kept him in Union. Negotiating with League sides [and he was very close to signing with the Manly Sea Eagles at one stage] probably let him know what figures were available to a professional rugby player, and gave him a starting point in his negotiations with his Italian employers.

Jonathan Davies in his Widnes days. Davies’ departure sparked fears of a mass exodus from Wales to the League, and it more or less panned out – big time players like Scott Gibbs and Scott Quinnell found their way north in the early 1990s, before Union went open.

In 1988-89 Davies was signed by Widnes for £150k: he wasn’t under contract to anyone at the time so while it was described by many in League circles as a transfer, it wasn’t like they gave the WRU the money – it went to Davies himself. The next year, current Wasps coach Dai Young’s ‘transfer fee’ from Cardiff RFC to Leeds was €165k – the ante had been considerably upped. That would still be decent money today, and a quarter of a century ago it was Premiership stuff.

In light of those figures from Rugby League, it doesn’t seem unrealistic to think that the likes of Campese and Brooke were earning £25-30k in Italy per season. With exchange rates the way they were, that meant that you could likely pay off the majority of the mortgage on a decent house in Auckland in two or three years.

Outside of the realities of pay-to-play, reading Brooke’s autobiography gives a real feeling of just what an eye-opener the experience was in terms of the lifestyle and habits of another culture. In those days, the expense of travel was restrictive to guys who had to hold down regular jobs as well as play international rugby; these days, it’s the professional life of a rugby player that can prove restrictive. Alan Quinlan wrote recently in the Irish Times that “as a professional rugby player, you come to rely on structure a lot, being told where to go and what to do, when to train and even what to eat.”

While there’s little doubt that the training, nutrition and sponsorship duties in Japan are recognisably similar to their home life to southern hemisphere players, literally every other experience are new to them.

It’s one of the reasons why The Mole isn’t that down on the gallivanting of James ‘Brand’ Haskell or Superstar Sunny-Bull Wull’yums: these lads are cramming all the experiences they can have into their athletic careers, playing all over the world with different types of people, and experiencing foreign cultures in a different way than they could do post-career as a tourist. There’s a lot to be said for an adventurous spirit.

Tipping The Scales

However, adventurous spirit or no, it’d be beyond naive not to recognise that a huge part of the attraction to Japan is the money. The cultural aspect might be very rewarding – if the player in question is receptive – but the rugby is of a far lower standard than these players are used to playing, so it’s difficult to see them getting any professional satisfaction out of it. Outside certain French multi-millionaire-backed powerhouses, with their laissez faire approach to the supposed salary cap, the amount of money available in the Far East is having a discernible knock-on effect when it comes to European teams recruiting Southern Hemisphere talent.

Back in 2008, Leinster were able to lure Rocky Elsom away from Australia after he had just been named ‘Wallaby of the Year’. He joined a foreign legion of Felipe Contepomi, Chris Whitaker, CJ van der Linde, Isa Nacewa and Stan Wright: three highly experienced SH test players, a Super Rugby standout and … uh, miscellaneous. With the exception of Ulster – where players are paid in pounds – none of the other provinces have anything like that coterie of high quality non-Irish qualified players to call upon these days.

There are a number of factors involved: again, one of them is the currency market. In July 2008 [shortly before Rocky Elsom arrived in Dublin to play for Leinster], the Euro was strong against the Yen, trading at roughly €1 = ¥170; at the moment it’s trading at roughly €1 = ¥120 … that’s just about a 30% drop in value.

As we’ve outlined above, the Japanese teams are owned – not just sponsored – by enormous multinationals headquartered in the country, with cash resources that are quite mind-bending; for example, Toyota is the eleventh largest corporation in the world by revenue. In terms of supporting their clubs, and without being in any way fiscally irresponsible, they can afford to pay their foreign players a huge whack because they don’t have to pay the rest of their squad that much: there’s absolutely no market for Japanese players in any other league.

A chap like Jaque Fourie can come in and ask for a fortune, and the best Japanese player on the team isn’t going to say “pay me the same as Fourie or I’ll go to France” … he probably wouldn’t even get a spot in a pro team in any club in the Pro D2. He’s got no leverage. That’s just not the case in Ireland – there’s an international market for our test players, as Jonny Sexton’s move to Racing Metro has proven.

A South African Centre Flaps His Wings in Japan, And An Irish Province Gets Knocked Out Of The Heineken Cup In France

So even if Munster or Leinster did have enough money to pay somebody like Conrad Smith the €700k p.a. that he could probably earn in Japan [and he was out of contract with the New Zealand union, and he wanted to give up his All Black jersey, and he decided he wanted to play for an Irish province rather than live in Biarritz or Paris], what happens when Conor Murray or Sean O’Brien come up for contract negotiations and say “I’m as important to Munster/Leinster as Conrad Smith is, I want €700k p.a. too”?

Conor Murray has become a vitally important player for both Munster and Ireland. With Ruan Pienaar entrenched at Ulster, both Eoin Reddan and Isaac Boss turning 33 this year and Kieran Marmion of Connacht as yet untried at test level, he’s in a smashing bargaining position whenever his conract comes up for renewal.

The player might have a very solid case that he is as important to Munster/Leinster as Conrad Smith, in that he’s a vitally important player and that there’s a huge step down from him to the next man in his position. On the other hand, once you set €700k p.a. as the benchmark for your best NIQ player, all the “he’s available to play 30+ matches per season” arguments don’t really cut it with the Irish player or his agent. Even if they accept that they’re not going to get €700k, they’re not going to be happy with an offer of €250-300k, because that’s less than 50% of what the top earner at the club makes.

You can see how that opens a can of worms: it’s a big difference being valued as worth 85-90% of the best player/highest earner at the club rather than 35-45%. It’s a slap in the face frankly, and while some will maintain that negotiations are all about cold hard cash at the end of the day’s negotiations, there’s more to it than that. Players want to feel appreciated, valued and secure, just like anybody else in a job. Saying that you’re worth less than half what another player earns doesn’t really help in that regard. If you’re a bit part player, and you don’t have that many other options, you just have to bite your tongue and sign on the line that is dotted. If you’re a regular test starter, not only do you have other options, you now have a bit of a grudge.

The Vichy League

The problem for the Irish provinces isn’t just Japanese wages though: as we’ve said before, the standard of rugby in the Top League is a long way off the pace, and that doesn’t really suit players who are looking for a genuine professional challenge rather than just a payday. You don’t become a world class player without having a competitive streak as wide as your back, and the Japanese league isn’t necessarily a great fit for those players who’ve still got fire in their bellies.

Mystifyingly, Stuart Barnes suggested in the Sunday Times that Bakkies might have a tough time against Leicester’s 24 year old lock Ed Slater – and then repeated the calumny in his pre-match report for Sky Sports. What was he thinking? Bakkies isn’t everybody’s cup of tea, but he is one of the genuinely great second rows of the last decade.

On the other hand, the French league is, to quote  Joe Schmidt’s memorable phrase, “a man-up-athon”. A season in the Top14 and the Heineken Cup will give you all the competition you need, and the money’s there too: Fleshlumpeater Bakkies Botha – a competitive animal if ever there was one – is on a three year deal in Toulon that’s estimated to be worth €700k p.a.

The television rights for the Top14 just keep getting more lucrative: their 2011 deal with Canal+ is estimated as being worth up to US$ 228m over five years, and while the performances of the French national team have declined in inverse proportion to the money coming into the French club game, the club owners aren’t the FFR. Most of them – judging from their actions and how they’ve flooded their squads with non-French players – don’t really give a shit about the national team, whatever they may say in public. Actions speak louder than words, and all their teams are full of foreigners.

Walk It Into The Net

Most sports fans will have heard or read that a major factor in Arsenal’s decline over the last decade has been their rigid wage structure, which has meant both that they’ve lost their top players to wealthier/more fiscally irresponsible teams, and have been unable to attract the top echelon of proven players, who can earn more money elsewhere … well, the Irish provinces are now in a similar situation.

The provinces are no longer at the top table when it comes to procuring players and, with the IRFU cutting down on the number of central contracts that take expensive players’ wages off the provincial books, they’ve got more mouths to feed as well.

Because they are restricted in terms of acquiring adequate replacements for valuable Irish players by dint of NIQ regulations [as a major part of the provincial remit is providing players for the Irish national team], the players themselves have more leverage than they had in previous years when it comes to negotiating with their provinces.

When you combine those in-house squad management factors with the decline of the euro, the rising wages for star players in privately owned, multi-millionaire-backed French clubs [in a big market country where rugby is firmly entrenched as a national game] and the emergence from relative obscurity of the Japanese Top League teams as extremely generous paymasters, we may have already seen the back of the NIQ glory days in Irish rugby.

The First of the Class of 2012 to graduate to full honours, Hendo is likely to be in the middle of Ireland’s forwards for the next decade

The idea for the 5 Up series was taken from the Seven Up TV show. We were interested to see how aspiring professional players developed and what factors affected their progress. Five players were chosen: one from each of the provinces and a second, from Leinster, who would have another season at underage level the following year.

Iain Henderson

With Ulster throwing their end-of-season eggs in the Heineken Cup basket, Henderson was given his starting debut for Ulster at the tail end of the 2012 season in a 8-36 defeat to Munster when he scored a super try. Stephen Ferris’ tendency to injury, along with Robbie Diack being unavailable, allowed Henderson the opportunity to start against Cardiff in September of this season. Henderson took his chance and also filled in the second row with Johan Muller injured at times during the season.

Henderson started all of Ireland’s matches in JWC 2012 as Mike Ruddock’s young charges finished in fifth place after losing out to England at the pool stages. He scored what turned out to be the decisive try against South Africa in Ireland’s game against the hosting Springboks.

To date, Henderson has made five international appearances for Ireland, all off the bench. He got the most game-time against Italy and looked comfortable at that level, repeatedly carrying and making bad ball better due to excellent presentation skills and consistent leg drive. He drove Parisse back off a five metre scrum at the start of the second half before putting in three classic hits where he’d lined up his man perfectly. Hendo picked up a foot injury in this game – a player getting injured with Ireland! – but a scan revealed only soft tissue damage.

Re-reading the original article, I was struck with its muted tones so must have been wary about lauding twenty year olds with little professional experience. The last line of the Henderson piece betrays some of my expectation but I have been surprised with how well he has adopted to higher level rugby. Despite only turning 21 in February, Henderson has never looked out of his depth in any match I’ve seen him in and we have yet to discover his ceiling.

For my money, Henderson’s international future is at second row where his combination of strength and agility make him a very valuable commodity. Ireland have been reasonably well served in the back row over the last fifteen years but have struggled to find an international class tight-head lock. His natural strength marked him out initially at u20 level and as he matures this feature of his game should only increase.

In contrast to some of his peers, Henderson has been fortunate with injury in that he hasn’t suffered anything serious and others’ unavailability has provided him with starting opportunities. Through what has been a steady rise at a young age, Henderson has maintained a remarkably low media profile and one of the few features about him revealed that he had not been a schoolboy superstar – unbelievable! I believe he is the best young Irish forward since Cian Healy and has the potential to be world class for a sustained period of time. Keep watching this space.

Conor Gilsenan

Gilsenan started against SA and England in JWC12 match but injured his ankle against England and played no further part in the tournament. That was the only match that Ireland lost in the tournament. Gilsenan was replaced at openside by Jordan Coghlan for the knock out games with Iain Henderson moving to blindside.

In the British & Irish Cup, Gilsenan came on for Leinster A at openside against Jersey, scoring a try, and started against Pontpridd. He shared the seven jersey with Coghlan and Dom Ryan in the A campaign and has yet to start for the senior side.

Gilsenan has recently had a run of games for UCD at blindside as Mark McGroarty seems to have nailed down the openside slot at Belfield. UCD lie second in Division 1B at time of writing after Ballynahinch claimed the title.

Luke McGrath

McGrath was on the bench for Ireland’s first two JWC12 matches against South Africa and England behind Keiran Marmion. McGrath started against Italy and scored a try.

Marmion was first choice for the remainder of the tournament and upon his return made the Connacht starting jersey his own.

McGrath captained Ireland in the 2013 u20 Six Nations tournament where they went 2-1-2 beating eventual winners England in Dubarry Park.

McGrath has seen very little senior rugby this season with Lansdowne scrum half John Cooney starting at scrum half for Leinster A throughout the B&I Cup and UCD using a range of scrum halves in their AIL campaign with Jamie Glynn getting an extended run in the team after Christmas. McGrath suffered from illness in the 2013 season causing him to miss a chunk of matches. McGrath was selected to start in Leinster A’s win against Bristol in the B&I quarter.

JJ Hanrahan

Hanrahan made his competitive debut in October 2012 at Thomond against Zebre in the centre outside Ian Keatley and made his mark with two tries. He had to wait until February 2013 to start again when he again lined up in the centre, this time against Edinburgh and Llanelli.

Hanrahan has played most of his rugby this season with UL Bohs who are at the foot of Division 1A with 5 wins from 16. Hanrahan has played in ten of those games with three wins and Bohs’ record is far better with him on the pitch than otherwise.

It’s interesting to compare Hanrahan, who played centre during the u20 2012 Six Nations outside Paddy Jackson with Jackson himself. Ulster started Jackson against Leinster in April 2012 and since then he has had a good run at the starting berth including an appearance in the Heineken Cup Final. Jackson did not travel to South Africa for the u20 JWC at Ulster’s behest and has since started for Ireland at outhalf. Hanrahan started in Jackson’s absence and played well enough to guide the team to fifth position and earn himself a nomination (one of three) as IRB Junior Player of the Year.

Jackson has been championed at Ulster where Iain Humphreys was jettisoned as a starter having started for Ulster in Thomond in the Heineken Cup quarter final before leaving the club during summer 2012. If Ulster haven’t exactly made Jackson a franchise player – Ruan Pienaar and John Afoa are too prominent for that designation – they have afforded him a lot of opportunity.

While Jackson has been playing for Ireland, Hanrahan has been ploughing a lonely furrow at the foot of Division 1A. Part of the reason for this series was to follow five players in particular during the stage of their career when promise must be translated to achievement. There is a general agreement that those that make it have earned it but there are a few twists in the road along the way.

Hanrahan started at out-half in Munster’s away quarter final win against the Cornish Pirates in the B&I Cup.

Shane Layden

Having impressed throughout the underage Six Nations, Layden missed out on the IRB Junior World Championship in South Africa due to a foot injury. He was replaced by Buccs team mate Conor Finn. Peter Nelson of Ulster started against pool games against SA and England before moving to centre against Italy where he scored two tries. Michael Sherlock played against Italy before Nelson returned to full back against England and France.

Layden (born 9/9/92) has mixed appearances for the Connacht Eagles in the B&I Cup and for Buccaneers in Division 1B of the AIL. The emergence of Robbie Henshaw (born 12/6/93) has limited opportunities for anyone else in the Connacht 15 jersey, including former captain Gavin Duffy. The Connacht Eagles finished last in their group winning one game while Buccs are fourth in Division 1B.

Layden’s last year has been plagued with injury including foot injuries and hamstring tears.

Summary

From a personal point of view, this has been a very interesting series. The themes that struck me were the impact of injuries at the early stage of a players’ career, the competition provided for a spot in your squad and the importance of a promoter who is prepared to give you a chance.

I think Iain Henderson is a smashing rugby player who benefitted greatly from game time with Ulster. I don’t think he’d have got the same opportunity had Stephen Ferris, Robbie Diack, Nick Williams and Johann Muller been fit at various stages of the season. I think he would have played and contributed as a squad player but the experience he gained of pro rugby stood to him and he keeps improving. Ulster have benefitted and Henderson’s progress suggests that one of the prerequisites of a top provincial coach is the willingness to give young players game time and the ability to maintain competitiveness while doing so. Joe Schmidt remains the model.

The comparison I have in mind for Henderson is Brodie Retallick, signed from Hawkes Bay by the Chiefs at 20 and a 7 time starter for NZ. There are arguments about the differing physical requirements between the Southern Hemisphere, [aerobic, ball-handling, competitions played one after another] and Northern Hemisphere [set piece based, heavier pitches, season dominated by Six Nations with Heineken Cup spread throughout ] but Retallick is a test All Black so he’s able to mix it. To counter that, Mark Anscombe is a Kiwi coach, and indeed Retallick was one of his JWC winning Baby Blacks, the injuries happened and Henderson took advantage of them.

A member of the Class of ’12 who has been afforded a huge opportunity is Paddy Jackson, championed by Davy Humphreys at Ravenhill and now starting fly-half for Ireland. In your correspondent’s opinion there’s precious little between Jackson and Hanrahan but Jackson now has the experience and neither will get this season again.

These players are illustrative of the Competition for Places meme. While Hanrahan is behind O’Gara and Ian Keatley, Jackson has been given a clear run at the Ulster No10 jersey with Niall O’Connor as the only specialist back up after Iain Humphreys’ move to London Irish. Ruan Pienaar, Paddy Wallace and Stuart Olding have all filled in at ten at one stage or another but Jackson is the main man. Meanwhile Hanrahan has played for a UL Bohs team that is propping up Division 1A. Sport is seen as meritocratic so if one player is playing for Ireland and the other for his club then the former must be superior. The truth in this matter is more relative than absolute but the confidence gained by having a prominent champion and bountiful opportunity probably makes it self-fulfilling. Hanrahan’s opportunities at Munster will be in a large part dictated by the Chairman of the Board’s contract decision. If O’Gara keeps playing he will get a lot of game time. In that case Hanrahan, and Irish rugby, would be better off if the Currow man was to sign for Ulster and compete with Jackson. However, Hanrahan signed a two-year deal for Munster around Christmas and seems prepared to take his chances/learn from the master/try and knock Radge off his perch.  Due to the parochial nature of the game in Ireland that sort of move has not proved popular but those transfers are the sort of talent optimisation that the yet to be appointed “director of operations type-role, equivalent to Rob Andrew in the RFU, that is apparently about to be created within Irish rugby” (sic) may well endorse.

Shane Layden has probably run into traffic at the other end of the age spectrum in the form of Robbie Henshaw. Usually young players who have yet to make an impact are spoken of knowledgably as possessing great potential. When your rival is younger than you then your name doesn’t get mentioned as often! Henshaw has been championed by Elwood and has maintained the full back position even when Gavin Duffy has been fit. I’m a big fan of Gavin Duffy and believe that he has a more rounded skill set than Henshaw but I stand accused of not watching a huge number of Connacht games. Connacht fans out there care to correct me about the merits of Duffy v Henshaw? Because of injury, the matter is academic and Layden has played very little rugby this season.

Conor Gilsenan and Luke McGrath both play for UCD. I am wholly against the premium clubs put on the u20 level in Leinster and I believe that it has been detrimental to participation numbers in Dublin in particular. I believe that UCD were one of the main agitating forces behind its current place in the domestic spectrum and that now the status quo prevails because getting Irish rugby clubs to agree on anything is like trying to herd cats so there is no change. Anyway, I digress, that’s a discussion for another day.

Because UCD can attract so much talent and place such an emphasis on u20 level, their best (underage) players play mainly meaningless fixtures against teams that are unable to match them while improving their weights and walking around Belfield in snazzy training clobber. How Luke McGrath, who has played off the bench for the full Leinster team, benefits from playing at u20s level against guys who have quite possibly been on the sauce the night before is beyond me. Interestingly, Cathal Marsh was McGrath’s half back partner on UCD’s u20 team in 2011-12 but this season is plying his trade with DUFC and getting first team action. Marsh started for Leinster ‘A’ in their B&I Cup quarter final win against Bristol with McGrath at scrum half.

Gilsenan’s appearances, that I am aware of, for UCD’s first team have been at blindside. For a player in Leinster’s academy measuring 1.87m and weighing 96kg, openside is the only position likely as a professional. (By way of comparison: Rhys Ruddock 1.91m, 111kg; Dom Ryan 1.93m, 106kg). Playing at blindside is not the same as openside and Gilsenan needs to play at 7 in order to develop the running lines, breakdown skills and reading of the game required for that position.

Having said all that, McGrath looks well poised to enjoy a professional career. Both Isaac Boss and Eoin Reddan turn 33 this year and Reddan’s broken leg provides an opportunity for one of Cooney and McGrath to get some first team exposure. McGrath’s selection ahead of Cooney at half back in the B&I Cup indicates that he is under serious consideration for the bench in Leinster’s remaining games of the 2012-13 season, all of which are important to the club.

I read an interview with a New Zealand playwright years ago where he defined the day he became a man as the day he realised he’d never play for the All Blacks. The corresponding day has yet to arrive for any of the players under review here and Henderson, of course, has already made the grade. The IRFU’s stance on foreign players has changed markedly in recent seasons and presents more opportunities for young Irish talent. However, it also means that provinces won’t be able to bulwark their squad with top class international talent as in years gone by and young players will be required to maintain high standards when international players are unavailable. This is a good thing for Irish rugby in the long run but may involve discomfort for provincial supporters in the interim (imagine, for example, an Ulster with no Pienaar and Afoa) and should benefit the national team in future. We’ve long held the belief that there was no “golden generation” and look forward to the sustained competitiveness of the provincial teams in the seasons to come.

Andrew Conway, the youngest player in the Leinster senior squad, is on his way to Munster next season.

Amidst the media furore, recriminations, denials, Twitter shit-slinging and overuse of the word ‘floodgates’ that surrounded Johnny Sexton’s move to Racing Metro, another ground-breaking move has gone largely under the radar. 

On the 30 April 2012, Leinster announced a tranche of contract extensions and a couple of new signings. In all, twenty contracts were announced, amongst them a two year deal for then 20-year old winger/fullback, Andrew Conway.

However, on 25 January 2013, Gerry Thornley broke the news that Conway was headed to Munster, and later in the day Munster would go on to confirm that the move was a done deal.

You’re Already In A Band, Or Didn’t You Fuckin’ Notice?

Ah, Deco Cuffe … he was already in a band, but didn’t fucking notice, apparently.

As far as The Mole is aware, Conway leaving Leinster to go to Munster mid-contract is the first in-contract ‘transfer deal’ between two Irish provinces. I haven’t heard of any Leinster two-year deal that has a break clause after one year: that’s not to say that they don’t exist, but I don’t see any reason why Leinster would label a one-year deal with the option of a second year as a two year contract.

So, if there’s no break clause, The Mole’s understanding of the situation would suggest that it means that the contract offer was not between Munster Rugby and Andrew Conway/his representative, but between Munster Rugby and Leinster Rugby. That’s an interesting scenario. Which came first? Munster’s offer or Conway’s dissatisfaction with his recently penned deal? What has changed to make Conway break a contract that he only recently signed? What do Leinster get in compensation, if anything? So many questions.

Ou Est Le Boeuf/Le Cheval?

Taking the new year as a simple halfway point in the season, at the time of the announcement Conway had played just over a quarter of his current two-year contract. He had played in 11 of Leinster’s 19 competitive matches to that date [10 starts, including his first HEC start, against Exeter at home]; he was also an unused substitute in the matchday 23 in a number of tight games from late October to mid-December, all of them decided by seven points or less:

• @ Scarlets [HEC | 20/10/12 | 13-20 win]
• @ Glasgow [Pro12 | 23/11/12 | 0-6 win]
• @ Clermont Auvergne [HEC | 9/12/12 | 15-12 loss]
• vs Clermont Auvergne [HEC | 15/12/12 | 21-28 loss]

In total, he was selected for 15 of a possible 19 matchday squads, missing out on the following games:

• @ Connacht [Pro12 | 28/9/12 | 6-34 loss]
• vs Cardiff [Pro12 | 27/10/12 | 59-22 win]
• vs Scarlets [HEC | 12/01/13 | 34-15 win]
• @ Exeter [HEC | 19/01/13 | 29-20 win]

With 10 starts in the first half of this season, he had already equalled the total number of starts in his last two seasons [6+4 in 2011-12, 4+3 in 2010-11]. In terms of where he stood in gametime racked up at Leinster, at the time of the announcement he was just outside the top 10 for starts in the 2012-13 season:

• [1] Ian Madigan – 14 starts
• [2] Leo Cullen – 13 starts
• [3-8] Jamie Heaslip, Shane Jennings, Kev McLaughlin, Fergus McFadden, Jonny Sexton, Isa Nacewa – 12 starts
• [9-10] Gordon D’Arcy, Mike Ross – 11 starts
• [11-12] Devin Toner, Andrew Conway – 10 starts

Leinster experienced significant injury problems in the first half of the season, which meant that a number of players [for example, Luke Fitzgerald and Dave Kearney, back three players who would have been direct rivals for gametime] were unavailable for selection for  long periods. Furthermore, about half of those players of the twelve listed above would have played more games were it not for international player management protocol. Still, 10 starts in half a season is pretty good going for a 21 year old*.

* He has also started three games in the B&I Cup.

Additionally, Fionn Carr was confirmed as returning to Connacht next season four days before Conway’s transfer was announced out of the blue. Carr has been another direct competitor for gametime, and it was rumoured for a number of months that he would be on the move and dropping out of the running at Leinster. While contract negotiations are typically private business, it seems unlikely that word doesn’t get around inside the camp if somebody is on the way out.

You’re Living In The Past Marge. Quit Living In The Past. 

The key to Conway’s dissatisfaction seems to The Mole to lie in the quite spectacular success that both Simon Zebo and Craig Gilroy have enjoyed at their respective provinces, success that has seen them catapulted to international recognition. Conway played alongside Zebo in the 2010 U20 Six Nations and Junior World Championship, and alongside Gilroy in the 2011 U20 Six Nations [in one game] and in the JWC of that year; contrary to what some may believe, all three never played together.

Simon Zebo has effortlessly made every step up from talented U20 to provincial regular to international highlight reel king in a two year period, scoring buckets of tries along the way – 20 in 45 games for Munster, 1 in 1 game for the Wolfhounds and 2 in 5 tests for Ireland.

While Zebo and Gilroy shone at underage level, Conway was the brightest star, playing in four U20 tournaments over two seasons and scoring a whopping 14 tries in 16 appearances. However, both the Belfast boy and the Cork-Martinique lad have since left him in their slipstream, adapting quickly to the demands of senior rugby, staying fit and producing performances that have caught the eye and the imagination. I’m sure they’ve been brought through, put their hands up, fronted up and kicked on as well [to put it in the parlance of rugby scribblers nationwide]. In contrast, Conway hasn’t got it done yet at senior level.

Having debuted for Leinster as an 18 year old under Michael Cheika in the 2009-10 season, he had a fine JWC in June 2010, scoring five tries in five games, including a hat-trick against the Scots in Ireland’s last match of the tournament. He picked up that form when he returned to Leinster colours, scoring a try in his first game of the season against Edinburgh in the Pro12. He was even more effective in the British and Irish Cup, scoring six tries in four games for Leinster ‘A’, all of them in pairs.

However, an ankle injury sustained against Treviso in late February [when he would otherwise have been playing for the Irish U20s] ended his Leinster season with surgery, and having been rushed back for his second JWC in June 2011 – in which he again bagged a remarkable five tries – he came into the 2011-12 season short a pre-season.

He has been hampered by a range of injuries that have kept him off the pitch: ankle surgery, whiplash, stingers, concussion. Conway is a slight, lightweight player whose primary attribute is his out-and-out speed; in comparison to other small wingers like James Simpson-Daniel or Shane Williams, he hasn’t really mastered many ways to beat a man in a phone box, avoid the full force of big hits or finish tries in improbable circumstances.

Aside from injury issues [and more to the point], Conway’s form hasn’t demanded selection. For a player whose game is predicated on scoring tries – and in a position where finishing ability is a must – he’s hardly covered himself in glory, scoring just two five-pointers in his 20 appearances over the last one and a half seasons. Leinster have been a pretty free-scoring team over that period – they were the second highest try-scorers in the Pro12 last year [behind Ulster] and are currently heading the try-scoring charts this season – so blaming the style of play doesn’t stand up to scrutiny. 

But What About The Heineken Cup [Which Is Strangely Deemed A Pre-Requisite For International Selection While Also Being Written Off As Not Relevant To Test Rugby]?

Conway made his Heineken Cup debut in Leinster’s first game of the pool, an unconvincing 9-6 win over Exeter at the RDS. The following week, he found himself amongst four unused replacements [alongside Jamie Hagan, Jordi Murphy and Fionn Carr] in the tight 20-13 win over the Scarlets in Parc y Scarlets. He can hardly have any beef with missing out on selection, or not being called on from the bench in a close game: after all, in the first game of the Pro12 season in the same ground, the Scarlets wingers scored four tries in a 45-20 demolition of an understrength Leinster, with the unheralded Andy Fenby banging in two scores down Conway’s wing.

Naps Nalaga is a nightmare match-up for most wingers, but especially so for a slight chap like Conway. Putting the Blackrock lad into the team on the back of no particular attacking form to speak of would have been a very poor selection on the balance of probabilities.

He was likewise bench-bound for the two games against Clermont Auvergne, for similar and obvious reasons: the Clermont wingers Napolioni Nalaga [191cm/6’3” and 105kg/16st7lbs] and Sitiveni Sivivatu [186cm/6’1” and 99kg/15st8lbs] are horrific physical match-ups for Conway, who goes about 180cm/5’11” and a very generous 91kg/14st4lbs [and it’s more likely that he’s still around the 178cm/5’10” and 88kg/13st12lbs that he was billed at previously].

With Rob Kearney, Luke Fitzgerald and Brian O’Driscoll all returning from injury in the new year, Conway found himself squeezed out of the matchday squads for the two remaining Heineken Cup games, bonus points wins over the Scarlets [in the RDS] and Exeter Chiefs [in Sandy Park]. The three returning players scored four tries between them in two games – Kearney scored one in each – so it’s difficult to argue with that selection from any perspective. In short, The Mole feels that Conway hasn’t been hard done by in selection terms. He’s been given gametime, and he has been given chances. If he’s dissatisfied, he doesn’t really have any legitimate beef.

It’s All Happening Not Soon Enough

The Leinster Schools Cup is a media-saturated event [for better or worse] and the best young players can attain a relatively high profile amongst keen rugby followers. The players take it seriously, and schools at the business end of things take it very seriously. Professionally-programmed strength and conditioning routines, nutrition plans, analysis and countless hours of training are all par for the course, and between the schools themselves and the Leinster Talent Identification Program [TIP], the best players are well-trained, physically prepared and über-confident.

Leinster are typically well-represented on underage teams; the players are ahead of the curve preparation-wise, if not necessarily on pure talent. Recognition is a real confidence booster to already confident young players, and The Mole believes that there are a lot more players who genuinely believe that they’ll succeed if given the chance than those who believe they’re lucky to have got the nod – that’s not a bad thing at all. They carry that confidence forward to U20s level which, whilst a very valuable step along the path, can also be something of a false arrival point; after all, as we’ve said many times before, the U20s have to pick a new team every year.

Nevertheless, some players progress smoothly and quickly into senior rugby; others who are maybe as talented don’t manage that progression quite as quickly for any number of reasons, and it can be the first real blow to their confidence. Youngsters who have been lionised as they rose through the grades hit the first stumbling block, and they’ve no idea how to deal with it. One thing’s for sure in their minds though – it ain’t me, it’s you. Who’s going to tell them otherwise?

Niall Woods, former CEO of IRUPA, head of Navy Blue Consulting and Conway’s agent.

Niall Woods – Bill Of Goods

Conway is represented by former IRUPA head Niall Woods of Navy Blue Consulting – like his protege, an alumnus of Blackrock College – who turned out for Leinster, London Irish and Harlequins during playing days that saw him win eight international caps on the wing. While the circumstances surrounding professional rugby have changed a great deal between Woods’ playing career and that of Conway, they share a similar profile – both pacy, lightweight wingers who learned their rugby at Blackrock and Leinster. It doesn’t seem improbable that there’s a particularly close working relationship between agent and client; after all, Woods can’t really give Marty Moore [another of his clients] any pointers on scrummaging, but he sure knows a thing or two about playing on the wing, and he also knows a thing or two about the workings of the professional game.

I’m sure every sports agent likes to portray himself as a Jerry Maguire type of figure [and some may even look in their hotel mirrors and see themselves as just that], but in reality, there are just as many of the Bob Sugar types out there too. Anyhow, they’re not so dissimilar:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nNI3E-dZK7o

You’d have to be a bit of a misanthrope to believe that those parents acting as their son’s agent – Frank O’Driscoll [father of Brian] being the most well known, although there are others – have anything but the best interests of their progeny at heart, but not everybody’s father or parent has the professional background, or the time, or the inclination to take on this role in their son’s life.

A veil hangs over the motivation of every other agent. Their interest is inextricably linked with the commercial and financial success of their client – they’re on a percentage after all, not a fixed fee. For them, what’s best for the player can only be measured in euros, how much you can get out of the best deal. It’s certainly a powerful motivating factor for the agent to work the negotiating tables hard when it gets time to look at the next contract. Is the best decision necessarily the best deal though? What is a career – is it the money you made or the accomplishments you achieved?

Richie Gray, looking happy. Probably reflecting on his deal with Sale.

Richie Gray is earning more money at Sale than he was at Glasgow – thus his agent is earning more money. If the definition of ‘good’ is more money, then Gray has made a good decision and his agent has done a good job. Neither is true. He made a sh*t decision and got bad advice.

Once you discard the idea that more money automatically equals better, then everything becomes a lot more complicated. Day-to-day enjoyment of training, team spirit, learning from good coaches, ease of communication with those around you [not necessarily just about language, but having shared experiences, similar outlooks and ambitions and the like], good relationships with management/owners, good injury management and player welfare, standard of facilities, on-pitch competitiveness, living standards, happiness of family/partners etc. – these are all aspects that come into play for the player, not necessarily the agent.

John Matuszak – as perceptive a comment about professional sports as any roided monster ever made.

The Tooz On Football, Business And The American Dream

There’s a great quote in Bill Walsh’s book ‘Finding The Winning Edge’ from former LA Raiders defensive end John Matuszak [who was a pretty f*cked up character in the great Raiders teams of the late 1970s and early 1980s – and he played Sloth in The Goonies too!] about player contract negotiations in the NFL: “Every time I call it a game, you call it a business – and every time I call it a business, you call it a game.”

Necessary Evil

You can’t expect the player to go into negotiations with his Leaving Cert and the url of his YouTube highlight reel and expect to get a fair deal. The gentlemen on the other side of the table have a lot more experience of this thing, and it’s in their interests to keep the price down. You also don’t want your players worrying about a meeting they’re going to have on Monday morning about their future earning abilities when they’re lining up a kick on Saturday afternoon. Agents have a legitimate and important part to play. To quote Sonny Corleone: “I don’t want my brother coming out of that toilet with just his dick in his hands, alright?” 

It also has to be pointed out that agents can and do often act in the players’ best interests by depersonalising an often emotional decision. It is unlikely that Johnny Sexton wanted to leave Leinster at the start of the season but when Racing Metro made him an offer he could not refuse he was willing to reconsider.

The overwhelming public reaction to Sexton’s move was “good on him, sad to see him go, it’s a lot of money and a short career”. Unlike Gray, Sexton already has three Heineken Cups to look back on when his career is done. How his move affects the rest of his career is something that remains to be seen. When you’ve won things, your perspective can change. Tom “Terrific” Brady recently chose to stay with the New England Patriots for less than his market worth, in large part to help the Patriots stay competitive for the next five seasons.

You Don’t Get Me I’m Part Of The Union

And what about those dastardly blazered types who sit tight-lipped and tight-walleted on the other side of the table? What was their role in the Conway ‘transfer’?

For the most part the Professional Contracts Review Group [PCRG] – made up of Martin O’Sullivan, Pa Whelan, Tom Grace, Eddie Wigglesworth and Philip Browne, the first three committee men [blazers], the latter two professionals [suits] – have laboured beneath the radar, only really breaking cover to announce the spectacularly ill-received protocol on non-Irish-qualified players in December 2011.

Philip Browne – in the words of The Band, “a union man … all the way”. Browne’s non-rugby background ensures that he is seen as provincially neutral, a rarity in Irish rugby.

Their priority was re-establishing the primacy of the Irish team and getting the provinces to push in the same direction, and for good reason: the CEO’s report states [on page 13] that “81% of IRFU revenues are generated by the national team, which in turn subsidises the provincial professional teams to the extent of 40% of total IRFU expenditure”. 

However, the document designed to address player shortage and succession issues in specific positions was unpopular, poorly thought-out, impractical, possibly illegal and badly timed  – a complete clusterf*ck, basically. The timing of the release, coming as it did right in the heart of the provincial season, with very few rugby fans thinking much beyond their province’s next Heineken Cup match, was guaranteed to provoke a negative response from the public – a rookie error – but they were also setting up some hard and fast rules that were simply unnecessary, especially as they already had the power to veto any provincial deal with a non-Irish qualified player.

Despite that, once all the bluster and clunky prose was burned off, the PCRG’s goal was pretty legitimate:

“The aim would be to have at least two such eligible players [likely first choice selections in provincial squads] in each field position across Ulster, Munster and Leinster … the objective is to protect the National Team without undermining the performances of the provincial teams as we collectively believe successful provinces are an important ingredient to a successful National Team.”

The Mann Act - Transporting Minors Across State Lines

Alongside the central tenet of reducing provincial reliance on non-Irish-qualified players, a growing concern amongst the union is to mobilise young talent they see as jammed up in the provincial works.

This is all very noble and correct etc. … except that there remains the suspicion that the top echelons of Irish rugby are rife with internal fiefdoms and provincial loyalty, and when you hear the phrase ‘the best interests of Irish rugby’, you may as well substitute it with ‘the best interests of my province’.

Given their disastrous handling of the NIQ issue, it’s probably for the best that the PCRG haven’t gone public with any protocol about the in-contract targeting by provinces of other provinces’ academy or development players, but it’s an open secret that it happens. In any case, the key question is whether or not the PCRG tacitly condoned a young player breaking his contract – in altogether unexceptional circumstances – with one branch of the union in order to take up with another branch of the same union.

As reported by Peter O’Reilly, it looks like the IRFU are planning to go all professional before RWC15. Conway’s contract break seems to open up a can of worms that an incoming professional is unlikely to appreciate. Is the Conway move – and the heavily rumoured [but yet to be officially confirmed] Munster re-signing of South African tighthead BJ Botha, which flies altogether in the face of the December 2011 protocol – the last sting of the dying wasp that is the PCRG?

Would Conway have been able to walk out on Leinster to join Racing Metro mid-contract? If Conway didn’t walk out but was traded, how much did Leinster get for him? If he didn’t walk out but was released, why were Leinster prepared to let him go without receiving compensation? And what’s the difference, from Leinster’s point of view, between Racing Metro and Munster?

Alan Quinlan writes an impressively honest and perceptive column in the Irish Times as well as commenting on the radio and TV. As well as being a former international, he’s also a fan. His latest column focused on atmosphere and lack thereof at Lansdowne Road/the Aviva Stadium during the recent match against England.

The Mole is interested to know what commenters think about the atmosphere at Lansdowne and other grounds around the country. There is much talk about the ‘ordinary fan’ not being able to get tickets for games but I’m not sure about who this refers to. No one wants to take umbrage with the ‘ordinary fan’ or the concept thereof but who is (s)he? It’s a generic phrase that applies to no one in particular and everyone in general.

For the record, the Mole was at the ground on Saturday and no one in the seats directly around me booed ‘Swing Low’ but the English fans two rows back were more vocal than any of the Irish supporters. I was at the same game in Lansdowne two years ago when the atmosphere before was buzzing (5.30pm kick off on a Saturday). Sexton and Reddan ratcheted the tempo up from the start of the game and the crowd lapped it up. A 19-13 victory in 2005 (Sunday afternoon kickoff) was a subdued affair while the 43-13 win in Croke Park was one of the highlights of Irish rugby.

However, the best atmosphere I’ve ever experienced at Lansdowne Road was 1993 against England. I was on the South Terrace behind three guys from Ulster who seemed to start every chant at that end before the rest of the ground took it up and the wheels came off the chariot. Were these guys ‘ordinary fans’? Extraordinary in my opinion, it takes somebody to start the chants and I never saw it again at first hand.

The atmosphere in the RDS for the quarter final against Clermont on Friday night a few years ago was electric and Clermont’s fans are the best I’ve ever seen or heard. ‘Qui ne saute pas n’est pas auvergnat!’ Having visited Signal Iduna Park in Dortmund for a game recently, I can say that my initial fears about the lack of terracing at Lansdowne are being realised. Terraces lend atmosphere to games because the lack of frills (comfort?) mean that only people who want to see the game are likely to go. The atmosphere rather than game itself is the reason that a large rump of people attend matches and likewise concerts. The designers of the new Lansdowne Road missed a trick.

One comment about atmosphere at games that has stuck with me was Geoff Moylan’s in the build up to the Croke Park Heineken Cup semi-final. Moylan had to be back for training on Sunday morning as Shannon were playing Clontarf in the league final the following week. Earlier on in the season he had been at Thomond for the match against the All Blacks: “The All Black game at Thomond Park was different as every guy who has every played club rugby seemed to be there and it was the best atmosphere I can ever remember.”

What’s right or wrong at grounds? What gets your juices flowing and who are the “Best Fans in the World”? What impact does the size of the ground have or is it all ‘location, location, location’. And before I forget, why are there so few toilets in the Aviva Stadium?

Not an oul fellah in sight: Ben Youngs, Joe Launchbury, Peter O’Mahony and Cian Healy are four youngsters who will have big parts to play over the coming decade in these clashes. The torch has been well and truly passed in England, and Ireland have some catching up to do.

There are always a dozen good reasons why a team loses a relatively close match – invariably, some of them are to do with the other crowd playing well. 

Some people have a tendency to go a bit bonkers in the wake of an Irish loss, especially an Irish loss to England. If it’s not the IRFU engineering their poorly thought-through NIQ protocol aimed at ensuring that “Twickenham will never happen again” – there are now non-Irish-qualified first choice tightheads at three provinces, rather than two – it’s bluffers on the internet saying that that was the worst Irish performance in years. It wasn’t.

Just like Wikipedia isn’t always entirely reliable [really?], ESPN Scrum.com isn’t the ne plus ultra of rugby statistic sites. However, it’s a good rough guide to the game.

This wasn’t a particularly difficult game to understand; repeated watching will tell you the same thing, not impart a cosmic understory to the initiated. The major reasons England won were:

• 1] Irish handling errors;
• 2] a superior kicking game;
• 3] excellent defensive discipline;
• 4] Irish injuries in the first half

Roberto Duran, the original Manos de Piedra or “Hands of Stone” – great for boxing, not so great for catching a slippy rugby ball.

Manos de Piedra

Knock-ons suck the life out of a team, especially when they keep on occurring. It’s impossible to generate momentum, it’s difficult to stretch a defense through a number of phases and generate mismatches, it’s difficult to maintain a grip on territory and it’s obviously difficult to score tries. It should go without saying that you’re going to have problems winning a game with those hindrances, unless the opposition team is ludicrously indisciplined and gives away a lot of kickable penalties when they have possession of the ball.

One of the oldest saws in rugby goes that conditions are the same for both teams.  Sometimes you have to laugh, because if you’re playing Fiji or Australia in a November downpour in Dublin, they’ve practically no experience of operating in those conditions; while they might be “the same for both teams”, one team has a huge bank of practical experience to which the other just doesn’t have access. It’s like going to live in Alaska and having to listen to the Inuits take the piss for not knowing how to build an igloo. Go f*ck yerselves, Inuits.

Anyway, there should be no reason for Irish players or teams to be unfamiliar with wet-weather rugby; if anything, we should be the masters of it. We could’ve written the book on wet-weather rugby …

… and the curious thing is that it looks like we had both written and read it. Ireland weren’t trying to play with width or putting in speculative passes or offloads; indeed, we were playing a fairly basic, conservative game that suited the conditions, but our execution of basic skills [doubtless made more difficult by the weather conditions and a hard-hitting English defense] was extremely poor. Jamie Heaslip and Mike McCarthy made the most high profile errors – each of them knocking on twice in open play – but there were plenty of mistakes to go around. While it’d be more frustrating to watch a team go out and mess up a bunch of times trying to play rugby that was totally unsuitable to the conditions, it’s almost as bad watching them botch a reasonable [if unimaginative] gameplan.

You rang?

Kick For Victory

Kicking played a massive role in the game. All told, there were 101 kicks, easily more than one a minute … and The Mole has gone and documented them all in classic statto fashion; Sunday games and tryless losses will do that to a man. Bring out the paisley dressing gown and pour me a mug of strong tea.

Don’t let it stop you checking out this peerless busy work [as ever, click to embiggen], but as stated above, there’s no real secret behind the stats: England just kicked better than we did. They also fielded better than we did [i.e. they didn't make any ordinary kicks better than they were – while we did, most notably through Jamie Heaslip's knock-ons, but also from some faffing about at the back by O'Gara], and they certainly chased better than we did, turning bad kicks into ordinary kicks, and ordinary kicks into good kicks.

Kicking game, 1st quarter of the match [min 1 - min 19]. From left to right: [1] the number of the kick; [2] what time it took place on the match clock; [3] the initials of the kicker and the number of his kick [i.e. OF3 would be Owen Farrell's third kick]; [4] a brief description of the kick as regards position; [5] for line kicks, an estimation of the amount of territory gained; [6] the type of kick [RS = restart; O = open play; B = box kick; FK/O = free kick; PK = penalty kick; PG = penalty goal]; and [7] a subjective judgment of whether the kick was good [√], neither particularly good nor bad [≈] or bad [X].

Kicking game, second quarter [min 20 - min 40]. While in the first quarter of the match Farrell and Sexton dominated proceedings, Ben Youngs gets in on the act in the second quarter … and gets a bit lucky with an unforced error from Heaslip and a long box kick bouncing a hair’s breadth before the touchline.

Kicking game, third quarter [min 40 - 59]. A kick-heavy quarter, with the Irish halfbacks kicking 16 times in 20 minutes with very varied results: on the plus side, some great box kicks from Murray and Ireland’s only scores of the game from O’Gara, but counterbalanced by some really appalling line-kicking from penalties by the veteran outhalf.

Kicking game, fourth quarter [min 60 - min 80]. The endgame, with Owen Farrell knocking over two penalties from the left of the sticks while Brand Haskell is in the bin. It’s worth noting that in each of the first, third and fourth quarters, England fullback Alex Goode had an absolutely enormous 40m+ touch finder, two of them from marks taken on the edge of the 22. He wasn’t quite flawless, but he had an exceptional game.

Sexton was putting along relatively well, and a projection of his 30 mins worth of kicking would have him producing a performance very like that of Farrell. Conor Murray relied almost exclusively on his box-kicking – some of it was very good, others were far too long for any chaser to possibly reach. Unfortunately, Sexton’s replacement O’Gara had a poor day with the boot, especially by his high standards.

In comparison to a missed placekick, a short linekick from a penalty hardly ever gets more than a one-line mention or a throwaway note from the commentators … and yet it has a significant effect on the shape of the game. 10m or 15m gains are nowhere near good enough from a dead ball; even a 20m kick is inadequate. As we say in Mole Towers, “you could throw it further with your bad hand”. You need to be gaining 30m down the line, getting the ball into the opposition 22, establishing a good position for an attacking lineout  and putting their line under pressure.

At this stage of his career, ROG doesn’t have much to his game bar his kicking abilities, and while there was ballyhoo from the blowhard Hook ["the best defensive kicker in the world"] and a lot of encouraging noises from the commentary team of Ryle Nugent and Donal Lenihan about how Ireland couldn’t possibly have a better substitute than O’Gara given the conditions, an overview of his kicking game would conclude that it was below par. His entire display was predictable and underwhelming, though not quite as disastrous as some would make out.

How each of the team’s primary kickers faired on the basis of The Mole’s  subjective judgment – no room for argument there, so. Again, a √ signifies a good kick; a ≈ is a kick that’s neither particularly good nor bad; and a X – an X? – is a bad kick [click to embiggen]. There were no drop goal attempts, but if there were, they’d be like penalties – no points for trying [i.e. no wavy equals signs ... you get the points and they're good, you don't get the points and they're bad].

While England as a team kicked well, the outstanding aspect of their performance – despite the fact that they eventually conceded 14 penalties – was the discipline of their defense in their own half.

This one’s for you, Pa: Owen Farrell and Head Boy Chris Robshaw smash Ronan O’Gara in midfield. The Welsh coaching team drew up the blueprint for controlling O’Gara and cutting out the Irish threequarter line in the RWC11 quarter-final , and in the second half you could see that the English defense had been well-briefed  over the break on how to take care of business in the same fashion. 

They only conceded three kickable penalties in 80 minutes of rugby, in a game played away from home in difficult weather. Not giving away a kickable penalty in the first forty minutes was extremely impressive, a testimony to Andy Farrell and the belief that the young English players have in each other and their coaches’ systems.

It also had a significant effect on the shape of the game. Ireland were hamstringing themselves with handling errors, and the English defence weren’t giving them anything cheaply. The team in green had more of the ball, had the more reliable set-pieces, won the territorial battle, were penalised less often, ran for more metres, made more clean breaks, beat more defenders … but they couldn’t get on the scoreboard, and they couldn’t really generate any momentum.

Random Acts Of Injurious Misfortune

Simon Zebo broke his foot running sometime around the tenth minute; Jonny Sexton pulled his hamstring kicking a ball on the ground after about half an hour.

These are just random injuries – there’s no explanation for them. There was no foul play involved, no unfortunate collisions or brave tackles … the two lads just got injured doing things that they do every single day.

While his replacement Keith Earls did a fine job and looked dangerous with the ball in hand on a couple of occasions, Zebo’s loss was perhaps a bigger blow than just losing his on-field abilities. Because of his recent explosion on to the rugby world’s consciousness and the willingness of the crowd to get themselves involved any time he looked like coming near the ball, something intangible but genuine was lost. Wow, that sounds like complete spoof, but you know what I mean.

Sexton limps off with a strained hamstring. Two seasons ago, he and ROG were neck and neck; last year, he took control; this year, he’s irreplaceable.

Sexton’s loss was significantly more tangible. A breaking threat, a long kicking game, a rock-solid defender, a playmaker who can get his backline moving … O’Gara is a step down in all these categories at this stage of his career. It’s not entirely his fault, by any means: he’s less than a month shy of 36 and he doesn’t pick himself [although the second point is moot, because he would if he could].

Benedictus

Declan Kidney’s comments to the media are usually so bland as to be meaningless, but The Mole found himself in the strange position of nodding in agreement reading a quote in the paper yesterday morning: we’re still in this tournament, and with a dollop of luck we could still be in the reckoning for the title on the last weekend. Wales are a confidence team, and despite the fact that their game against France was almost unwatchable, they got themselves over the line – that will give them a huge boost, and likely make sure that they’re still competitive on the last day of the tournament, when England travel to the Millennium Stadium.

With Ryan Jones back from injury and Alun-Wyn Jones to return in the second row, their pack will be significantly better-equipped to take on the English eight … all the moreso if Howley doesn’t succumb to sentiment and pick the out-of form Sam Warburton over the in-form Justin Tipuric. With a Lions tour in the offing, there’s still a huge amount to play for on an individual-by-individual basis, so expect that to be a massive clash.

On a final note, The Mole would like to commend French referee Jerome Garces on his performance. It’s often said that if a referee goes unmentioned in match reports, he’s had a good game. While Garces wasn’t perfect [he didn't referee the offside line well, for one thing, and he also missed Healy's blatant stamp on Cole's ankle] he dealt with a testy atmosphere very well. Kudos!

Tipuric is the form Welsh player in Wales, continuing from where he left off last season. The variability of Sam Warburton’s performances has left me unconvinced about his bona fides. Like Ryan Jones before him, the onus of Welsh captaincy seems exhausting and he has been unable to sustain the form that made him so prominent in the RWC and during the Grand Slam season. Warburton’s performances for Cardiff have been unimpressive and one wonders if Gatland, more ruthless than Howley, would have persisted with him at Tipuric’s expense.

In their two most recent meetings, Gatland has nailed Kidney. This time it was Kidney’s turn and Ireland exposed the Welsh systems and selections. Neither side chose to contest the breakdown with much intensity once the tackle had been made. Perhaps this is due to Poite’s refereeing and teams decide to err on the side of caution with the French man in charge. More likely it is due to the preferences of the defensive coaches and where they direct their team to apply energy.

Commentating on BBC, Martyn Williams noted that “the Welsh usually use an out-to-in blitz defence” and this was a feature of Shaun Edwards’ Wasps teams. Ireland’s lineout maul, Conor Murray’s threat around the fringes and some good lines from close in runners attracted Welsh defenders in close. This made the blitz a riskier option and Sexton’s deep alignment allowed him time to choose his options. In the first few minutes he twice grubbered in behind the Welsh and gave Ireland field position. In the eighth minute JJV Davies blitzed but Sexton was too deep and his hands too good as he freed O’Driscoll. The massive dog leg created by a missed blitz wasn’t fully exploited but left room enough for Ireland to get quality field position. From there Ireland repeated the dose and Jamie Roberts’ decision to compete at a ruck after tackling left Wales short of backs out wide.

It took two excellent passes from Sexton and O’Driscoll, along with a clever decoy from Kearney, to put Zebo away. Ireland executed well and Zebo served notice of his poacher’s ability at the highest level. Davies and Cuthbert were caught in no man’s land: tempted to blitz but left short by Roberts’ decision, no one made a strong tackle and Ireland were off the mark. O’Driscoll’s pass in particular was all class. In 2008 it looked like his hamstrings were gone but a changed conditioning regime has seen a leaner, more flexible O’Driscoll continue at the top for another five years. The threat of what he might do buys him time against defenders who don’t know whether to commit to him or not. Often they’re right to be afraid and his vision and ability to create space for his team mates must be set aside his hunger close to the line. At the top level he is still top drawer and the contrast with JJV Davies was noticeable. Davies is a fine player but he threw two straightforward passes into touch and handed Ireland back the initiative on both occasions.

If Wales’ hallmark of defence is blitzing then Ireland’s is the choke tackle. Both sides showed the rugby league antecedents of their defences by ceding ruck ball and creating a line across the pitch but Ireland were prepared to put a lot of effort into creating mauls. Here again Kidney’s coaching staff had done their homework and Ireland targeted Wales’ weaker ball carriers in particular. Missing Ryan Jones and Bradley Davies in the forwards, Wales occasionally used Coombs, an unfit Ian Evans and Matthews Rees to carry. Ireland pounced on this opportunity and created turnovers that they attacked purposefully off. A strip of Ian Evans created a counter attacking opportunity for Ireland and Conor Murray put Peter O’Mahony down the wing for a lot of yards.

O’Mahony is a puzzling footballer. He’s a good runner and handler but he’s not involved enough at all for my tastes. On a day when Donnchadh Ryan, Sean O’Brien, Cian Healy and Rory Best got through a mountain of work, O’Mahony departed on fifty minutes looking relatively fresh. You could see why Kidney wanted to experiment with him at openside last year; his skills are made for a linking flanker akin to Gleeson or Cabannes. He’s just not involved enough, particularly when compared to Tipuric who admittedly was fresh in the second half.

One of the reasons why Wales used the likes of the runners named above is that Jamie Roberts wasn’t fully fit. Roberts has been the scourge of Ireland in recent encounters and when he is on form he is a potent weapon. The flip side of being a big man with fast twitch fibres is that injuries are more likely to be incurred. Roberts has struggled with fitness all season and Ireland will be pleased to meet Wales now rather than in a few weeks’ time. Roberts will cause damage as the tournament progresses provided he stays injury free.

By half time Wales were twenty points down and the selection of Shingler was called into question in the minutes before the break when he ignored a five on four overlap against a doglegged disorganised Irish defence with the heavy artillery outside him. If the pass had gone a try was odds on and it would have been 20-10. Instead he took contact, Ryan slowed well and his misery was compounded when he gave away a penalty in front of the sticks that allowed Ireland a twenty point lead. Shingler’s selection showed again that glitches not apparent in club games can be exposed at international level.

Unfortunately Ireland were discovering that with Craig Gilroy and the young Ulster winger was struggling with his counterattacking and kicking. Time and again during the game Wales kicked to Gilroy and time and again he returned the ball to one of their runners in plenty of space or put it straight in. Stuart Lancaster will have looked at the tape and Farrell will target Gilroy should Kidney select him next week. I’d start Fitzgerald ahead of him which seems tough but the autumn and summer series are the time to give younger players experience. The Six Nations is Ireland’s priority.

Gilroy wasn’t the only member of the back three below form. Rob Kearney, normally imperious in the air, failed to win any of his duels and that stymied Ireland’s counterattacking game which is based on him reclaiming steeplers. With Ireland’s kicking game misfiring, the Welsh were able to gain a foothold in the second half and the arrival of Tipuric on 44 minutes looked tardy as the pace of Welsh attack increased noticeably with the trademark blue scrumcap on the pitch.

Fortunately Ireland’s tackling was heroic although Keith Earls’ positioning for Cuthbert’s try call his credentials as an international centre into question. Wales got their big men the ball in the second half when the power and pace of North and Cuthbert in particular was a potent reminder of the threat they pose. Ireland may have caught Wales at the best stage of the tournament as they have some quality players to reintroduce and other proven campaigners who will benefit from the game time.

From Ireland’s point of view, the coaching staff can take a bow for some tactical calls which bore fruit and sets them up for a tilt at the title. It’s a decade since Wales have lost more than one game in the Six Nations in Cardiff and England will not relish their trip to the Millenium. A Sunday kick off is less craic for fans but the extra day’s rest will be appreciated by an Ireland team that should have a clean bill of health for England’s visit. The game was played at a ferocious pace which will stand to the team and Ireland’s leadership core is in good form.

All told, it was a cracking opening weekend and Italy’s victory against France in Rome is a harbinger of things to come in the Six Nations. The Celtic nations’ decision to allow the Italians compete in the RaboDirect Pro 12 is to be applauded. Zebre are still struggling to find an identity but the transfer of the franchise to Rome would help grow the game in a populous and wealthy nation. The Mole opined last year that Italy will win a Six Nations before 2020 and results like Sunday’s make that notion seem less fanciful. The sound of a modern coliseum bom-bom-ba-bomming their way through one of the great anthems is just another reason to cherish a venerable tournament that still has it in spades.

Leo Cullen has been the rock on which Leinster’s success of recent times has been built, but he can’t go on forever. It’s natural that people are discussing his future, given that he turned 35 the other day. His toughness and disruption at the breakdown make him a sponge for punishment and cheap shots, but he’s hardly an innocent on the pitch himself.

Much has been written over the last few weeks on the subject of locks in Ireland, most of it orbiting around the leaked news that Mike McCarthy will be playing his rugby in Leinster for the next three seasons.

We’ve covered some of this ground before in previous articles on Tighthead Locks and Brad Thorn Coming To Leinster but the media furore around the McCarthy signing and the ongoing instability of the lock position in Leinster is what makes it worth looking at again.

Since that Brad Thorn article was written in March of this year – about nine months ago – the legendary Kiwi has come and gone [with a Heineken Cup winner’s medal as a souvenir]; Damien ‘Big’ Browne received another year-long deal; Tom Denton and Quinn Roux have arrived from Leeds Carnegie and Western Stormers respectively; Mike McCarthy has, in the absence of Paul O’Connell and the space of six weeks, broken into the Irish side and signed up for Leinster for three years from June 2013 to June 2016; Mark Flanagan has played a whopping six minutes of rugby; and Devin Toner seems to have lost the confidence of the coaching staff.  Flux hardly covers it.

All Of Our Institutions Have Let Us Down – The Church, The Banks, The Leinster Academy …

On the subject of Leinster locks, the most salient fact is that there was an institutional failure to produce a second row good enough to play regularly for the province between Bob Casey [born mid-1978] and Devin Toner [born mid-1986]. That’s eight years, which is a long time by anybody’s standards.

Cullen has togged out in 186 games for Leinster, and started 150+ of them. Tall trees cast long shadows. Heap big wisdom there, Cochise.

Leinster have been incredibly well served by Leo Cullen [currently in his thirteenth season with the club, not including the two years he spent at Leicester between June 2005 and June 2007] and Big Mal O’Kelly [who did thirteen seasons at the province as well, and had two seasons right at the start of his career, when the professional era was in its infancy, with London Irish]. Between them they’ve played well over 360 games for the province, and they’ve cast a long shadow under which prospective candidates have found it difficult to grow … but you can’t blame players for being good and not wanting to give up the jersey.

Mal O’Kelly won 92 caps for Ireland and appeared for Leinster 183 times in his thirteen seasons with the province; just like John Hayes at Munster, he has left some mighty big shoes to fill.

In O’Kelly’s last season [2009-10, as a 35 year old], he played 22 games for Leinster, starting 13 of them. He was a significant contributor right until the end of his career, as befits a player who was voted into the Irish Team of the Decade by his IRUPA peers; that he didn’t become Irish rugby’s first centurion was somewhat unlucky.

In Brian O’Driscoll’s recently broadcast HSBC-sponsored interview [they also sponsor Mexican drug-dealers], he stated that Leo Cullen was the best captain and the finest leader of men he had ever played with:

“He [Cullen] marries what he does on the pitch with what he says and … the cool, calm collected way he delivers the message.” 

Considering that O’Driscoll has played with Keith Wood, Martin Johnson, Scott Quinnell, Paul O’Connell and Lawrence “Buy My Book” Dallaglio, that’s high praise indeed. Cullen probably doesn’t have the number of test caps that he should have, but his Irish career spanned almost a decade and, lest it go unsaid, he captained Ireland on two occasions in RWC 2011.

It’s incredibly difficult to prosper or gain recognition when there’s an All-Decade player ahead of you, be it at club or country. In a position-related case, as great [and the word is used advisedly] a player as Simon “Give Us A Hug Shawsy” Shaw only came into his own for England and the Lions [sorry, THE LIONS] once Martin Johnson retired.

Lost Prospects

With a limited number of professional teams in Ireland, and the difficulty that persists in fighting your way into the national side from a team outside the four provinces, players who can’t force their way into match-day squads with their home province when they’re relatively young [let's take a limit of 24 years old] can get lost in the wash.

Lads like Des Dillon [born 1980] who, like Cullen, was an outstanding schools No8 but was certainly physically big enough to play in the second row, and “Man Mountain” Aidan Kearney [born 1979] had the size and the strength to be pro second rows, but for a number of reasons didn’t pan out. An awful lot of that was due to toughness and attitude [or lack of it]; some of it was down to the professional game in Ireland still searching for the right structures to support player development and retention; and some of it was due to mismanagement in the middle of the last decade, which saw four different coaches in four years in Leinster between the 2002-03 season and the 2005-06 season.

Outside of two [brief] stints with his home province, David Gannon has played for Connacht, the Exeter Chiefs and the Southland Stags in New Zealand – his commitment to the game and to his teams has been unflinching. Unfortunately, being a standout at underage level doesn’t always mean you’ll be a standout in the pro game, even with as good an attitude as Gannon has shown. Nonetheless, he’s made a solid pro career for himself and is a player for whom The Mole has a lot of time.

In the last decade – dating back to Gannon’s first U21 Six Nations season in 2002-03, when he was a year underage – there has only been one season in which Leinster haven’t supplied a starting second row to the Irish U21/U20 team in the Junior Six Nations [the age-grade dropped one year after the 2005-06 season]: that was in 2004-05, when the second row was composed of Ulster’s Lewis Stevenson and Ryan Caldwell and Munster’s Mark Melbourne.

• Gannon started all ten games in the 2003 and 2004 tournaments;
• Devin Toner [currently Leinster contracted] started 5 out of 5 in 2006;
• Conor McInerney [Leinster Academy graduate] made 5 starts out of 5 in the Grand Slamming 2007 team [but unfortunately had to retire due to injury after a stint with the Ospreys];
• Eoin Sheriff [Leinster Academy graduate] made 5 starts from 5 in 2008, and is now contracted to Saracens;
• Ciaran Ruddock [Leinster Academy graduate] made 5 of 5 starts, and Mark Flanagan [currently Leinster contracted] started 2 of 5 in 2009;
• Ben Marshall [currently in his final year in the Leinster Academy] made 5 starts out of 5 in 2010;
• Mick Kearney [now contracted to Connacht] started 4 of 5 in 2011; and
• Tadhg Beirne [currently in his first year in the Leinster Academy] started 1 of 5 in 2012, but featured prominently in JWC 2012.

Looking at the list above, it’s clear that it’s not as though Leinster haven’t been bringing second rows into and through the academy; it’s just that no outstanding candidate has yet emerged. Second row is a position which at the top end demands massive levels of strength and mental toughness [which are difficult to find in combination in lads in their teens and early twenties] combined with extreme size [197cm+ tall, 110kg+ in weight] and athleticism. It hardly needs saying, but there’s not a ton of these lads knocking about in Ireland. There’s also a limited amount any academy program can do for a player who doesn’t have the natural stature to tape his ears up and play in the row: anybody can get stronger and heavier from lifting weights, but there’s no exercise that’s going to make you taller … even if you hang out of the bannisters like Peter Shilton.

The Pelous Fund

Clone the man, teach him English.

So if you get a teenager who comes knocking at your door standing 200cm tall and weighing in at 115kg, who’s extremely competitive, highly athletic, physically mature, as strong as a professional athlete several years his senior and who has been playing rugby for a decade or more, it’s a bit of a rarity.

You can give those lads a roll of insulation tape and lob them into pro rugby before their twenty-first birthday party, because they’re once in a generation players. Otherwise, learning on the job at the pointy end of European rugby won’t cut it for clubs who want to win trophies. In big clubs and big tournaments, it’s a position for grown men or absolutely exceptional young internationals.

Look at the roll-call of the last ten HEC-winning second-row partnerships:

• 2011-12 [Leinster]: Cullen [34] & Thorn [37]
• 2010-11 [Leinster]: Cullen [33] & Hines [34]
• 2009-10 [Toulouse]: Albacete [29] & Millo Chluski [27]
• 2008-09 [Leinster]: Cullen [31] & O’Kelly [34]
• 2007-08 [Munster]: O’Connell [28] & O’Callaghan [29]
• 2006-07 [London Wasps]: Shaw [33] and Palmer [28]
• 2005-06 [Munster]: O’Connell [26] & O’Callaghan [27]
• 2004-05 [Toulouse] Pelous [31] & Millo-Chluski [22]
• 2003-04 [London Wasps]: Shaw [29] & Birkett [24]
• 2002-03 [Toulouse]: Pelous [29] & Gerard [25]

The average age of HEC-winning second rows over the last decade is 29.5. That tells its own story. The big outliers are Thorn [37, Leinster 2011-12] and Millo-Chluski [22, Toulouse 2004-05].

When a Fabien Pelous [who debuted for France as a 21 year old] or a Paul O’Connell [who played for Ireland as a 22 year old] or a Martin Johnson [who started for England as a 22 year old] comes along and starts bashing everybody up during training, he becomes the centrepiece of your team for a decade. Players like that are born, not made.

If, by throwing money at the problem, you could make a Fabien Pelous in an academy, any self-respecting CEO would just stick an extra fiver on every ticket for the season and tell the fans it was a Pelous fund – and the fans would gladly pay it. However, you can’t do that. To a large extent, you just have to cross your fingers and hope that the next genetic lottery winner in Ireland comes along … and he already did, to Ravenhill. It’s Iain Henderson.

Big Dev, Big Target

The age profile of second rows is one of the reasons why people who say things like “this is a make-or-break season for Toner” are, in The Mole’s opinion, way off. What – are Leinster going to cut him? He’s 26 now, and has over 110 Leinster games under his belt – why would you let him go now when you’ve spent seven years training him up? It hasn’t been a one-way street either; Toner has delivered plenty of good performances over the last four seasons. Maybe he’ll never be an Ireland regular, but he’s only coming into his second row prime.

Dev Toner has been a contributor in each of Leinster’s Heineken Cup wins. He started four and came off the bench in another two in 2008-09; started two and came off the bench in four in 2010-11, and started three and came off the bench in five in 2011-12. For a 26 year old second row, he’s got a good body of work behind him, with 113 appearances for Leinster. Toner comes in for an awful of criticism, especially from fans of the other provinces. It’s odd: it’s not like he’s getting a load of easy test caps, or has had a particularly easy run at his home province; nor is he a niggly presence on the field. Where’s the beef? Why all the Toner-hate?

What was Mike McCarthy doing in 2007-08, when he was the same age as Toner currently is now? He was playing on the blindside for Connacht and only starting about half their Magners League games. Donnacha Ryan only made his first Heineken Cup start two months before his 27th birthday [against London Irish, in October 2010], was promptly dropped, ended up playing the second half of the season on the flank [including both Magners League semi-final and final] and didn’t start another HEC game for more than a year. Judge those two players on their respective seasons as 26 year olds and you wouldn’t imagine that they’d be Ireland’s starting second rows for the 2013 Six Nations.

Measuring Irish second rows against Paul O’Connell’s standard is natural, in that he has set the standard for lock play in Britain and Ireland since Martin Johnson’s retirement. That might seem to overstate the case, but the basis of the argument is that he started all six Lions tests of the 2005 NZ tour and the 2009 SA tour [and indeed was tour captain of the latter]. In between those tours he won two Heineken Cups for Munster and a Grand Slam for Ireland. His credentials as the best northern hemisphere second row of his generation are close to unquestionable.

However, it’s also a standard that few will ever hit, and you can still be a more than competent test player without being as good as O’Connell.

Players become more competitive as they get older; when you’re young, even if you’re totally focused on your sport – and few youngsters are that single-minded – there’s always another match. Indeed, there seems to be no end of matches stretching out in front of you. Winning every collision, dragging yourself off the turf after every breakdown, never letting somebody get one over you, seeing off young pretenders: those are the competitive instincts that both ensure players have long careers and are exacerbated as they hit their prime and come down the stretch towards retirement. A fine example would be Leo Cullen who, though he has worn an awful lot of tread off his tires and isn’t as athletic as he was in his late 20s, is not just wiser, but probably more competitive and more bellicose at this stage of his career than he ever was in the past.

The challenge for Toner is to become more of an authoritative figure on the pitch; this will always be difficult when he’s in Cullen’s [figurative] shadow. Cullen is the most successful leader in the history of the province and is the standing captain; people who think that Toner is going to push him out of the starting XV by dint of form don’t really understand the dynamics of a team. For example, Donnacha Ryan is playing great stuff at the moment, but where did he end up playing when Paul O’Connell came out of the blue to play a couple of HEC matches in October, having been out for six months and nowhere near form or fitness? He found himself on the blindside.

While Leinster have experimented with Toner scrummaging behind the tighthead – and it hasn’t always been the disaster it has been written up as [see Leinster’s second half destruction of the Llanelli scrum in the HEC fixture in Parc y Scarlets] – Cullen and Toner together is not a great partnership; they’re too similar in their strengths and their weaknesses, and neither are explosive, hard-charging contact kings. A truer test of Toner’s viability as a Leinster first-string second row will come whenever Leo Cullen retires.

Mark Flanagan

Flanagan is perhaps the biggest unknown in the Leinster squad. Parachuted into a strong Leinster team at the last moment to replace an ill Damien Browne for a January 2012 game against Cardiff, he made an eye-catching contribution with a couple of long midfield breakaways. It’s not really what you expect to see from second rows, and while the ability to motor with the ball in hand is a massive plus for any rugby player, work-rate, scrummaging and collision-winning are the bread and butter of your day in the front five.

Mark Flanagan hits up the Cardiff defensive line a year ago in the Pro12. A long term back injury has kept him out of contention for the first half of the 2012-13 season, and it remains to be seen whether he can translate athletic potential into regular performance [image courtesy of Sportsfile/Brendan Moran].

We’ve written before that as a rugby player Flanagan is a work in progress, having only taken up the sport as a 16 year old. His athleticism is the strongest aspect of his game and saw him make an impact for both Ireland U18s Youths and Ireland U20s [2009] within just a few years of swapping his Westmeath minors jersey for Leinster blue. However, in order to progress he needs games and a run without injury interruptions, and it’s difficult to see where these games are going to come from this season. The B&I Cup fixtures in January will probably come too early for him, and with no Leinster second rows involved in the Irish set-up and Leinster fighting for a top-four spot in the league, it will be difficult for him to break into the team for the Pro12 games in February and March during the Six Nations.

Ben Marshall

In his third and final year in the Leinster Academy, St Andrews and Old Belvedere product Marshall has performed well in the four games he has played for the senior team this season [he was pretty much Leinster’s lone bright spark in the hammering they took from Connacht at the Sportsgrounds and had a cracking outing against the same opposition in the RDS] and he’s got a competitive streak that, while not yet a hard edge, is an encouraging sign for his future. There’s a level of physical and mental toughness that’s a necessity to play in the front five, and you can’t fake it.

Ben Marshall has taken every chance offered to him in his final year in the Leinster Academy, and looks certain to have snared a senior contract for next season. It’s important to be able to contribute to the senior side in the final year of the academy; there’s no shortage of players who have graduated from the Leinster academy but haven’t earned contracts afterwards. [Photo Credit: Sportsfile_Brendan Moran]

Marshall has come a little under the radar for most, including Leinster fans. St Andrews isn’t a particularly renowned rugby school [although Munster’s Felix Jones is also a recent graduate], and in recent years, talented schools players have typically impacted on the rugby public’s mind with a showcase performance in a televised final. However, sans cup glory, he nevertheless emerged through the tried route to the Leinster Academy of representing Ireland as a starter at U18 Schools and U20 level. Despite a couple of serious injuries keeping him off the pitch for the second year of his stint, he has been highly rated by Leinster staff since his arrival at the team, and his recent outing against Connacht [his first start in the second row, having worn the No6 jersey in previous run-ons] was an impressive first effort that featured a high work-rate, a number of strong carries and some aggressive clearing out at ruck-time.

Tighthead Locks [Redux]

When Brad Thorn was contracted by Leinster earlier this year for the business end of the 2011-12 season, a few revealing thoughts from the Leinster backroom staff made their way into the national media. By explaining the impact of a tighthead scrummaging lock, there was certainly something of an effort to swing public opinion, but it was also genuinely reflective of the thinking and experiences of the three chief coaches, Schmidt, Gibbes and Feek.

The casual reader may not remember that Jono Gibbes was actually in place for two full seasons before Schmidt arrived at the province. He was just 31 years old when he arrived in Leinster from Waikato in the summer of 2008; it was his first job since retiring as a player. In his playing prime, Gibbes lacked the top-end pace and mobility to be a long-term All Black flanker [though that’s not to say that he wouldn’t have excelled in a number of other teams] and he also suffered from just being a bit too short to be a top-flight lock. He fell between stools, but he was still a bull of a forward at test level.

Greg Feek arrived shortly after Schmidt, contracted by Leinster to ensure that the battering their scrum had taken in the 2009-10 Heineken Cup semi-final against Toulouse wouldn’t happen again. His reputation has only increased over the last couple of seasons, which has led to changes in his job description.

With Feek assuming more responsibility in the Leinster set-up, and thus becoming a more central figure in the coaching staff, one of the tenets of the current Leinster forwards regime is that there are two distinct positions in the second row, and that the emphasis swings on the scrum, rather than the line-out or restarts.

‘Shrugging off’ hardly does it justice. Mike McCarthy throws Pumas openside Juan Leguizamon away in the recent November international between Ireland and Argentina. McCarthy will bring a ball-carrying and hitting power that Leinster have been missing in the second row this season.

Mike “Mick” McCarthy 

The signing of McCarthy, fresh off the back of a Man of the Match performance against South Africa, the most physical pack in world rugby, ticks a lot of boxes for Leinster. If you’re going to test the mettle of a tighthead lock against any team in the world, it’d be against the Springboks; not only did McCarthy pass the test, he came through with flying colours.

This isn’t “Useless” Ed O’Donoghue getting a three-year deal on the back of an iffy, non-test performance for an Ireland XV vs New Zealand Maori; this is a guy who can get it done against the Boks and the Pumas.

Damien Browne is an honest, tough player who brings huge inert strength to the scrum, but there are serious limitations to his game: his 125kg frame is difficult to get up in the air at lineout or restart time, there isn’t a quick-twitch fibre in his body, he doesn’t offer a line-breaking threat with the ball in hand and he has limited mobility. McCarthy offers a big upgrade in a number of these areas, while allowing little fall-off at scrum-time. His Action Man style of play – big tackles, big carries, a running engine and a full load of aggression at the breakdown – will allow Leinster to play a wider variety of players beside him, because he brings so much to the table.

Quinn Roux

Quinn Roux has had little luck since arriving in Dublin, but while his experiences would seem to be an unfortunate echo of compatriot Steven Sykes’ time at the province, there are significant differences. Sykes struggled to fit in with the rest of the squad, and didn’t really adapt to life in Ireland particularly well; a series of niggling injuries kept him off the pitch and prompted questions about his attitude.

In contrast, Roux has made a good impression amongst fellow players and the coaching staff with his willingness to put himself about and the degree of power he brings to the table. Apparently the words “physical” and “physicality” occasionally get an outing when he comes up in conversation. However, he suffered a pretty horrific shoulder dislocation against Glasgow, which will massively limit his impact in what is a season-long contract. Leinster fans only got to see 108 competitive minutes out of him between a busted collarbone and the shoulder injury, so there’s not an awful lot of evidence on which to base judgment.

There are a number of issues to consider about Roux’s immediate and mid-term future: will Leinster extend his contract with him having played so little rugby? While silence has descended over the IRFU’s NIQ/NIE Player Protocol since it was announced this time last year, that’s not to say that it has ever been officially rescinded. If Leinster are only allowed spend one NIQ/NIE slot on a second row, is an unproven 22 year old the best bet?

Secondly, after a very unlucky introduction to Irish rugby, will Roux even be interested in sticking around if he is offered another contract? This is a [back to the Rumsfeld well] known unknown; it’s going to be an issue, but it’s impossible to predict the answer. Richardt Strauss had a very tough time in Ireland during his first season [2009-10] as a 23/24 year old – Michael Cheika simply wouldn’t pick him – but stuck it out and was a constant in Joe Schmidt’s first Heineken Cup winning team the following season. Robbie Diack arrived in Ulster as a 22 year old from the Western Stormers before the 2008-09 season, and has stayed around long enough – while becoming a rock solid member of Ulster’s squad, it should be said – to become Irish-qualified under the IRB’s residency rules.

Both of these players were young when they moved over and, unlikely as it may seem to you or I that rugby-obsessed South Africans in their very early 20s have the realism/cynicism to close a door on childhood dreams of playing for the Springboks in order to experience a different culture and [perhaps] play test rugby for a different nation, it’s not as though it hasn’t happened in the very recent past.

Three things are key to understanding Roux’s prospective future in Ireland: the emphasis on the scrummaging, cleaning out and general ‘enforcing’ aspect of the tighthead lock position in Leinster under Gibbes and Feek; the need to ‘get more Irish’, as IRFU requirements about non-Irish players become stricter and more prohibitive; and the constant need to introduce new players so that the squad doesn’t get old overnight.

Eben Etzebeth and Quinn Roux tower over some Western Province assistant coach who’s puffing himself up like a bullfrog. “Take a walk around my massive second row, bro.” That’s a nice flip-flops and socks combo you’ve got going on there Etzebeth, by the way.

With the arguable exception of Ulster’s Iain Henderson, there’s not an Irish-qualified second row in the five year age bracket around Roux who can match his power output, his bulk and his aggression at ruck time, three of the most important characteristics of a tighthead second row. His direct contemporaries – Leinster’s Ben Marshall and Munster’s Dave O’Callaghan and Brian Hayes, all of them born in 1990 and Irish U20 internationals in 2010 – certainly can’t, and nor can their predecessors Ciaran Ruddock, James Sandford and Mark Flanagan. Going back another year, we’ve seen nothing from Ian Nagle or Eoin Sheriff to suggest that they match up well either. Dave Nolan, their team-mate in the Irish U20s of 2008, looked to have the frame at 198cm/6’6” and 120kg/18st12lbs, but has been cripplingly unfortunate with injury. Roux has slimmed down from the 122kg he weighed at Western Province to a more manageable 117-118kg, but there simply aren’t many lads knocking around the streets and fields of this bonny isle who can compare with the steak-fed Akrikaaner monsters of the high veldt when it comes to being collossal brutes.

The acquisition of Mike McCarthy for a three-year period [and it’s worth remembering that Leinster approached the player two years ago, when his contract was last up for renewal with Connacht] indicates a degree of long-term planning that all the Nathan Hines and Brad Thorn signings in the world – brilliant though they were in the short term – can’t supply.

With McCarthy around and in the prime of his career, Roux wouldn’t be expected to step up immediately and shoulder the burden that Hines bore; he’d lighten McCarthy’s load in the Pro12, and hopefully would progress quickly enough to challenge for his position in a couple of seasons. The real pay-off will come if/when he becomes Irish qualified; at that stage, Leinster will have a 25 year old, 120kg Irish-South African tighthead second row in their squad for the next seven or eight years.

Highlight reels are always a bit suspect; they obviously only show you the good parts of a player’s game. On the other hand, there has to be good parts to show in the first place. So, with that healthy caveat out of the way, here’s Quinn Roux bashing into people for six and a half minutes:

Ground Control To Ginger Tom

The Tom Denton signing is a long-player and low risk; despite being English-born, he’s Irish qualified, after all. Leinster signed him from Leeds Carnegie [who are in the RFU Championship, and incidentally in Leinster’s pool in the British and Irish Cup this season] and the likelihood that he was raking in cash with both hands over there seems limited; it’d follow that he’s hardly costing Leinster huge wedge.

Tom Denton turns out for Leinster ‘A’ in the British and irish Cup against his old side, Leeds Carnegie. Denton is in his first year of a two year deal, and hasn’t made any significant impact yet. With that said, he’s got the frame for the job and he’s a hard-working player. The second half of the season should see him more familiar with Leinster’s patterns, and it will be interesting to see how he goes. [Image courtesy of Sportfile & Stephen McCarthy]

At 198cm/6’6” and 115kg/18st1lb, Denton is significantly bigger than those lads as well, and has the potential to get bigger and stronger still: Schmidt was quoted as impressed that he was “throwing some heavy tin around in the weights room” during preseason. Given that he came on to scrummage behind the tighthead against Ulster in Ravenhill [moving Devin Toner to the left of the pairing], you’d imagine that strength and size will continue to be a priority for him, even at the expense of a bit of mobility …

… which would essentially mean that he would become a statue. As those watching Leinster’s recent win in Edinburgh will have seen – particularly for WP Nel’s try – Denton is painfully one-paced. He makes Damian Browne look like Carlin Isles. He can’t even claim fatigue as the excuse behind being burnt by the Edinburgh tighthead; he had only been on the pitch for 16 mins.

A clear idea of what Leinster look for in their second row corps is beginning to emerge, and The Mole imagines that the coaching staff are hoping that Denton will become a like-for-like replacement for Damien Browne: a Pro12 level tighthead-scrummaging lock. He’ll need to get bigger, stronger and tougher en route: provide more shunt in the scrum, win more collisions [whether tackling or carrying], become an accomplished mauler and be far, far more aggressive at clearing out rucks. Four months of the season are played in wintry conditions, and a lack of pace in the front five can be accommodated on sticky tracks if you can compensate by dint of strength, size and aggression, but there’s a long way to go on all those counts for the Irish Yorkshireman. Denton is on a two-year deal, and by the end of next season, if he’s good enough to start games against the majority of Pro12 teams – with the exception of the likes of Ulster, Munster and the Ospreys – he’d be worth his place in the squad for a second contract.

Flux Capacitor

While The Mole has been reasonably optimistic about the prospects of those six players briefly profiled above, the pessimistic take – perhaps even the crux of the matter – is that there are question marks over every single one of them. McCarthy obviously has the fewest, but he’s never played for Leinster, and will have to adapt to new team-mates, a new environment, a different gameplan and new coaches; Toner has been around the Leinster set-up for seven seasons, but hasn’t yet graven his name irrevocably into the team sheet as contemporaries Sexton, Heaslip, Kearney, O’Brien etc. have done over the same period.

Flanagan has played incredibly little rugby over the last 12 months, and Marshall hasn’t yet graduated from the academy; having potential is better than not having it, but if called on next season to start 12-15 games, would they be capable of putting in strong, 80 minute showings all the way through? The behemoth Roux may or may not even be around next year, given the nature of his contract. Denton hasn’t hit the ground running, and has yet to have a signature moment [never mind game] in his seven outings for the senior team.

As big a question as any of these is the future of captain Leo Cullen. In his absences over the last two seasons, Jamie Heaslip, Shane Jennings and Rhys Ruddock have captained the team on a number of occasions [with Devin Toner and Kev McLaughlin also having led them out], but replacing Cullen’s leadership will be a significant task. Players can grow into the captaincy, but there’s little doubt that when the big Wicklow man steps aside – whether that’s at the end of this season, at the end of next season, or possibly even in two years’ time – Leinster will lose more than the player.

The Munster coaching ticket. Bitterness not pictured.

I was going write something about Eddie O’Sullivan being overlooked for the Connacht post but Brendan Fanning did it this morning already. If Pat Lam is selected as Connacht coach then Ireland’s provinces will have four Kiwis at the helm. For a union so staunchly opposed to imported players, even if they have started families here, the IRFU’s approach to foreign coaches seems very inconsistent.

Two of those Kiwi coaches are having very different experiences in Ireland this season. Rob Penney arrived with multiple domestic successes but failed to lead the Baby Blacks to another world title in the summer of 2012. He joined forces with Axel Foley, himself overlooked for the top role with his native province, and brought Simon Mannix along with him.

Mark Anscombe struggled to match that success while at Auckland, where he was Pat Lam’s predecessor, but has been around the block as a coach, and coached his vintage of Baby Blacks to victory in 2011. Anscombe strikes the Mole as a ‘bottom up’ type of coach and an older style Kiwi, reminiscent of many of the men who led AIL clubs in the early and mid-90s. Indeed, Anscombe coached at Old Wesley during the 90s. Ulster’s early season training was rumoured to have concentrated heavily on fitness and they compete hungrily at every breakdown. Their body positions, particularly in mauls, suggested hours of physical preparation and contact drills. By contrast, Penney is a ‘top down’ coach who is determined to create a particular style of play in his squad even if it is at odds with what has gone before. He talks a lot about understanding the game and decision making.

Anscombe has different material to work with than Penney. Johan Muller, Ruan Pienaar and John Afoa all have RWC winner’s medals. To put that in perspective, only players from 2003 onwards are likely to be playing this season and of that English squad that won, very few are still active (Jonny Wilkinson, Mike Tindall and Iain Balshaw are the only ones that spring to mind). From that select pool of 60-something players, Ulster have three. It’s quite a back bone of experience and ability.

Ulster’s age profile is very good and it’s interesting to see the performance of two ‘older heads’ in particular this season. Paddy Wallace and Andrew Trimble face stiff competition from Luke Marshall and Craig Gilroy for starting spots and this competition has benefitted Ulster with the older men playing out of their comfort zone in order to keep their place. The Mole has long been a Wallace fan and is delighted that an extended run in the same position has brought out the best from one of the most talented footballers of his generation.

The necessity of when to play young players and provide them with experience is a subject that’s fascinated me this season. There is no doubt that the Heineken Cup is the highest level of the club game in the Northern Hemisphere. It makes sense, therefore, to pick your best team as it is a priority, particularly with no relegation from the Rabo Pro 12. For the national team the priority is the Six Nations. The summer tour and November series provide an opportunity for the coaching staff to blood young talent. Should Gilroy and Marshall have started for Ireland during November? Absolutely. Should they start ahead of Trimble and Wallace for Ulster? I’d start Wallace ahead of Marshall in every big game on the evidence of the season so far while Tommy Bowe’s injury makes Anscombe’s decision about his wingers much easier.

The performance of players that would not have been considered central at the start of the season has been a feature of Ulster’s play and none more so than Nick Williams whose recruitment was met with an air of disbelief in many quarters. The big man has been reborn at Ravenhill and is a different player to the one that spent most of his Munster career playing for Dolphin when he was fit.

Anscombe’s team is playing with confidence, that elusive ingredient that makes all the difference. Their style of play is physical with Ruan Pienaar pulling the strings and Paddy Wallace adding creativity in the midfield. Anscombe seems to have been charged with the role of on-pitch coaching with Jonny Bell and Neil Doak as his assistants. Recruitment and other managerial issues that eat into pitch time are handled by the King of Ravers, qualified solicitor Davy Humphreys. As an aside, see if you can find Humphreys’ job listed on the Ulster website. I couldn’t, the role was created specifically for him and he runs the show.

In contrast, Munster looked bereft of confidence against Cardiff. Rob Penney is constantly positive while his coaching partner Foley famously noted “bitterness and pride” as his primary incentives in a storied Munster career. The body language in the booth did not look good as Munster shovelled the ball from touchline to touchline without looking like they had a belief in what they were doing or how it would be ultimately effective. The Cardiff Blues, with Josh Navidi again outshining Sam Warburton in the back row, shrugged off the insipidity that has marked much of their season and saw Wexford man Robin Copeland get the game winning try. For the second time in a row Munster lost at Musgrave Park and the lack of atmosphere in Cork contrasted with the fervent arena of Ravenhill. Rhys Patchell seems to have added some confidence to the Blues and Warren Gatland must be watching his development with interest.

We wrote about the challenges that faced the yet to be appointed Munster coach in April last year and noted that managing Ronan O’Gara’s exit from the stage would be one of them. Ol’ Red Cheeks is looking at contract negotiations after Round 6 of the Heineken Cup which seems to indicate that his Irish deal will not be renewed and the matter is in Munster’s hands. With Paul O’Connell absent, Munster have been denied a significant leadership presence, particularly when compared to the wealth of experience in the Ulster squad. An unhappy O’Gara now shoulders the burden of place kicking, seniority, contract negotiations and being asked to play a game he’s not suited for and doesn’t believe in. All yours Radge.

Where that leaves the respective seasons remains to be played out but Ulster’s situation is far more positive and a Heineken Cup final in Dublin offers them their best chance of victory to date. They are playing with an intensity that Munster lack at the moment. Penney referred to “errors” as the reason for the defeat against Cardiff. You can quantify errors so it’s a reasonable response but Munster fans’ must be growing impatient with reason and wishing that their team would run through the routine once more from the top, with feeling.

The structure of the Rabo Pro12 payoffs means that a top two place is almost essential to success as it is extremely difficult to win consecutive games against the form league teams away from home. Ulster have all but booked one of those spots with a cluster of teams gunning for second place. Leinster look the most likely to nail it down and Ulster’s biggest worries remain the battle on two fronts and where best to employ Ruan Pienaar. They’re a good sort of problems to have.

P.S. Ulster have introduced my favourite chant of the season. One man asks the crowd to give him a ‘U’, then an ‘L’, then an ‘S’….until give me an ‘R’, give me an ‘R’, give me an ‘R’, give me an ‘R’ – ULSTERRRRRR! Brilliant. Note: Thanks to those who pointed out that this isn’t new. Still my favourite chant of the season.

Dylan Hartley and Rory Best went head to head last Friday night and there was only one – LIONS LIONS LIONS LIONS LIONS LIONS LIONS LIONS LIONS LIONS

The Mole was recently moved to speak out in defense of Sky Sports in a social situation. Suffice it to say that said defense went down just about as well as Randy Marsh’s appearance on Wheel of Fortune. Ohhhhhhhh. “Naggers”.

While being no fan of the Dirty Digger, my dislike for the dirt-raking media tycoon has always been tempered by the fact that Sky Sports do a brilliant job with the rugby at their disposal [and their boxing magazine show, Ringside, is consistently good – another ‘aye’ in their favour ]. You only have to compare the calibre of analysts ‘in the van’ to note the yawning gap between Sky’s coverage and that of RTE:

Sky: Dean Ryan breaks down the attacking tics of Northampton replacement outhalf Stephen Myler within a couple of minutes of his arrival on the pitch, noting how he tends to drift wide and leave a pop off his right elbow for a man coming inside on a switch, and comparing it to the previous roll-around ploys that Ryan Lamb – the man he replaced in the No10 jersey – favoured in the first half. 

RTE: Mark McDermott looks surprised that he’s on, points out that somebody passes to somebody else, spells out “T-R-Y”, is interrupted by Tom McGurk cutting to commercial when he’s on “R”. 

However, even my beloved Sky Sports rugby-covering types aren’t beyond criticism.

Let’s Take A Look At The Lions Index … Let’s F*cking Not

I get that there’s a commercial imperative to hype an end-of-season tour to which they own exclusive rights, and one in which so many important commercial entities have invested so much sponsorship money. I get that it has the potential to produce enormous revenues for all the corporations involved, especially those who have pumped in money at this early stage, but that those profits are also reliant on popular opinion and uptake. I get that. It’s not that I don’t understand it, it’s just that it’s already as irritating as a blue-arsed fly.

Their constant shilling of the Lions tour has already broken through the floodgates in Mole Towers, and the ground floor is awash with bolters.

If you were to believe the Sky hype, every game they broadcast has the potential to swing Warren Gatland’s mind in favour of some heretofore unacknowledged tyro; it doesn’t matter if it’s in the Premiership, the Amlin Challenge Cup or the Heineken Cup. If it’s on Sky, it’s a Lions-influencing swing vote. Even if it’s the fringest of fringe contenders going toe-to-toe, the Lions will get a mention.

However, once in a while you do get one of these head-to-head match-ups between legitimate title challengers, and such was the case the other night when Ulster hooker Rory Best [62 Irish caps] went head-to-head with Northampton’s Dylan Hartley [42 English caps]. There was only one winner.

You Fairly Ruffled My Savoir Faire There Dean, My Good Man

Not even Hartley’s best mate could make a claim for him avoiding embarrassment, never mind achieving parity. With Northampton 6-20 down and fifteen minutes left on the clock, the Saints hooker let his frustration get the better of him – frustration that his side hadn’t performed in a make-or-break European game, frustration that they were getting badly beaten and manhandled in front of a big home crowd, and frustration that his opposition number had him in his pocket. An innocuous post-tackle tangle on the deck turned nasty when Hartley landed a couple of unprovoked elbows to the face of Best who, in yet another testimony to his toughness, was remarkably unphased by the whole schemozzle.

Hartley’s cheapshots are hardly news at this stage of his career – ask Sir Rutchie – but it does once again throw the spotlight on a player who, at the very sharp end of the game, isn’t up to it mentally.

We previously compared him very unfavourably to Steve ‘Thomo’ Thompson and f*ck it [polishes fingernails on lapel] we were absolutely spot on then … and remain so now. Modesty shmodesty! In that great phrase of “Callous” Mark Calaway*, he’s “phony tough”. When the going gets tough, Dylan Hartley doesn’t get going; nah, instead he cracks mentally and either goes into his shell or does something that a coherent person knows is only going to hurt his team.

To paraphrase the great Billy Joel [The MOR Springsteen It’s Not Cool To Like © as we call him in Mole Towers], I’m sure he has some cosmic rationale, but he cannot handle PREHSHAAAHHH.

Dig that Joel. Pointed, but smooooove.

* ‘Callous’ Mark Calaway was the first ring-name of the WWF/E’s The Undertaker