6 Nations

Firstly congrats to wales on a deserved grand slam. While they never really matched their world cup performances they didnt need to in this very average tournament(this years).

The refereeing in this years tournament was of an even lower standard tho which is most worrying for the game. Alain rolland for 1 seems to have lost the plot altogether and the rest arent far behind.

On the subject of the irish teams performance, as borders already said, hook was bang on in his assessment after game. im not going to repeat what they already said a new progressive solution needs to be found for this problem as the current one appears to be to ignore it and lay the blame at the international team managers feet.

I asked the question to a group of about 10 lads in the pub last eve after the game for them to name 5 irish tight head props playing top level rugby regulary atm and all struggled. While u can argue that we dont need 5 it is a huge concern going forward. Only 2 of the 4 irish provinces start an irish qualified th in their big games and loughney only got his chance because of injury. The player most consider no 2 to ross is third choice at leinster which makes a mockery of Irelands player management strategy.
So we have Ross, Hagen, Loughney, Andress, Archer and Buckley currently getting games at a top level in th position. After that we have tim and dave ryan playing in italy and some prospects in the Leinster and Munster acadamies(dont kno about ulster).
Of those named above we know that buckley isnt up to it and archer is struggling to find his feet at Hec and against top pro12 teams. I havent a clue how good Andress is but he is playing in a league that emphasises scrummaging and appears to be surviving. I rate Loughney highly for the same reasons as i rate archer lowly(he has shown a canny ability to adapt and survive under serious pressure) and Hagen is suffering because of a poor decision he made when decision should have been mde for him (player management strategy). How munster, leinster and ulster were allowed to sign foreign th props when Hagen was available makes the current strategy laughable. Whatever about leinster, Munster and Leinster starting niqs while hagen plays B+i cup on easter weekend highlights how far off the mark the irfu are on this matter.
While many of the rule changes made in recent years imo bring the game closer to league than union yesterday we were reminded of the futility of ignoring the games basics. Hopefully we learn from that.
Imo the irfu should scrap the BS anounced earlier in the season and replace it with a simpler rule which should simply state that every niq starting a fixture should have an iq playing in same position on bench. In addition the niq allocation should be reduced to 3 with 2 project players also allowed.
I think this would allow the provinces to continue to be competitive and successful while helping to address deficiencies in International setup.
Whatever happens in future i hope we never witness a day like yesterdy again.

Congratulations to Wales they took care of everyone place before them. It will still take some convincing that this is one of the great Welsh sides. They are young so there is time to prove that and their trip to Oz and then their date against the AB later in the year will be a better gauge of where they are.

What can be said about Ireland? They will need to get used to the 3/4 position in the 6 Nations table because on the evidence of yesterday's display that will be the best they can hope for over next few years. England may finally be on the up, Wales are young so you would expect them only to improve and you would expect the French to get their act together at some point soon. Ireland will be thankful for Scotland and Italy and even they will present challenges if Ireland cannot sort out their scrummaging among other things.

I imagine we'll be hearing things like "a team doesn't just get bad overnight." Well that's not the case here. Really fearful about what could happen in NZ in June.

i agree rogue and i think that is down to the professional culture developing in this country of club before country as opposed to whats developing in wales where culture is definately country before club.

This is not unusual in sport and all you have to do is look across the pond to england in soccer and the strength of premier league clubs compared to international team and then look at germany for comparison.We as a rugby nation are very parochial and our prvinces mean a huge amount to us. I dont think any province supporter would sacrifice their provinces chance of continued success for the good of the national team. thats just the way it is. Munster doing well and remaining at the top tier of european rugby is hugely important to me as is the continued development and improvement of connacht. of course id like the national team to do well but find myself worrying about injuries to key players during the 6 nations knowing the business end of the club season has yet to come. i know that im far from alone in those thoughts.

The irfu for their part also, by their actions or lack of, endorse the province over national team attitude. as i said earlier munster will play ulster i hec qtrs and both starting ths will be niq. if their attitude was genuine in its support of the national team the starting ths for munster would be ross, ulster- andress, leinster- hagen and connacht- loughney(for example purposes only and based on home province).
if this was the case then kidney of any other national coach would have genuine choice in the selecton process and not be forced to pick court on the bench as hes only available prop getting province game time. the same could be said for lh but situation a bit better here.

That said im very happy with bj botha starting for munster as im sure all ulster fans are with afoa so my guess is that nothing or very little will change because noone really wants it to.

Wales are an interesting case. The regions have not caught on with the fans too a great extent and they've tasted very little success in the HEC so it's almost by default that they chose country over club. With the recent exodus that wouldn't be changing soon.

It will be interesting to see how Wales do over the next couple of seasons. Will having the number of front line players off to England and France hurt them or will it actually be a blessing in disguise? The cash strapped regions will not be able to bring in many foreign players so the young Welsh talent will be given plenty of game time in the Rabo and Europe.

I think after Saturday a few might want things to change, never before in the professional era have we had to bring someone on in a key position who was so comprehensively out of their depth at international level. Don't blame Court, it was a horrific situation to be thrown into.

In other times we could say, oh the style of play doesn't suit us, the coach is the problem and so on, we didn't get the break on the day but last Saturday Ireland were absolutely annhialated and laughed at in front of the watching rugby world and that will force all parties to evaluate what we want from our provinces.

Ultimately i've read that 3rd in the 6 nations is bigger in terms of revenue for the IRFU than 3 Irish sides in the semi of the Heineken, 2 in the final and the other winning the Challenge Cup so the IRFU need to take a firm stance to protect the national side. Ultimately the provinces are becoming much more self-sufficient but won't survive as top quality outfits without the financial backing on the union, the IRFU need to show the balls now to make a serious move on the issue. As usual I expect them to fudge the issue until the next crisis emerges. For all the credit they get there is a touch of the FAI to some of the stuff that has been allowed happen by the IRFU in the past 5 years or so as for the group that approve player signings the less said the better.

However, it is difficult situation to change now that the IRFU have dug this hole for themselves. Botha's signing has been the main catalyst in moving Munster back into being serious contenders in Europe as their scrum is now a solid unit and in some instances an offensive weapon where when Buckley was there Munster fans would cringe at the thought of a scrum. If he left at the end of the season Munster would most likely not get out of their group next season and the development of other players would obviously take a hit playing with such a poor scrum. Similarly with Afoa at Ulster. Provincial supporters would be up in arms.

I'm sure most of us in Connacht hope that White can have a similar type of effect at Connacht and from our point of view he looks an excellent signing but where is the thinking from the IRFU with the merry go round that developed with White and Hagan? I know Ross was gone during the 6n but if there was faith in Hagan he should be trused for Rabo games. White is a fine player but who sanctioned that signing after Leinster had already brought Hagan east? I'd say most Connacht fans would prefer if Jamie Hagan had stayed and took on the mantle of cornerstone of our pack for another couple of seasons and then moved on to challenge Ross at Leinster if he wanted.

No matter what is done you will see the one-eyed provincial fans saying oh we needed such and such as back up. Oh we needed to play him against Aironi because we couldn't trust the other lad yet, he needs more time to develop. We needed to play a 25 times capped Springbok prop for 70+ minutes against Connacht academy players because he needed gametime. Same with us playing the likes of Rodney Ah You last Wednesday, including Dylan Rodgers in squads regularly, no offence but these lads are solving no problem for Connacht either short term or long term. White should be the only NIQ prop on our books next year.

The IRFU advertised for the newly established role of high performance scrum coach, just days after Ireland's scrummaging skills were exposed in a 30-9 Six Nations defeat by England.

The job, posted on the Leinster and Munster provincial websites, called on applicants with "a complete and thorough understanding of rugby union" to plan, research and constantly evaluate current scrummaging practice.

Ireland lost scrum after scrum on Saturday and watching television pundits in Dublin even expressed their concern for the safety of replacement tighthead prop Tom Court after the Ulsterman was put under relentless pressure.

The successful candidate will be chiefly responsible for implementing a new scrum programme at the country's academies that, despite producing the likes of flyhalf Jonathan Sexton and flanker Sean O'Brien, have had only one major frontrow graduate in the shape of looshead Cian Healy.

If we assume that Hagen left connacht, with irfus blessing, to experience regular rugby at the highest level in the club game then, if u conveniently ignore connachts participation in hec, thats fine. However he should have been allowed to sign for leinster but should have been sent to Munster or Ulster instead where he would have gotten the game time which he sought even if they had signed Bj and Afoa. Being on the bench and playing 20/25min reg is better tha playing B=i cup or ail.

Equally if you believe that its part of the provinces mandate to develop and maintain players for the national team why are props like Andress and Murphy plying their trade in Ap and super15 respectively. I believe that while the provinces will play lip service to it their real internal mandate is to win games and trophies and thats their only focus.

The announcement today of the creation of a high performance scrum coach baffles me somewhat in that Munster and Leinster already have people doing this job. In Munsters case they have 3 ths either on dev or acadamy contrats and another couple in the sub acadamy. I assume this is similar in leinster. In addition we have archer, ryan and Borlase(project) on full contracts but yet we fully rely on Bj to hold the scrum together for us. I dont know how bringing these lads to a central location 5/6 times a year is going to change that significantly.

I think any solution to the problm has to be two fold.
In the short to medium term players of the calibre of Botha, Afoa and White should be allowed to continue in their employment while assisting in the dev of younger irish props. The best available irish qualified tightheads should be sharing the position with them tho to ensure immediate cover in the posion for ireland.
The long term solution however will imo take a lot of goodwill on all sides to put in place. It will require the changing of the rules of scrummaging in schools rugby to allow properly contested scrums again. Until this happens we wont know who can scrum properly. imo atm players are being selected for their ball carrying and lifting skills ahead of scrummaging and these lads are being found out upon graduating to provincial senior rugby where scrummaging is their bread and butter. it was this system which allowed Ross to leave munster while they held on to Buckley and now sees the promotion of archer ahead of the likes of cotter, kilcoyne and condon.

If the new appointment is given the power to make changes of this nature then we have a chance of rectifying the problem. I fear tho that borders is right and this is merely a band aid for the current media storm.

Load of rollocks being talked about the tighthead subject. In fact Hagan and Archer are getting buckets of gametime (but no HEC exposure). Here are the stats according to the Rabo and HEC sites for all TH props who appeared in the HEC or have large amounts of gametime, so the likes of Borlase and McGrath don't feature.

Draw your own conclusions. The only one that I have is that Afoa and Botha are majorly blocking Irish player development, but you wouldn't see Ulster or Munster in the QFs of the HEC without them. Seems we can't have it both ways

Player	Rabo minutes	HEC Starts	HEC Sub
Jamie Hagan	564	1	0
Nathan White	444	0	5
Mike Ross	307	5	1
John Afoa	586	5	0
Jerry Cronin	417	0	0
Declan Fitzpatrick	346	1	0
Adam Macklin	179	0	4
Stephen Archer	541	0	2
BJ Botha	529	6	0
John Hayes	273	0	2
Rodney Ah You	482	2	2
Ronan Loughney*	409	3	0
Dylan Rogers*	322	1	3
Stewart Maguire	74	0	1

* as tighthead only, Loughney has 760 minutes in total and he and Rogers had 2 and 1 sub appearances in the HEC at loosehead.

Totals:

IQ. 8 players, 2837 minutes, 10 HEC starts, 8 HEC sub
NIQ "projects". 3 players, 1248 minutes, 3 HEC starts, 10 HEC sub
NIE, Rtd. 3 players, 1388 minutes, 11 HEC starts, 2 HEC sub 2

since it a world cup year some status go tits up.

since afoa came to ulster they played
10 pro12 games. he played in 8. subbed 5times only missing 54mins+2games giving other players in the team 214mins to prove themselfs for the irish team since 5/11/11

in heineken cup he played 5 out of 6 games. got subbed 3 times which added to 27 mins + game missed 80 = 107 mins in heineken cup top class rugby for another player to prove himself.

overall since 5november another player other than afoa had 321mins of first team game time!! just over 4games

Very interesting stats Salmson, obviously as Swift points out the world cup distorts the figures and 564 minutes is hardly earth shattering but its more than I thought but of more interest to me would be the number of games Hagan has played for 60 minutes or more, usually seems to get 40/50 minutes if he starts. That was the one big issue I saw of his time with Connacht, his fitness seemed questionable, he'd give you a great 60 minutes or so but was usually out on his feet by then. If a player is to have an international future especially while there are still 22 man squads for international games, props in particular need to be able to go the full 80 minutes or they aren't much use if like Hagan they have experience only at tighthead.

541 minutes for Archer is hardly buckets of gametime either, equivalent of 6.75 games in total. Its not likely he'll get more than 1 or 2 opportunities in the run in with Munster battling for the home s/f in the Rabo.

Them sort of stats aren't going to go anyway towards developing the likes of Hagan and Archer. However, with White coming here Hagan will likely get more opportunities next season unless Leinster go shopping down south again.

Borders no.2 wrote: the world cup distorts the figures

Not as much as you might think. The international players tour non-WC years and only feed back into the teams end September / start October in time for the first HEC game, and then they're gone again for most of November. So while the figures earlier on in the season would have been all over the place, by now they have evened themselves out.

You could argue Afoa is an outlier too, the reason he's playing so much is (1) clearly ulster are going to get their (considerable) money's worth; he missed over 1/3 the season, only arriving after the world cup and then disappearing back to NZ for a mate's wedding, missing a few more matches on the back of that and (2) the obvious No. 2 Declan Fitzpatrick is injured.

As an aside to the subject of Hagan and Archer, I recall years ago John Aldridge and Ray Houghton signing for Liverpool and spending 6 months in the reserves to learn how to play the Liverpool way.

It certainly seems that's how things are with Hagan and that he'll play a fuller part next year. And, while losing our one quality TH this year was painful, we'll start next year with 2 THs as good or better, so it's worked out pretty well medium term.

Definitely there's a problem with a lack of THs, but you have to wonder would things be so bad if Kidney and Smal hadn't sunk God know how much time, effort, and money into Tony Buckley?

There a very interesting interview with John Andress on irishpost.co.uk where he gives his opininion on this subject from an irish qualified TH props point of view. Its a very interesting read but unfortunatly i dont know how to transfer it to this thread but you will get it there if interested.

Here is that article irishpost.co.uk/index.php/component/cont...school-of-hard-props