The injury situation is looking a lot healthier for Ireland, Geordan Murphy would make quite the pundit and the new Indo website featured a quite hilarious typo in the rugby section today.
Ireland slowly coming back to full health
It took some time, but four days after the Wales game on Saturday, the Ireland players are slowly coming back to health and the fact that some of them are only doing so now probably emphasises how important an eight-day turnaround is compared to a six-day one in a competition as physically demanding as the Six Nations.
According to The Irish Times, Gordon D’Arcy took a full part in training today and is well on course to retain his place this weekend, while his most likely understudy if he was to suffer a setback between now and Sunday, Keith Earls, was also fully involved and will get the all-clear pending the results of a medical report due today.
Sean O’Brien sat out the session complaining of a sore calf – 23 tackles and 12 carries in one game is bound to have some sort of residual effect in the days afterwards – but he should be OK, while all also seems to be well with Peter O’Mahony, who looked just a tad disoriented on his way off the pitch on Saturday.
It’s all coming together rather nicely it seems. Bring on England!
Who do the Indo think might play alongside BOD this weekend?
With all of the injuries cleared up, thankfully there’s plenty of strength in depth in the Irish camp ahead of the weekend, but no matter how much Declan Kidney’s resources were stretched we doubt he’d ever call on Today FM DJ Ray D’Arcy.
D’Arcy may well have dabbled in a bit of rugby in the past but he’s a bit slight and a bit long in the tooth for the non-stop, 100 miles per hour nature of the professional game today.
According to The Irish Independent website today, however, Declan Kidney is considering switching Brian O’Driscoll to 12 if Ray doesn’t make it in time for Sunday, an unfortunate mishap that happened to coincide with the day that the Indo launched their impressive looking new website.
They say that people in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones and we would be lying if we said we haven’t been guilty of a typo or two in these parts so we’re not going to hammer them for it, but as far as media mistakes go, it’s one of the funnier ones we’ve come across.
Pundit’s chair calling for Murphy?
We’re big fans of Geordan Murphy around these parts. He was possibly the most skilful of a very talented generation of Irish players, he has shown remarkable longevity at club level for the Leicester Tigers, he comes across as an all-round good bloke and he is apparently responsible for giving Billy ‘36’ Twelvetrees the best nickname in rugby.
It seems that he might make quite a pundit after he’s finished his career as well if he fancied going down that road after his guest slot as the Expert Witness on planetrugby.com this week. The column in full is well worth a look, but we particularly liked his take on how Sean O’Brien’s ball-carries counteracted the effectiveness of the Welsh blitz defence.
“Ireland, led by a very robust and physical performance from Sean O’Brien, really made those opening exchanges their own, with O’Brien prepared to take the ball at pace into a blitz defence, something that can create a lot of holes outside, as the blitz is rushing at pace, and find it difficult to change direction,” Murphy said.
“That sort of power into the blitz causes players to get wrong footed and that leaves open channels around the contact area to exploit,” he added.
Now that observation might be obvious to those immersed in the game, but for those who have a keen interest without having an intimate understanding of the rules, it’s great to hear or read.
Good stuff Geordan.
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