Personnel has a fair amount to do with that. In Schmidt's time, SOB and Sexton were the two most influential players by far. The former was the main person for winning the collisions and getting us over the gain line, the latter for directing what we did with possession and how we exposed that gain. We had neither last season for the most part.Tricky Dicky wrote: There's no problem with big players running straight and hard. We all loved Cian Healy running over Richie. The difference between Schmidt's teams doing it and MOC's Leinster doing it is that Leinster and Ireland under Schmidt played flat, had multiple dummy runners, and a lot of "animation" off the ball, as Murray Kinsella calls it. This meant that off quick ball the oppo defence was on the back foot and the contact area was easier to dominate. MOC's systems mean that individuals need to be much more powerful to get the same go-forward
Things could be a lot better in attack under MOC, agreed, but there's an eagerness to fawn over anything Schmidt did in opposition to how MOC is attempting to get things done while turning a complete blind eye to the fact that Schmidt tried to do a lot of these things himself. He was very eager to have the big, line breaking carrier in midfield. He used crash ball at second receiver regularly. While there was often plenty of movement, there were plenty of times it was simply shovelled to D'Arcy and he was asked to pump the legs and crash it up just as himself and Marshall have done for Ireland in the past year. Goodman against Clermont was an example of a bloke several times in midfield just running direct and hard into contact without any real deviation or movement around him (and he made solid yards too on those carries).
I don't know on Te'o. I really don't and I doubt the vast majority of people here do either (although some will be waiting to hammer the poor bloke as soon as he slips up to give themselves a pat on the back). He might be useless. He might be great. But people jumping on the signing, criticising it and moaning about how Leinster are going to play before a match has even been played is pretty silly.
, Fanning, Boss, Roux, Ross, Cronin, McCarthy, McCarthy, Denton, Bent, Dundon, Strauss, Douglas, Kirchner should never have played for academy, been allowed nor be allowed regardless of whether they need gametime?
