Dave Cahill wrote:footrush wrote:I know this is a positive string so...
There might have been something to have been positive about last January - there isn't now. It has been a dreadful season, our worst since Gary Ella was in charge. The crowds have been cr@p, the rugby has been poor, the air of fragility about the team is palpable, I've never felt more like a customer than this season. If it weren't for the introduction of HH13 in the RDS bars meaning I never have to drink Carlsberg again, this season would have nothing whatsoever to recommend it.
Thought last season was a lot worse. I remember regularly feeling a real sense of frustration leaving the RDS [and Lansdowne Road] last season and I haven't often felt that this year. With that said, the lows have been lower – the two Wasps games in particular were really, really abject.
As I said in another thread though, the second season was the tough one for both O'Connor and Foley [in Munster]. It has become a cliché over the last decade or so, but if you're not getting better, you're getting worse. We very obviously need to sharpen our skills and add different strings to our attacking game, and the first step to that would be employing an innovative skills/attack coach ... unfortunately we've got nobody in the management/coaching side of things [bar KmcQ] who has any meaningful managerial or coaching contacts outside of Leinster.
I would also be of the opinion that the management [Mick Dawson and Guy Easterby] are not up to scratch on this issue, and the make-up of the Professional Game Board isn't a patch on what it was four or five years ago. To be frank, while there are some pretty knowledgable and sound people still involved, there are also some complete tools to whom I wouldn't give five minutes of a year when they were talking ... and I'd narrow that down to thirty seconds when they were talking about rugby.
With that said, I actually have a lot of personal faith in Leo and Girve. My main concern for next season is that they think that the job of rebuilding the squad is largely done, because I think that we are – at best – halfway there. There have been really significant plusses this season in the emergence of Dooley, Tracy, Molony, Mick Kearney [belatedly], JVDF, Luke McGrath and Garry Ringrose, but we need to see the same sort of influx again next season with Dan Leavy, Nick McCarthy, Joey Carbery, Ross Byrne, Tom Daly, Adam Byrne and hopefully Billy Dardis too all getting a push in selection.