There was certainly some seriously talented backs around at our peak, but Darragh Fanning played 34 times for Leinster since he joined Leinster, hard working and committed as he was there was certainly a gap for a talented back to play and play a lot.molloyjh wrote:
It's not just as simple as the Academy assembling a good back from a production line though. You have to bear in mind a number of things. For starters the need had been in the forwards for some time. And with the young backs who came through up until the last season or two they had some serious players ahead of them. Throw in some guys not developing like they should and injuries and I really don't think we've done that bad.
I'm talking about the 1990-1995 age groups and how they've been developed.. in comparison to say the 1985-1989 age groups you can see the visible drop off in the standard of back produced by leinster.molloyjh wrote: We've brought through McGrath at scrum-half, and you could argue Cooney as well who seemed to be developing well until last season or the season before. We've produced Mads at 10 who hasn't lived up to his potential and we had McKinley there who looked great up to his injury. Eoin O'Malley very nearly was the first guy to force his way ahead of Drico, but again injury robbed us of him. We have struggled a little to develop a quality inside centre. In the back 3 we had guys like Conway and Morris who felt they needed to leave to get game time because of who was in front of them when they came through. We've now got Ringrose who has made it as well as guys like Reid, Crosbie, Ross Byrne, Marsh, Kelleher and Adam Byrne all at various levels of making a breakthrough into the senior squad and others like Daly, Dardis and Brewer who we should be seeing more of in the next while.
That's a lot of backs over a 5 year period, a few of which either were quality, are quality or could be quality. For numerous reasons it can be hard to line people up exactly so that there isn't a drop off when long term players leave. But I don't think we're having that much difficulty producing backs. There are plenty of sides out there who would kill to have that kind of talent coming through their systems. There aren't many of the ability of the Shaggys or the Hickies or the BODs but the way the game has gone it's getting harder and harder to find guys like that anywhere, let alone at Leinster.
And I disagree that it's harder to find highly skilled backs, it's just gotten harder to find them being developed in leinster. Given the recent record, it's far from a sure thing that any of the young backs in the academy develop into high quality players i.e international standard. You either enter the academy as an elite talent and get fast tracked into the senior team - Ringrose and to a degree McGrath or you spend three years "developing" into a decent squad player at best or more likely headed elsewhere usually the championship.
