Leinster line up Mike Ford to replace Kurt McQuilkin

[simonokeeffe]

Thought T'eo effed up the defence, inside or out, no-one trusted him.

Bigtime

Ringrose is normally a very intelligent defender and all the feedback on the preseason games has been singing his defensive praises

[goreyguy]

Thought T'eo effed up the defence, inside or out, no-one trusted him.

And when another one of the centres was Noel Reid....

[riocard911]

Thought T'eo effed up the defence, inside or out, no-one trusted him.

For sure. But on the rampage he was a sight to behold, like the time he put Warbs' lights out with the Plastercast of Power!!!

[Peg Leg]

Thought T'eo effed up the defence, inside or out, no-one trusted him.

For sure. But on the rampage he was a sight to behold, like the time he put Warbs' lights out with the Plastercast of Power!!!

Not forgetting his excellent hit on Murray [open to correction] in Lansdowne in the last play under the posts on our own line. Man was an animal when the hit was made, but not enough trust narrowed the defence and dragged our fb in to the line too often.

[Dave Cahill]

And as a data nerd using using simple total figures gets on mine a bit I have to say. Totals will tell you some things, but don't paint an accurate picture of activity unless that activity is constant. If there are irregularities in there the totals can be misleading. Take for example the Wasps game. We conceded a whopping 7 tries that day. The max we ever conceded in the previous season was 5. We conceded 3 against them at home as well.

If you break the season down we conceded 27 tries in the regular league season, 5 in the knock outs and 17 in Europe. Compare that to the previous season of 39 in the regular league season, 9 in the pool stages in Europe and 3 in the knock outs in Europe. So even having played 2 more games in the league we still conceded 7 less tries. It was Europe, and mainly that away game against Wasps, that made the telling difference in the totals.

If you take away that one outlier (the Wasps game) and replace it with an average figure in the pools of 2 tries (10 in the other 5 games) then we conceded 7 less tries with far more disruption. That's an 14% improvement despite a challenging environment. There were a few other games where we let ourselves down, like Ulster away and the final, but these games were the exception rather than the rule. If you consider the disruption and the weaker teams we were fielding for such large chunks of the season (which cannot be discounted) I think there's a pretty solid case to say that our defensive systems improved.

EDIT: I didn't go through the previous season in detail to see if there were any outliers there, but I don't remember there being any 1 game where we conceded a noticeably higher number of tries. Open to correction there though.

So to sum up, against good opposition, our defense crumbled. Thats kind of my point.

Outlier indeed.

[molloyjh]

So to sum up, against good opposition, our defense crumbled. Thats kind of my point.

Outlier indeed.

Our defence "crumbled" once all year. Other than that we conceded a max of 3 tries against all other opposition, including Toulon. We had a handful of games where our defence was less than stellar, but there is a (fairly large) middle ground between stellar and crumbling. The original point was that our defence was improved over the previous season. Regardless of hyperbole and simplistic figures there is a strong evidence based case to back that up.

[LeRouxIsPHat]

Perceptions and stats are funny things sometimes. Not having a go at you Dave but you were saying in the Gloucester match thread that our last try was brilliant. Watching the highlights there it should have been ruled out for two forward passes and Carbery should have passed much sooner than he did...but it's chalked up on the scoreboard and we just about won the game as a result.

Personally I was much happier with our defence last season, although I don't think it kicked on from the initial promise and I still can't comprehend how bad it was in the final. Not sure why that happened and I'm worried now that without Kurt we won't just be able to fine tune the errors and take it in a positive direction.

[Flash Gordon]

Thought T'eo effed up the defence, inside or out, no-one trusted him.

For sure. But on the rampage he was a sight to behold, like the time he put Warbs' lights out with the Plastercast of Power!!!

In my opinion one of Teo's issues for us was the fact that he preferred to run over a play rather than beat them or release a line breaking pass. Knocking a player on his arse might get a cheer from the crowd but it probably only buys you 2 or 3 meters.

[limecat]

If y'all wanna talk about Tom Hanks and Cromwell, feel free to do so here: http://forum.leinsterfans.com/viewtopic.php?f=6&t=24515

[simonokeeffe]

Limecatifora lays down a marker