Hello and welcome to our latest 80+ column where I generally harp on things outside our normal remit, namely the latest match involving the Leinster/Ireland men’s team.
Had two contributors lined up for this week’s pod, unfortunately both had to pull out. The cheek of them having “real life” get in the way! Seriously though, this meant I had to look for replacements and on short notice I was lucky to get at least one, very grateful to Ciarán Duffy of Post to Post Sport for stepping in to the breach.
But this meant that if I was to keep to the wrap pod format I had to describe the timeline of the second half myself and I never realised that I had never actually done this before for the pod. I see now it’s quite the challenge and it only made me appreciate what the team of contributors do week to week. I also enjoyed it though, didn’t hurt that I had the better of the two halves for Ireland!
For our bonus chat this week I went beyond the wrap pod panel and recorded a chat with Ailbhe who runs the excellent Bluesky account @IrishWomens and is soon starting her own podcast in time for the Women’s Six Nations so this was an opportunity to preview that, look at the Irish Women’s season overall and also of course to plug the new pod. Please do check it out.
LEINSTER SQUAD UPDATE
Updates are tricky to work out at this time of year because while the province will focus on the players not involved in the Ireland squad and with the A international in Bristol on Sunday we have to factor that in as well as those players who came off the bench in Cardiff.
There is one further factor to consider…the need for as much continuity as possible since this is the group of players that will likely travel to South Africa fer two critical matches right after the Six Nations. And it just so happens this year we come across the top two RSA sides form wise, the Bulls and the Sharks, both of whom have enjoyed a run of games together since January with full squads and no test rugby getting in the way.
With that in mind for my predicted 23 I have gone with as much of the group that went to the Ospreys as I can, assuming Ciarán Frawley must miss out which could lead to a debut for Caspar Gabriel, we’ll see.
HARPIN’ POSSIBLE MATCHDAY 23 V CARDIFF
15. Jimmy O’Brien 14. Tommy O’Brien 13. Hugh Cooney 12. Charlie Tector 11. Andrew Osborne 10. Ross Byrne 9. Luke McGrath
1. Jack Boyle 2. Gus McCarthy 3. Rabah Slimani 4. Diarmuid Mangan 5. Brian Deeny 6. Max Deegan 7. Scott Penny 8. James Culhane
16. John McKee 17. Paddy McCarthy 18. Rory McGuire 19. RG Snyman 20. Alex Soroka 21. Fintan Gunne 22. Casper Gabriel 23. Rob Russell
caveat : I have no “ITK” a la Thornley
LEINSTER SQUAD UPDATE
AVAILABLE FOR SELECTION:
Rob Russell: has returned to full training and is available for selection.
NOT AVAILABLE FOR SELECTION:
Cormac Foley: has picked up a calf injury and will be unavailable for selection
NO FURTHER UPDATES ON:
Michael Milne and Jordan Larmour.
TROLL PATROL
Now it’s time for Troll Patrol where we ‘detain’ a social media commentator and charge them with gaslightery and general online mayhem.
It’s not often you see test players from the same nation take an online pop at each other, yet while you may think I’d lean towards the Leinster player in this exchange, I actually believe Luke deserved everything he got from Choo Choo Stu here.
Maybe I don’t listen to him that often but from what I have heard it seems his long term punditry plans would be to become “the next George Hook” and if so I’d strongly advise he gives that a serious rethink.
Anyway Stu gets the award this week, but in this case it’s for what I call “the good kind” of trolling.
Qualifying finals – 1 v 6, 2 v 5, 3 v 4 with the top-ranked team hosting
Semi-Finals – three qualifying winners plus highest ranked loser: Teams re-ranked with 1 v 4 and 2 v 3
Final – top-ranked semi-final winner hosts the other semi-final winner.
Premiership
🔝🐱🐴
ProD2
RWC2027 QUALIFIERS
The RWC2027 tournament has expanded to 24 nations so with four extra spots up for grabs it makes for a fascinating qualifying process.
Rather than post the latest results and fixtures here however, I’d like to defer to the excellent work of frequent Harpin’ contributor Ciarán Duffy who has been keeping close tabs on the qualifying process over at his own site Post to Post Sport.
Follow this link to see how the Road to Australia is progressing..
Japan League One
Major League Rugby
Harpin Prediction League
This is the 4th season of our Superbru prediction league among Harpin’ pod contributors.
Kristian is the reigning champion, but the real competition is in avoiding finishing last, which means you must wear The Jersey of Shame. I had to wear it the first year, while Keego has had the honour the past two seasons. As you can see our resident stats expert Rugby Kino is leading the way but we’re only passing the halfway stage, and we’ve also added a Cup (or Mug) competition to make things interesting. Myself and Conor have already reached the semifinals, this weekend sees a Clash Of Titans between last year’s league champion Kristian and current runaway leader Kino.
Wales were so much better today, played with width and offloaded really accurately. Doris certainly missed and Ringrose’s mistimed tackle didn’t help. Likely France only 3 points behind us after this weekend which makes a win essential in 2 weeks time.
Peggy Sibbald
Well done Ireland..but hats of to Wales they played a massive game of Rugby 👏👏👏
Craig Grehan
That was an epic battle. Sloppy but epic. I think it will stand to us better than if we’d gone out and hammered them. Not that it was gonna happen. Fair play Wales. But fair play Ireland for sticking it out and showing the grit between the teeth
Michelle Tobin
Scrum was an unmitigated disaster. We were lucky not to concede a yellow for the repeated penalties. So many players will watch that performance back and be embarrassed. Some dreadful stuff. A few bright sparks, Osborne, Lowe, Conan and Beirne but plenty of others sub-par.
Greg Kelly
Ireland were poor but did the job when needed. In fairness had we played well for 60 mins of that game we would have won comfortably and I think we allowed Wales to play well. Was surprised Ringrose was upgraded to red but there was some really bizzare interactions between referee and TMO in that game 🤷♂️
Jackie McEachern
Grateful for the win. We missed Doris, hoping he’s back for France and also hoping Conan’s injury isn’t serious. I thought it was a little strange that Crowley wasn’t brought on until so late in the game.
Get in the conversation yourself by leaving
your own thoughts each week after the full time whistle
Hello and welcome to our latest 80+ column where I generally harp on things outside our normal remit, namely the latest match involving the Leinster/Ireland men’s team.
For our latest wrap pod we harped on Leinster’s 11th win out of 11 in the URC, with Rich Mifsud from Gibraltar and Ciarán Duffy from Bray doing their usual bang up job helping me do so.
We’ve been using a timer on the Zoom calls for the past few weeks to help keep the show under an hour and it has been working really well, especially since by a complete coincidence the app puts the clock right where I have the Harpin logo on the videos so nothing needed to change.
Made another change to our platform lineup, after adding the Substack channel something had to give.
Mastodon had already made way for Discord, so we decided the next in line was to be Threads; to be honest I never really understood what I was getting from that platform anyway.
But the Substack looks very useful indeed, I’m trying to use it to get myself actually writing again, including what I hope will be a weekly article named “Broken Play” which I’ll scribble on Saturday mornings for the foreseeable. I am also restoring our “Throwback Thursday” feature where I’ll be trawling through the Harpin archives going back to 2008 for an old post which somehow relates to Leinster/Ireland’s next match. With us playing in Cardiff this weekend you can probably imagine what bit of history I’ve chosen for the first one, but to confirm your suspicions you’ll have to actually click into our Substack on Thursday morning to find out!
Just to be clear, I have this Substack account as a FREE subscription so if you could take a look and maybe even subscribe you’d help me out a lot, cheers.
BREAKING NEWS
UPDATE : this Ross Byrne story broke as we were posting, we’ll harp on it for our preview Friday
FRONT FIVE
CLICK THE IMAGE TO VIEW THIS WEEK’S FRONT 5
A selection of eye-catching egg-chasing quotes & links from around the rugby media landscape
OFF THE BOIL
SWEET HOME CHICAGO
BRING YOUR A GAME
THOMOND THOUGHTS
RE-LEASH A JAGUAR
HARPIN ON…LIONS TOUR – STILL WORTH IT?
For our bonus chat this week, our panel looked at the Lions Tour in the professional era.
Here’s the lead-in question…
“It’s a Lions year and two games into the Six Nations the talk about possible starting XVs and who’s ‘on the plane’ are already happening throughout the ruggersphere. But for right now, we’re going to revisit a angle that we’ve been harpin’ on going way back to 2013 when we had a guest post from long time Babbling Brook message board poster curate’s egg titled “Lions: more ‘meh’, than miaow”. Basically the question being asked is whether or not the Lions Tours are still relevant in the professional age and the questions have come from more and more people as we have gotten closer to the latest tours since then. Starting with yourself Ciarán, are the Lions a concept worth continuing?”
BTW – we chose to steer clear of the ‘British Empire’ Lions argument in the video mostly because we figured the comment section would cover it pretty well and sure enough within half an hour we got the first one in, here’s a sample…
Camcolito
I couldn’t care less about the Lions honestly. The Brits love it since it gives them the feeling of having an empire.
Jason Wall
7:34 no such thing as Ireland being in the home Nations. Also no such thing as the British Isles. The Lions seems to go nack or reflect the imperialism of the British empire.
I’d rather see a series of a team from Franco-Hibernian Wolf Hounds v the British Lions.
IRELAND SQUAD UPDATE
With Doris and Kelleher listed as doubts since Monday’s update I took the approach whereby we do have enough cover not to risk them, this includes Tadhg Furlong who can get minutes off the bench for Leinster against Cardiff if needed. I have a feeling Simon will stick with Sam and Bundee in the starting lineup but I for this selection I switched those for rotation’s sake and as you can see I have opted for what I call “The Porter Protocol” where Church puts in a full bore 30m shift allowing AP to see out the match.
Healy, Sheehan, Bealham, McCarthy, Beirne, O’Mahony (c), van der Flier, Conan
G McCarthy, Porter, Clarkson, Ryan, C Prendergast, Murray, S Prendergast, Aki
caveat : I have no “ITK” a la Thornley
IRELAND SQUAD UPDATE POSTED MONDAY FEB 17
The Ireland squad return to camp on Sunday evening ahead of Saturday’s Round 3 Guinness Men’s Six Nations clash against Wales at the Principality Stadium in Cardiff (Kick-off 2.15pm).
Gavin Coombes, John Hodnett, Diarmuid Mangan, Stuart McCloskey, Jacob Stockdale and Nick Timoney have all been added to the squad, with Iain Henderson (hamstring) and Cormac Izuchukwu (ankle) unavailable due to injury. The Ulster duo will remain with their province to recover and commence their rehabilitation programmes.
The workloads of Caelan Doris (knee) and Rónan Kelleher (neck) are being managed this week.
Tadhg Furlong is continuing to make progress and both Mack Hansen and Joe McCarthy are back training with the squad.
Meanwhile, Craig Casey will join the Ireland camp this week as he bids to return to action over the coming months.
TROLL PATROL
Now it’s time for Troll Patrol where we ‘detain’ a social media commentator and charge them with gaslightery and general online mayhem.
It’s very important to remember that it’s not just so-called anonymous “keyboard warriors” who can be trolls. In fact I find that term is most often used by the journos, probably to disguise the fact that they can often be the worst trolls themselves.
Take this article from Stephen Jones. I’m serious, please take it and get it as far away from me as possible!!! Seriously though, maybe the sub editor has a lot to do with the choice of headline but having suffered SJ’s work in the past I’d say it’s a pretty accurate reflection of what he’s on about in the article itself. No, I didn’t actually read it, nor would I want to. I got enough from this headline to know it ranks right up there with Off The Ball’s nonsense I mentioned in this week’s Front5 video.
Qualifying finals – 1 v 6, 2 v 5, 3 v 4 with the top-ranked team hosting
Semi-Finals – three qualifying winners plus highest ranked loser: Teams re-ranked with 1 v 4 and 2 v 3
Final – top-ranked semi-final winner hosts the other semi-final winner.
Premiership
🔝🐱🐴
ProD2
RWC2027 QUALIFIERS
The RWC2027 tournament has expanded to 24 nations so with four extra spots up for grabs it makes for a fascinating qualifying process.
Rather than post the latest results and fixtures here however, I’d like to defer to the excellent work of frequent Harpin’ contributor Ciarán Duffy who has been keeping close tabs on the qualifying process over at his own site Post to Post Sport.
Follow this link to see how the Road to Australia is progressing..
Japan League One
Major League Rugby
Harpin Prediction League
This is the 4th season of our Superbru prediction league among Harpin’ pod contributors.
Kristian is the reigning champion, but the real competition is in avoiding finishing last, which means you must wear The Jersey of Shame. I had to wear it the first year, while Keego has had the honour the past two seasons. As you can see our resident stats expert Rugby Kino is leading the way but we’re only passing the halfway stage, and we’ve also added a Cup (or Mug) competition to make things interesting – I managed to overcome Jay in the first quarterfinal, with Conor leading Rich with one outstanding match left in Round 11.
14 February 2025; Rabah Slimani of Leinster is congratulated by teammates after scoring his side’s third try during the United Rugby Championship match between Ospreys and Leinster at Swansea.com Stadium in Swansea, Wales. Photo by Chris Fairweather/Sportsfile
Just shows what experience brings, Tipuric was a menace and a pain in the arse from the 1st minute, got right in the Leinster faces and bullied them and all behind the refs back(or the ref just didn’t care).
McGraths try was brilliant for once in the game passes stuck and defenders were beaten.
MOTM Harri Deaves was also a menace & seemed to get a semi when Snyman came on giving him lots of lip and trying to belittle him, Snyman for his part looked to love it and was all smiles, a real valentines vibe going on.
Great win for a real second team and good for Frawley, O’Brien, Osbourne and the Irish squad members to get a run to dust off some cobwebs, which there was a lot of, but if they get a run against Wales it will stand to them.
Some over the top comments on here about playing bad when the team was cobbled together and most haven’t played in 3 weeks but as the saying goes winning ugly is still winning.
Sandra Seery
Was really hoping for a bonus point but happy with the win.
Bert McLoughlin
Sloppy handling when in good positions cost us a few scores from good positions but just about got over the line. It’s not often an opposition backrow play better than the Leinster backrow, Tipuric still going strong as the elder statesman
Jackie McEachern
I think this is mostly one to forget but glad we got the win.
Warren Doyle
A win is a win but not a great performance. Second string players will not have learned anything from that. Too much up & under & very little continuity. Better to come, hopefully.
Get in the conversation yourself by leaving
your own thoughts each week after the full time whistle
Hello and welcome to our latest 80+ column where I generally harp on things not so Leinster-and-or-Ireland-men’s-team-related.
As you can see below the lads didn’t let me away with a typo when I set up the wrap pod WhatsApp group, quite a bad typo I’ll freely admit. Anyway Tom & Conor forgave me enough to give a top notch summary of Ireland’s win on Sunday.
We recently started a presence on Discord and now we’re adding Substack to the list. Threads might be next to be ditched make way….
Anyway, Substack seems like a good place to get back into regular actual writing – as much as I have loved producing pods and videos for the past few years I do miss the article-producing so hopefully this new account will help me do that.
I’m going to start with a series of posts I call “Broken Play” where every Saturday morning I’ll sit down and bash the keys on a few topics without stopping for a while on different rugby topics on my mind and we’ll see what we end up with.
Obviously I’m not looking for subs to read my stuff, at least not for the time being, so please check it out if you can.
FRONT FIVE
CLICK THE IMAGE TO WATCH THE VIDEO ON SUBSTACK
A selection of eye-catching egg-chasing quotes & links from around the rugby media landscape
GATS GONE
ROMAIN HOLIDAY
WOMEN’S 6N SQUAD
THIS IS LEINSTER
LONDON JORDAN?
HARPIN ON…URC 24/25 RESET
For our bonus chat this week, our panel looked at the two rounds of the URC during the 6 Nations and how they can effect the race for the top 8?
Here’s the lead-in question…
“We’re six matches in to the 2025 Six Nations but with two bye weeks throughout the tournament that means we have to quickly turn our attention back to the URC and next weekend sees Leinster travelling to Swansea to play the Ospreys. We currently lead the table by 11 points from Glasgow, although the Bulls’ win over the Stormers last Saturday means if they win their other game in hand it could make the race for top spot interesting especially with the two to meet in Pretoria on March 22. For now we’d just like to take a step back and see how the table is shaping up ahead of the final stretch as the teams all try to give themselves a good shot in the knockouts. Starting with yourself Conor, how do you see the competition so far?”
LEINSTER SQUAD UPDATE
Really, really tricky 23 to put together this week. The injury update alone wasn’t enough to know who was in contention, there was also the prospect of players returning to Leinster from Ireland camp, also Rabah Slimani. Could Tadhg F & Joe McC feature on Friday? Possibly off the bench but we’ll have to see, I’m working under the assumption that neither will be risked.
HARPIN’ POSSIBLE MATCHDAY 23 V OSPREYS
McErlean, J O’Brien, J Osborne, Barrett, A Osborne, Frawley, McGrath
Boyle, G McCarthy, Slimani, Deeny, Snyman, Deegan, Connors, Penny
McKee, P McCarthy, McGuire, Mangan, Soroka, Gunne, R Byrne, Turner
caveat : I have no “ITK” a la Thornley
AVAILABLE FOR SELECTION:
Will Connors and James Culhane are both available for selection this week after returning to full training last week.
Liam Turner has recovered from the injury suffered in the DHL Stormers game and is available for selection.
NO FURTHER UPDATES ON:
Rob Russell, Michael Milne and Jordan Larmour.
[Frawley, Joe and Gus all back training with Leinster apparently And Boyle]
TROLL PATROL
Now it’s time for Troll Patrol where we ‘detain’ a social media commentator and charge them with gaslightery and general online mayhem.
A classic “self-troll” for you this week. An actual Irish fan actually hoping Ireland lose just to make the final round interesting? Couldn’t make it up.
Qualifying finals – 1 v 6, 2 v 5, 3 v 4 with the top-ranked team hosting
Semi-Finals – three qualifying winners plus highest ranked loser: Teams re-ranked with 1 v 4 and 2 v 3
Final – top-ranked semi-final winner hosts the other semi-final winner.
Premiership
🔝🐱🐴
ProD2
RWC2027 QUALIFIERS
The RWC2027 tournament has expanded to 24 nations so with four extra spots up for grabs it makes for a fascinating qualifying process.
Rather than post the latest results and fixtures here however, I’d like to defer to the excellent work of frequent Harpin’ contributor Ciarán Duffy who has been keeping close tabs on the qualifying process over at his own site Post to Post Sport.
Follow this link to see how the Road to Australia is progressing, some nations booked their places over the weekend.
Japan League One
Major League Rugby
Harpin Prediction League
This is the 4th season of our Superbru prediction league among Harpin’ pod contributors.
Kristian is the reigning champion, but the real competition is in avoiding finishing last, which means you must wear The Jersey of Shame. I had to wear it the first year, while Keego has had the honour the past two seasons. As you can see our resident stats expert Rugby Kino is leading the way but we’re only passing the halfway stage, and we’ve also added a Cup (or Mug) competition to make things interesting – I managed to overcome Jay in the first quarterfinal, with Conor and Rich facing off next.
Decent performance but we need to get out of the habit of coughing up late scores, this could come down to points difference
Colin McConaghie
Thought JGP was outstanding again and Hugo looks back to his best. Worried about our centres who aren’t hitting the heights.
Not sure about persisting with POM with other longer term options available. Conan stepped it up when he came on.
Cormac Mannion
No head-slapping, whooping and screaming in the opposition’s faces from the Scotland players today. Good enough for them.
Overall, a solid performance. We were very sloppy at times though, particularly from 35mins to 50mins and then the last Scotland score.but we were well on top for most of it. Lineout wasn’t great but we tried a few new things and hopefully Furlong and McCarthy will be back for Wales.
David Ryle
I feel Sam has shut his detractors up but they won’t.
Kevin Kelehan
Scotland played very well for phases but the loss of Russell and Graham means we never saw the full test that was expected. Ireland were really professional in using their power and patience to get their scores. Conan is definitely back to his absolute best as Prendergast raises the bar at 10 higher game after game.
Jackie McEachern
Really happy overall with the performance and bonus point win. I thought Prendergast, Beirne, JGP and Keenan were all excellent. Always things to work on but two 5 point wins from the first two 6N matches is excellent.
Get in the conversation yourself by leaving
your own thoughts each week after the full time whistle
HARPIN' ON RUGBY 