As you’ll see a bit down the page, this ‘Thursday Six Nations kickoff’ malarkey is really grinding my gears, not least because it messes up my content schedule. Our preview will record Wednesday evening so I will post this late on Tuesday.
When it comes to the Edinburgh wrap, I was joined by Mr Leinster Royalty himself Tom Coleman who gave an excellent account of the match as well as an overview of Leinster’s season as you’ll see in the bonus chat. We began by focusing on Leinster’s NIQ players. I’m sure I wasn’t the only one cursing RG Snyman during the match on Saturday for overdoing the funky offloads but Tom did a decent job of providing counter point with all the good he’s done, as well as looking at Reiko & Rabah.
…had far to go. And I’ll tell you what, you’d have to go pretty far to convince me that any of the reasons given for bringing this match forward to a goddam Thursday make any sense.
I mean, forgive me for not keeping up on the latest bobsledding and luge news but when this day switch was first announced, and I heard it was to do with the opening ceremony for the Winter Olympics, I thought that meant the games were IN France. But they’re not. They’re actually in Italy. So why isn’t it their game with Scotland that gets moved instead of ours????
I mean, going by this article it seems that a weekly ProD2 fixture plus several World Cup matches under a very flawed format somehow makes this marquee matchup going to midweek understandable. Excusez‑moi, mesdames et messieurs, but it doesn’t.
Hey there, welcome to our latest 80+ column, where my goal is to harp on anything but Leinster & Ireland rugby and, well, I almost get there each week. Almost.
The wrap pod on Sunday featured Leinster’s biggest fan in Gibraltar, Rich Mifsud, who offered his thoughts on the win over Bayonne, ICYMI you can find it here.
It was officially Harpin’ pod number 490 which means a big milestone is on the horizon and if the numbers followed their usual progress then 500 would have been the wrap pod for England v Ireland in the Six Nations so instead to mark the occasion we have a special episode planned, more info on it closer to the time.
For now it’s time to kick off the column with Front Five, a feature I started on the old blog back in 2014. In those days I’d actually choose five articles to post every day to both keep the content flowing and to keep myself up to date on what’s happening in the ruggersphere. These days with podcasts and videos and such to work on, once a week is plenty.
FORMAT TWEAKS
…there is collective support from coaches and clubs to commence their campaigns before the packed November Test window.
Since this current format was introduced I have always been torn on my opinion, certainly not with what seems to be the majority. The elements that appear to annoy most people never really bothered me, like “How can you win just one game and still make the knockouts?” (you might make the knockouts but you’ll be away to a team that probably won all their matches) and “bring back the pools of four” (had plenty of flaws of its own like dead rubbers in January). Still, I wouldn’t be delighted with the current status quo, like “how the hell can a team finishing 3rd from bottom of the Premiership earn a shot at being champions?” so it’s not like I’d be a staunch defender.
This article seems to suggest that for the most part the current four pools of six with four matches each seems to be set in stone until 2030. That only annoys me because it means four more seasons of format nay-saying online if I’m honest. But as you can see by the quote, there is talk of perhaps playing matches at different times of the year, with one, possibly even two matches in October, plus a gap between the Round of 16 and the Quarterfinal.
I kind of like those ideas, in fact I’d suggest putting the Round of 16 BEFORE the Six Nations; imagine if that Champions Cup bracket was taking place this coming weekend? Anyway – we’ll see what they end up doing. I’m sure the collective ruggersphere will be delighted with the decision regardless…
OH BTW…here’s one other thing I definitely would change, this popped into my inbox Wednesday morning…
I don’t care what marketing jargon you might throw at me to explain why they have done this, I can’t see the logic in announcing nominees for POTY when the Y is only 3 weeks old. Makes about as much sense as a certain someone expecting to get a peace prize.
We’ve recently added a new feature that’s proving relatively popular. As I watch the latest Leinster/Ireland match live, I take meticulous notes on the action in my own shorthand – I had been deleting them each week but this season I started sharing them on Substack for shits and giggles, and a few weeks ago I added the real-time comments of the various Harpin commentators as they reacted to key moments of the match in our WhatsApp group. I thought it best to redact their names, but for this week I got the idea to colour code the redactions so you could at least see patterns in what they are saying.
Below is a sample of how the group reacted to the double blow of Tommy O’Brien getting a yellow card and Ciarán Frawley going off injured…
It’s a lot of extra work but it’s also a fun new addition to my rewatch on Sunday mornings and with the positive response I have gotten I’ll keep it going for the foreseeable.
Thankfully the wrap pod itself was also fun to produce given the result! Hugo as ever did a top notch job going back over the key points, in fact for this match we had to go longer than usual as there was so much to take in.
It’s 2026 and for the Irish women’s senior rugby team, the time to reflect on the amazing gains made in the last World Cup cycle is gone. Now it is time to begin the next one and build on that amazing performance against the French in Bristol.
And naturally it is imperative that we begin that cycle with a convincing victory and I very much back the girls to get the job done.
What’s that? Our Six Nations opener is against World Champions England in London? OK, maybe not “imperative” then, but you get the idea…
Probably the name that jumps out of Bemand’s squad the most is that of Erin King who was of course a very conspicuous absentee from RWC2025 and is already helping the Wolfhounds tear up trees in the Celtic Challenge. And as we watch the Irish sides dominate that competition yet again, it’s clear that once the impressive list of Premiership players are folded in (Aoife Wafer, Brittany Hogan, Cliodhna Moloney-MacDonald, El Perry, Niamh O’Dowd, Grace Moore, Neve Jones, Sam Monaghan and Nancy McGillivray) we’ll have quite the squad.
Even though we have both England and France away this season, I am still very much looking forward to this campaign.
Normally for these Front Five segments I go out of my way to find topics that are far removed from our Harpin’ feature matches since we cover those on the podcasts, but I really had to make an exception for this one.
On the Munster v Leinster wrap I did speak to the over the top reactions to the refereeing on the socials, ones that suggested the questionable calls only went against Munster, but then I read this article were Owen tells the keyboard warriors to hold his beer. A contributor in the Harpin WhatsApp group said it best…
I was frankly shocked to discover the author is a former head of referees for the IRFU, given how firmly he flung a neophyte referee under the bus
And the fact that it is a respected referee doing the criticism, particularly at a time when we are supposedly meant to be protecting officials from abuse, compounded all of my other complaints re the content…
This week’s wrap pod was probably our shortest ever, so much so that I added a sample of the bonus chat to the end to give it a few extra minutes. I still think myself & Hugo covered the win in Leicester pretty comprehensively, though I think in future I’ll aim to go a bit longer. The pods were pushing an hour last season, which was too much, but I think under 30m is going too far in the other direction. Takes a while to bed in a new system I guess, although I can’t believe this was the THIRTEETH Sunday night recording of the season already – have we really been going for a quarter of a year???
Thorinho doesn’t think he’s the first to discover the format flaws in the comp is he? Fans have been railing on it for years now, as have I been, well, I suppose you could say “defending it” though that’s not quite the case. I think it would be better to say that my problems with it seem to be different to everyone else’s.
I really don’t get the whole fixation with “being easy to qualify for the knockouts” which appears to be the biggest bugbear. While I do agree that 24 teams are too many (especially when the team finishing 3 from bottom of the Premiership gets in) the fact that you can lose one match and still reach the round of 16 isn’t as ridiculous to me as it is to some.
Because should you qualify this way, you will face an away challenge in that Round of 16 to a team that has probably won all their matches, and thus you will either not go any further, or you can produce a headline making result.
The Round of 16 has replaced rounds 5 & 6 of the pool stages under the old method, which to my mind was equally ridiculous and when there were only 8 qualifiers out of 24 or 20, teams selecting weaker sides was still an issue.
Where the problem lies for me is the fact that the competition is scattered throughout the season in blocks. Two matches here, two there, with domestic matches in between, plus of course the massive Six Nations-sized gap where it’s possible for clubs to go into the knockout stages with a very different squad to that which contested the pools.
I have always argued on these pages that rugby tournaments should be played in one block no matter what the format, and what the Northern Hemisphere season does is force coaches to choose between competitions when it comes to selecting their squad, and frankly I can’t blame them when they more often than not prioritize qualification for next year’s Champions Cup over success in this year’s.
To be fair, I would still be in favour of reducing the amount of teams, but I also have sympathy with the EPCR over the small amount of dates available for the pool stages. Since COVID the Premiership & 🔝🐱🐴 seem reluctant to give the two dates back so assuming the Champions Cup absolutely MUST make do with just 4 rounds, my proposed changes would be a reduction to 18 clubs as well as something I can’t believe I’m suggesting.
One of my biggest pet peeves with the rugby blazers has been an over-reliance on copying what football does and expecting it to be as lucrative. Just look what they did to rebrand the Heineken Cup, making it look almost identical to the Champions League with a similar logo and even playing an “anthem” before matches. Most crucially they tried to mimic the sponsorship model in the hope that it would attract multiple sponsors when instead they can barely get one for the main event and can’t seem to get any corporate interest at all in the Challenge Cup.
But for me the one thing from soccer they could borrow is a recent change to a “Swiss model” of pool stage, namely one big league table for all the clubs as opposed to separate pools. This takes away a glitch found last year in a pool which included Bordeaux and Toulouse, as well as one that could possibly happen again in Leinster’s pool along with the Stormers, whereby a team can win all their matches yet still fall outside the top 4 seeds. IMO this is a much more “ridiculous” outcome than one win scraping you into a likely Round of 16 tonking.
There could also be a realignment of prize money making mere qualification for the competition less lucrative and offering more for reaching the final eight, putting more jeopardy on the round of 16 assuming there has to be one.
It was great to have Cian “RugbyKino” O’Muilleoir back on the wrap pod this weekend, he had been off working on his own podcast “Mudder Rucker” along with Ailbhe O’Nolan focusing on the recent World Cup. Unfortunately it had to be this crazy contest that he came back for, but he still managed to find some positivity in the pandemonium although as you’ll see later down the column, one of his analogies did not go down too well with fans of a certain literary work/motion picture series. ICYMI click here to check out the pod.
POTTS OF CASH
“I’m beginning to see some real green shoots of increasing revenues emerging from the Nations Championship.”
Every year the IRFU releases its financial report and according to Chief Executive Keith Potts, things look in decent shape. Deficits aren’t always a bad thing so it would seem he is justified in describing the union’s situation as “robust”. He also seems to be pointing to the new Nations Championship as a possible avenue for more revenue, I suppose we’ll have to wait and see what kind of broadcast deals come with it. To be honest I was kind of surprised there wasn’t one in place when they announced the format, especially given it is a competition that has been mooted for many years now.
From a fan’s point of view, here’s hoping the “robustness” together with the prospect of further growth from external sources means the ticket prices can at very least be held at current levels for a while going forward? We’ll see.
Here at Harpin’ Manor we have made a commitment to cover the Leinster & Ireland senior men;s team rugby by featuring their matches on a weekly basis by way of two pods per contest, one for a preview, and one for a wrap. We do this regardless of the importance of the fixture. So whether it’s a marquee matchup, against Munster at Croker or the All Blacks in Chicago, or an outing that will be virtually forgotten once the full time whistle blows, like against Zebre or Japan (all due respect etc), we’ll be there harpin’ on ‘em.
It’s our way of keeping tabs on the overall rugby scene – we have things like this column to cover the wider world and BlueSky & Facebook to pass comment on things that happen during the week in real time, but it’s the pods that do most of our lifting, and as ever I’m grateful to the team of contributors for joining me for the chats each time. On this occasion it was Conor Cronin sharing his views on the win over Japan, and for this one we reverted to the “Harpin old school” format of covering each half separately and I reckon it worked pretty well. Click here to check it out if you missed it.
GOODMAN YOURSELF
By Goodman and the players’ own admission, Ireland’s backline detail has not been where it needs to be.
Ireland backs coach Andrew Goodman out to get the better of mentor Joe Schmidt
Johnny Watterson – Irish Times
I find it fascinating that Andy Farrell has taken so much stick in articles and social media comments over the past couple of weeks…I mean sure, the buck does stop with him but if his track record at the Irish helm doesn’t earn him any mitigation, surely the fact that he was away from the role for the bulk of 2025, not to mention so was a large contingent of players as well.
So with the Irish attack failing to fire on all cylinders, plus all the lineout woes, you’d think we might be transferring some more focus on the unit coaches, not necessarily to blame in such away that they should be fired necessarily, more to at least acknowledge their responsibility.
Paul O’Connell currently has the lineout in his bailiwick and no doubt will have a plan to sort out the very obvious yips, and when it comes to the attack, there’s Andrew Goodman. I have to say we were never exactly dazzled by his time at Leinster, a province that certainly earned the moniker with “-tainment” tacked on to the name for a reason.
And this makes me wonder, not for the first time, if high ranking positions in the Irish set-up are “promised” more than they are earned. I know this makes me sound like a classic tinfoil hat blogger but I’m just putting this out there – when you’re combing the southern hemisphere for what you consider to be the best coaching talent, is it enough to offer a position within a province, even Leinster, or does it help to have some extra leverage in your back pocket like a promise of a guaranteed promotion after a certain amount of time?
But like I say, that’s just a crackpot theory from the outside…at least in this article Goodman acknowledges there have been issues much like the lineouts (although the two are clearly related given how pretty much all of Ireland’s tries over he last two weekend’s have come following the setpiece working) so we can look forward to seeing how they have been worked on in training.
Needless to say it was a tough wrap, and having already determined that Saturday’s Croke Park disaster reminded me of the Northampton semifinal earlier in the year, we had the added realizations that not only did we host Zebre the following weekend back then as well, but Hugo Gordon also featured on that Saints wrap pod!!!! To be fair, he did a really good job both times highlighting what went wrong while still affording due praise to our southern cousins this time.
Must have been tough for JGP to do an interview so soon after the Croke Park disaster, yet being one of the senior players in the squad it was good to get a sense of where the group is at as they embark on one of the most critical November series for Ireland in a number of years.
Sorry to heap that much pressure on it, but I believe it to be true. After two Six Nations Championships in a row, despite winning another 4 out of 5 this year it was considered a disappointment and with these being the last test matches before the RWC2027 draw, ranking points will be essential, but also it’s about restoring some confidence that we can take forward to the upcoming Six Nations and beyond.
The quote really does give us something to look out for in the Chicago test, we’ll see what it might be.
After the doom and gloom of the Stormers whitewash the week before, we were determined to look for positives in our second wrap pod, and to be fair, despite a second loss in a row myself & Conor Cronin were well able to find them. I mean, it WAS another loss, and also there was definitely an opportunity to bring home all five points which was thrown away (literally, sorry Sam), but while we did cover the negatives as you can see below we saved it for the bonus chat.
Terrible news for Lewis and his family. Needless to say, the entire rugby community is keeping them in our thoughts.
Multiple comments online contrasting the increase in these tragic announcements with the determination of some to push ahead with the 20-minute red card because apparently the full red cards are “ruining the game”.
One could argue that stories like this do the sport far more damage.
Hi there welcome back to the 80+ column, pretty much the only content I’m churning out for the off-season.
Although there’s still a month before the URC kicks off, with the 🔝🐱🐴 opening series of matches around the corner I want to take the opportunity to at least devote the majority of space in this column to the women’s game. Our remit may be the Leinster & Ireland men’s teams but we are of course rugby fans first and foremost and RWC2025 is where it’s at right now.
But for this tournament I do my best not to try to pass myself off as an expert, I am primarily a fan so if it’s proper analysis and interviews you want, I sincerely hope you’re subscribed to the excellent MudderRucker podcast – we spoke to host Ailbhe O’Nolan a couple of weeks ago and you can find that plus all the relevant links here.
This is just a sample from the full column which can be found on Substack at this link. Please be sure to subscribe while you’re there!!!!
HARPIN' ON RUGBY 