I've a soft spot for Biarritz too - my liver.Bring Humph On!! wrote:Yea BR I couldn't agree more. Beziers & USAP are 2 cracking examples. How many seasons before Touloouse are fighting relegation?
I still wish EOS all the best. I've a soft spot for Biarritz ... Aupa BO!!
EOS to Biarritz
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Re: EOS to Biarritz
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Kofi Annan
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Re: EOS to Biarritz
Wouldn't really use Beziers as an example, have not been a great team in about 30years, but I get your point.
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big mervyn
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Re: EOS to Biarritz
More of a Bayonnais man meself. Praper rugby club, not like thon fancy Dans up the road.BR wrote:I've a soft spot for Biarritz too - my liver.Bring Humph On!! wrote:Yea BR I couldn't agree more. Beziers & USAP are 2 cracking examples. How many seasons before Touloouse are fighting relegation?
I still wish EOS all the best. I've a soft spot for Biarritz ... Aupa BO!!
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Big Neville Southall
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Russ
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Re: EOS to Biarritz
I like Toulon ...
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bazzaj
Re: EOS to Biarritz
The invention was made in Leinster through BOD and Hickey and could have been finished by anyones gran.BuckRogers wrote:Complete shi.te.Russ wrote:You can see how bad a manager EoS was by virtue of the fact Ireland's worst ever coach came after him and achieved a championship
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Ireland's most successful coach, can't argue with a Slam and unbeaten calendar year.
O'Sullivan is not my cup of tea but I'd imagine he has learnt a lot since his fall from grace. What he did with Ireland in the end was a bloody embarrassment but he was a good coach initially. The invention shown for Howe's try against the Boks was a genuine thing of beauty.
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If he was such a good expansive coach why did he completely fail to bring the best out of Geordan Murphy?
He also shockingly prefered Girvan Dempsey on the wing over Tommy Bowe in the absence of Horgan in the 2005 season where we came 3rd which still annnoys me.
With basically the Leinster backs and the Munster pack of that EOS era it was our constant failure to beat the French that was our undoing, 2003 apart.
Even Scotland had a better win ratio over them!
I think history will show that of that the Ireland EOS era we were on a relative par with Argentina with 3 wins apiece.
That is being kind as they made it to 3rd in the World Cup and we never remotely got near that.
Good coach my ar*se.
Re: EOS to Biarritz
I think that IS my point, they're a proper club with proper support who failed to make the step up to proper professionalism. They've been down on fed1, made it back up, and hung on by the skin of their teeth. They're now consolidating their place in LNR, and it would be great to see them improve enough to make it back to T14. Is that feasible without the sort of investment RCT have? I don't know, but I'd love it to be.Kofi Annan wrote:Wouldn't really use Beziers as an example, have not been a great team in about 30years, but I get your point.
Re: EOS to Biarritz
Bowe wasn't an international standard player in 2005 and Murphy was never quite an international standard fullback. Simple enough stuff.bazzaj wrote:If he was such a good expansive coach why did he completely fail to bring the best out of Geordan Murphy?
He also shockingly prefered Girvan Dempsey on the wing over Tommy Bowe in the absence of Horgan in the 2005 season where we came 3rd which still annnoys me.
Anything I've ever heard about O'Sullivan suggests that he was an excellent technical coach and a terrible man-manager, with a tendency towards megalomania. Whether his ego would let him be a coach, rather than a head coach, I don't know (nor am I sure many would trust him in such a set up) but given his limitations as a head coach and his supposed technical capacity, I always thought he'd have been a hell of a backs coach. Also removes his intrinsic conservatism over selection.
And for everything that is said about O'Sullivan, let's not forget the Autumn of 2007; Ireland played some utterly sublime rugby and neither Australia nor the Boks, even if slightly weakened, troubled that side. Both of those teams selected that Autumn played some great rugby. I wonder what conversation we'd have if the game against France in 2007 ended a few moments earlier?
O'Sullivan's Ireland should have achieved more and could have achieved more in the last few years of his time. But in part, I think this was all to do with on-pitch hot-headedness, which only comes from the players. Ireland were winning the game against France with a couple of minutes on the clock and kicked a penalty goal, giving France field position from the half-way line and a decent chance to rescue possession. A kick to the corner would have left France a lot further to go, even if Ireland's lead was less solid. With the lineout to Ireland and territory deep in France's half, I'd say the chances of winning the game from the kick to touch were a lot higher! That was an on-field call, though, not one from O'Sullivan. Ditto the last-minute try conceded to Italy that, ultimately, decided the championship... The players' lack of coolness under pressure is, in my opinion, as much to blame as anything O'Sullivan coached into (or out of) the players for the lack of success in those years.
O'Sullivan had his problems but he is not as poor a coach as many here would have it!
Re: EOS to Biarritz
Agreed Neil. I would also add that a couple of matches aside he probably did spend too long in the position. At the same time even thinking back to the debacle of the 2007 WC, and while not forgetting that I called him out as the major problem in that, there is no getting away from the fact that the players did not perform as you would expect. Though the reasons behind that can be speculated on of course and obviously his failure in terms of reaction to it cannot be ignored either.
I would say he is a good coach and I hope he shows this with Biarritz.
I would say he is a good coach and I hope he shows this with Biarritz.
It is a man's own mind, not his enemy or foe, that lures him to evil ways.
Re: EOS to Biarritz
My feeling at the 2007 World Cup was that Ireland were limited by three things:
1. O'Sullivan's desire to selecting the same XV players.
2. O'Sullivan got the kind of game that would be played at the world cup totally wrong
3. A genuine limitation on the kind of player available to Ireland.
My overriding memory of that World Cup was big, big teams with huge forwards playing with kickers at 10 and 12. Wilkinson and Flood / Catt for England. James and Steyn for South Africa. Hernandez and Contepomi for Argentina. Luke McAlister played a fair bit for the All Blacks at 12 in the tournament; Giteau played 12 for Australia. Jauzion is maybe less of a pure kicker but was never bad with the boot. Maybe Wales aren't the best team to look at but Hook spent most of that tournament at 12. Ireland had... D'Arcy. And largely, only D'Arcy. Maybe some of my fellow UAFCers would suggest Paddy Wallace should have been slotted in but Wallace was only really establishing himself as a 12 at this stage and could only be considered a serious option in retrospect. Ireland simply didn't have the players to tactically match the direction of the tournament and this was not, really, O'Sullivan's fault. Ireland simply didn't have a player of that type of international quality at the time and it created a tactical imbalance relative to the other teams in the tournament.
What O'Sullivan can be blamed for is failing to change a formula that wasn't working and for getting the initial formula so wrong (oh, and for selecting Brian Carney... what was going on there?!) in the first place. Ireland had done well in 2007 playing the game with a fairly lightweight pack that could shift around the pitch easily and keep the opposition moving. Come the world cup, every other nation had kind of bulked up. They had huge forwards and Ireland were rumbled off the park by every team they faced. Including Georgia... That Georgia seemed to have got a tactical headstart on Ireland, I think, explains the problems with O'Sullivan's head-in-sand approach. The sheer size of the Georgians, though, also highlights the point I make, I think. England's success in the tournament, too, follows this sort of pattern. Ireland's forwards were not, physically, prepared in the way other nations' forwards were. At the time a lot was made of Ireland not being battle ready and not having enough warmup games. I dispute that; no amount of warmup games would have made Ireland's pack bigger, or their tactics more suitable for the tournament.
Sometimes, I wonder if there was a side of complacency to things from Ireland? Ireland missed out on the Grand Slam due to a last minute try... And on the Championship because of two other last minute tries... Otherwise, it had been a good year. France were the only team that Ireland hadn't decimated in 2007. Did this feed into a mentality about the World Cup?
The second problem due to O'Sullivan was that when Ireland's pack were bullied by Georgia and France, O'Sullivan didn't have any ideas. The changes he made were behind the pack, not in the pack itself. By late 2007, the penny had dropped with me that Neil Best was a limited and selfish player and barely of international standard anymore but he was also a hell of a lot more physical than the subtlety of Easterby's game. Ferris was a relative novice back then but was a big unit and Leamy was hardly setting the world alight... Rory Best wasn't as good as Flannery in 2007 but he was more of a "forward's forward". O'Kelly would probably have added a bit more ballast than O'Callaghan, even if he didn't have much over 50 minutes in his legs at that time. Would this have made the difference? I think it's dubious but that O'Sullivan didn't even try reeked of head-in-sand and hands-over-eyes stuff that was, I think, the major problem. O'Sullivan simply didn't seem to realise how bad things were, even after the Georgia disaster.
Players performed poorly but I wonder how much of that was just players performing poorly and how much of it was players realising they were going to get roasted up front against every team they came up against? How much of it was players sticking rigidly to the game plan, rather than playing what was in front of them? Another of O'Sullivan's reported limitations fits into this last part - a fairly strong demand for the game plan to be stuck to, even if it wasn't working... Some individual players really didn't perform and there were plenty of rumours... All of that said, it's obvious that O'Sullivan cocked up the whole approach to the tournament. That said, Ireland were also hampered by the playing resources available to them and I don't think any improvement of approach would, necessary, have worked out much better. Ireland would still have been stifled in midfield and would still have lacked the kicking outlet available to most teams. This wasn't something O'Sullivan could do anything about in 2007 or before and not something I think any other coach would have been able to do much about.
The 2007 World Cup was the time for O'Sullivan to go. The IRFU's bizarre decision to afford him a new contract before the tournament and its refusal to accept the need for change until after the subsequent 6 Nations was, in my opinion, the only major error made in this time. O'Sullivan was right for Ireland in 2001 and I think he was right, even if his selection policies frustrating and conservative, until that world cup. Individual and collective team failures on the park contributed as much as anything else to Ireland's inability to get over the final hurdle in those years. Let's not forget that this was a time when Irish sides had won only one Heineken Cup, and that in 2006. It was not a team filled with players used to winning in pressured situations. Quite the opposite - Shan, correct me if I'm wrong but Munster had basically bottled two finals before 2006, Ulster weren't a force at all and Leinster choked in basically every important game they played in the Heineken Cup.
Frankly, I think a lot of Ulster fans would have a greater appreciation of O'Sullivan's coaching pedigree if Ulster had produced more players of international class during the period of his tenure. A lot of the negative perceptions, I think, stem from a belief that Ireland would have been more successful if more Ulster players had been selected, yet I doubt those selections are either here or there. Humphreys wouldn't have won a 6 Nations for Ireland; Bowe wouldn't have won a 6 Nations for Ireland and none of the Bests would have made the difference between a Triple Crown and a Championship. Conservative as O'Sullivan's selections were, I'm not sure different selections would have translated into more success.
1. O'Sullivan's desire to selecting the same XV players.
2. O'Sullivan got the kind of game that would be played at the world cup totally wrong
3. A genuine limitation on the kind of player available to Ireland.
My overriding memory of that World Cup was big, big teams with huge forwards playing with kickers at 10 and 12. Wilkinson and Flood / Catt for England. James and Steyn for South Africa. Hernandez and Contepomi for Argentina. Luke McAlister played a fair bit for the All Blacks at 12 in the tournament; Giteau played 12 for Australia. Jauzion is maybe less of a pure kicker but was never bad with the boot. Maybe Wales aren't the best team to look at but Hook spent most of that tournament at 12. Ireland had... D'Arcy. And largely, only D'Arcy. Maybe some of my fellow UAFCers would suggest Paddy Wallace should have been slotted in but Wallace was only really establishing himself as a 12 at this stage and could only be considered a serious option in retrospect. Ireland simply didn't have the players to tactically match the direction of the tournament and this was not, really, O'Sullivan's fault. Ireland simply didn't have a player of that type of international quality at the time and it created a tactical imbalance relative to the other teams in the tournament.
What O'Sullivan can be blamed for is failing to change a formula that wasn't working and for getting the initial formula so wrong (oh, and for selecting Brian Carney... what was going on there?!) in the first place. Ireland had done well in 2007 playing the game with a fairly lightweight pack that could shift around the pitch easily and keep the opposition moving. Come the world cup, every other nation had kind of bulked up. They had huge forwards and Ireland were rumbled off the park by every team they faced. Including Georgia... That Georgia seemed to have got a tactical headstart on Ireland, I think, explains the problems with O'Sullivan's head-in-sand approach. The sheer size of the Georgians, though, also highlights the point I make, I think. England's success in the tournament, too, follows this sort of pattern. Ireland's forwards were not, physically, prepared in the way other nations' forwards were. At the time a lot was made of Ireland not being battle ready and not having enough warmup games. I dispute that; no amount of warmup games would have made Ireland's pack bigger, or their tactics more suitable for the tournament.
Sometimes, I wonder if there was a side of complacency to things from Ireland? Ireland missed out on the Grand Slam due to a last minute try... And on the Championship because of two other last minute tries... Otherwise, it had been a good year. France were the only team that Ireland hadn't decimated in 2007. Did this feed into a mentality about the World Cup?
The second problem due to O'Sullivan was that when Ireland's pack were bullied by Georgia and France, O'Sullivan didn't have any ideas. The changes he made were behind the pack, not in the pack itself. By late 2007, the penny had dropped with me that Neil Best was a limited and selfish player and barely of international standard anymore but he was also a hell of a lot more physical than the subtlety of Easterby's game. Ferris was a relative novice back then but was a big unit and Leamy was hardly setting the world alight... Rory Best wasn't as good as Flannery in 2007 but he was more of a "forward's forward". O'Kelly would probably have added a bit more ballast than O'Callaghan, even if he didn't have much over 50 minutes in his legs at that time. Would this have made the difference? I think it's dubious but that O'Sullivan didn't even try reeked of head-in-sand and hands-over-eyes stuff that was, I think, the major problem. O'Sullivan simply didn't seem to realise how bad things were, even after the Georgia disaster.
Players performed poorly but I wonder how much of that was just players performing poorly and how much of it was players realising they were going to get roasted up front against every team they came up against? How much of it was players sticking rigidly to the game plan, rather than playing what was in front of them? Another of O'Sullivan's reported limitations fits into this last part - a fairly strong demand for the game plan to be stuck to, even if it wasn't working... Some individual players really didn't perform and there were plenty of rumours... All of that said, it's obvious that O'Sullivan cocked up the whole approach to the tournament. That said, Ireland were also hampered by the playing resources available to them and I don't think any improvement of approach would, necessary, have worked out much better. Ireland would still have been stifled in midfield and would still have lacked the kicking outlet available to most teams. This wasn't something O'Sullivan could do anything about in 2007 or before and not something I think any other coach would have been able to do much about.
The 2007 World Cup was the time for O'Sullivan to go. The IRFU's bizarre decision to afford him a new contract before the tournament and its refusal to accept the need for change until after the subsequent 6 Nations was, in my opinion, the only major error made in this time. O'Sullivan was right for Ireland in 2001 and I think he was right, even if his selection policies frustrating and conservative, until that world cup. Individual and collective team failures on the park contributed as much as anything else to Ireland's inability to get over the final hurdle in those years. Let's not forget that this was a time when Irish sides had won only one Heineken Cup, and that in 2006. It was not a team filled with players used to winning in pressured situations. Quite the opposite - Shan, correct me if I'm wrong but Munster had basically bottled two finals before 2006, Ulster weren't a force at all and Leinster choked in basically every important game they played in the Heineken Cup.
Frankly, I think a lot of Ulster fans would have a greater appreciation of O'Sullivan's coaching pedigree if Ulster had produced more players of international class during the period of his tenure. A lot of the negative perceptions, I think, stem from a belief that Ireland would have been more successful if more Ulster players had been selected, yet I doubt those selections are either here or there. Humphreys wouldn't have won a 6 Nations for Ireland; Bowe wouldn't have won a 6 Nations for Ireland and none of the Bests would have made the difference between a Triple Crown and a Championship. Conservative as O'Sullivan's selections were, I'm not sure different selections would have translated into more success.
Re: EOS to Biarritz
Eddie gone from Biarritz after poor start to season.
http://www.independent.ie/sport/rugby/o ... 18505.html
http://www.independent.ie/sport/rugby/o ... 18505.html
It is a man's own mind, not his enemy or foe, that lures him to evil ways.
