ANOTHER TEST WEEK, another week of conversations around Ireland’s succession planning at out-half.

Three years into Andy Farrell’s tenure as head coach, the future beyond Johnny Sexton remains unclear. The Ireland captain won’t be involved against Fiji tomorrow, so Joey Carbery gets a rare start – just his 12th in the Ireland 10 jersey.

Behind Carbery, it’s anyone’s guess as to who will eventually emerge as next in line. For a moment it looked as though Harry Byrne would be Farrell’s man, but injuries have continuously struck the Leinster out-half at the wrong time. The Ireland coaches are also keen on Ciarán Frawley, and the 24-year-old would surely have featured this weekend if injury hadn’t ruled him out.

The end result is that Munster’s Jack Crowley finds himself on the Ireland bench, with a potential Test debut coming his way just 19 caps into his Munster career. While opportunities at provincial level have been limited, Crowley impressed on the Emerging Ireland tour and was one of the few bright sparks for Ireland A against the All Blacks XV last week. 

“With Jack, he’s found a way to make us stand up and go, ‘Wow, this guy’s got something,’” said Ireland defence coach, Simon Easterby.

“Jack’s story is a bit different. He’s sort of found his way into the group in a slightly different way, having had limited gametime at 10 for Munster this year, but he has a lot of strong attributes and things that we as coaches, and his peers, have been really impressed with.  

“If you look at what he did with (the Ireland) U20s, he’s a leader for them and bridging that gap between 20s and senior international rugby is always a bit of a challenge because we don’t have many of those opportunities outside of the Emerging tour, which gave him the chance to work with Catty [Mike Catt] in particular and understand our attacking game.

Easterby speaking to the media at Aviva Stadium today. Bryan Keane / INPHO Bryan Keane / INPHO / INPHO

“One hundred per cent, he has deserved to be in this position because of the way he’s gone about his business. Circumstances have led to that but you’ve still go to take your opportunity and put your hand up and make it hard for us not to select him, and he’s done that.”

A heavily changed Ireland team also sees Jeremy Loughman earn his Test debut in the front row, while Connacht’s Cian Prendergast could win his first cap off the bench. Jimmy O’Brien makes his first start at fullback while the likes of Kieran Treadwell and Nick Timoney will also be keen to impress.

“I guess when you look at the different combinations, you’ve got Rob [Herring] and Tadhg [Furlong] along with Jeremy, we’ve got good experience in that front row that can support Jeremy in his first cap,” Easterby continued.

“Treaders [Treadwell] comes into the second row with Tadhg Beirne, who is experienced. There’s others. So there’s experience across the spine of the team.

I don’t think we’ve made wholesale changes, because we can’t afford to against a team like Fiji. We want to make sure we give the players that are coming in or haven’t been capped before or have limited caps, we want to give them the best opportunity to go and perform in a strong team. And I think that’s what we’re doing with the selection.”

Easterby also responded to Vern Cotter’s suggestion that Ireland were not overly interested in tomorrow’s game, which comes sandwiched between higher profile Tests against South Africa and Australia.

“The game against South Africa has given them an enormous amount of confidence and they are barely looking at us because they have Australia the week after,” the Fiji head coach said.

“For them, it’s just a training session and for us, it’s a game where we can learn so we will use this opportunity to get better.”

“You only have to look back to 2017 when we last played Fiji and there were three points in it, it was 20-all with 73 minutes gone so I take that with a pinch of salt,” Easterby responded.

“We’re showing as much respect to this Fijian side as we would to any team. It’s about our performance and how good we can be on the weekend. But we’ve certainly invested plenty of time into understanding what they might pose, the threats they’ll pose, the opportunities that might present themselves if we play a certain way.

“We can only look after what we do and believe me we’ve worked hard on making sure that these guys are prepped in the right way as they would be for any international.” 

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