HAVE YOU GOT your top 50 Irish rugby players written down? Andy Farrell and his Ireland coaches do, although their list has been in flux recently if we’re to believe IRFU top dog David Nucifora.

The union’s performance director says the Irish coaches are keen to have a pool of 50 genuine frontline options for their World Cup squad next year.

As the man behind the concept, Nucifora has unsurprisingly come out strongly in defence of the recent Emerging Ireland tour, which caused friction with the four provinces and failed to convince some Irish fans of its worth. Others loved seeing young players impress in wins against the Griquas, Pumas, and Cheetahs.

Nucifora also lauded the success of the two midweek games against the Māori All Blacks in New Zealand last summer, stressing that these have been important measures in assessing Ireland’s depth ahead of the World Cup.

“We’re intent on finding out who our best 50 players in the country are,” said Nucifora today.

“We’ve got a pretty good handle on our top 30. The Top 50? I think there’s still plenty of debate as to who fits into that. When it comes to next summer, we’re choosing a 33-person squad for the World Cup, but we’re going to need the squad of 50 to delve into at different points in time.

“All 50 won’t be fit and available at the same time, we know that, so we have to make sure we have the best 50 players. Not think we have the best, but know we have the best.

“We needed to find ways to ensure we were exposing certain players to certain conditions, how they work with different coaches, how they adapt to a different style of game. It would have been easy to leave the players in their provinces but that wouldn’t have showed us anything different. You need to take people out of their comfort zone, put them into something different, you need to spend time with players.

“If they had stayed with their provinces, our national coaches wouldn’t have been any the wiser about those players. What was done in a two-week period blew me away. It surpassed what I thought would be achieved.

“What the coaches learned about those players in two weeks has rearranged the pecking order as it currently sits. In their minds now, they have a different top 50 from what they had before that trip. It also gives them 12 months to work on some of the shortcomings they’re now fully aware of in those players.”

Of course, taking players away for a two-week tour after the URC season had already begun left the provinces short in some areas of their squad, even if the frontline Ireland internationals were back available much earlier in the season than usual. The Emerging Ireland tour certainly did not go down well with Leinster, Ulster, Connacht, and Munster.

But Nucifora believed the Emerging Ireland trip was worth the disruption.

“Was it ideal that it fell in the window of the URC? No, it wasn’t but we had to be opportunistic and we were,” said Nucifora.

“We took the two weeks that was given to us and now we feel we’re in a far better place than we were before.

“We have to look to do things differently. If we keep doing the same things we’ve always done, we’re always going to get the same return. We’ve looked to change things up on and off the pitch.

“At times, that’s not always popular and palatable but that’s what you’ve got to do if you want to really search for how good you can be as a group.”