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Andy Farrell's first media engagement as Ireland boss wasn't all plain sailing as IRFU excluded certain media

New Ireland coach Andy Farrell with Johnny Sexton (Photo by Stu Forster/Getty Images)

Andy Farrell’s first media engagement with the Irish media as new Ireland head coach wasn’t all plain sailing on Monday.

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Rather than hold a conference that accommodated all media that wanted to attend, Joe Schmidt’s successor adopted an invite-only approach that has been used in recent times by IRFU high-performance boss David Nucifora.

Only certain invited media organisations were permitted to attend, with others excluded from Farrell’s first press appearance as the boss. 

This handpicked approach to generating publicity caused a stir online after one excluded media took to Twitter to voice its disapproval. 

Pat McCarry, who works in the online/broadcast sector and has written books on Irish rugby, tweeted: “Andy Farrell up for his first press engagement of his term tomorrow and the IRFU is hand-picking journalists and outlets again while excluding others… Pathetic state of affairs.”

https://twitter.com/MickCorryPA/status/1209398442730147840

McCarry followed up after the conference had taken place by tweeting some agency pictures with the text, ‘Nice and cosy’. 

In between his tweets, there had been online calls by Irish rugby fans for journalists attending the session to refuse to go, but the Irish rugby media pack has been disunited for some time with previous calls to boycott after journalists were excluded from sessions going unheeded. 

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https://twitter.com/alomaofigaroll/status/1208937775803895808

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J
JW 20 minutes ago
Why England's defence of the realm has crumbled without Felix Jones

This piece is nothing more than the result of revisionist fancy of Northern Hemisphere rugby fans. Seeing what they want to see, helped but some surprisingly good results and a desire to get excited about doing something well.


I went back through the 6N highlights and sure enough in every English win I remembered seeing these exact holes on the inside, that are supposedly the fallout out of a Felix Jones system breaking down in the hands of some replacement. Every time the commentators mentioned England being targeted up the seam/around the ruck or whatever. Each game had a try scored on the inside of the blitz, no doubt it was a theme throughout all of their games. Will Jordan specifically says that Holland had design that move to target space he saw during their home series win.


Well I'm here to tell you they were the same holes in a Felix Jones system being built as well. This woe is now sentiment has got to stop. The game is on a high, these games have been fantastic! It is Englands attack that has seen their stocks increase this year, and no doubt that is what SB told him was the teams priority. Or it's simply science, with Englands elite players having worked towards a new player welfare and management system, as part of new partnership with the ERU, that's dictating what the players can and can't put their bodies through.


The only bit of truth in this article is that Felix is not there to work on fixing his defence. England threw away another good chance of winning in the weekend when they froze all enterprise under pressure when no longer playing attacking footy for the second half. That mindset helped (or not helped if you like) of course by all this knee jerk, red brained criticism.

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LONG READ Why England's defence of the realm has crumbled without Felix Jones Why England's defence of the realm has crumbled without Felix Jones
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