When does Andy Farrell name British and Irish Lions team to face Western Force
Changes aplenty are expected as Andy Farrell names his side to take on Western Force this weekend.
A packed out Aviva Stadium were stunned when Argentina picked off the Lions in thrilling fashion last Friday but panic won't set in just yet.
Farrell will welcome back his Leinster contingent as well as those competing in the Premiership final while he will also be looking at load management and weighing up the long journey from Dublin to Australia.
Here is everything you need to know about the starting team.
The British and Irish Lions Team will be announced on Thursday at 7.30 am.
The British and Irish Lions social media will release the team.
The Lions take on the Western Force this Saturday at 11 am.
It's hard to know but Farrell will want to see as many players as possible as early as possible. Neither Henry Pollock or Josh van der Flier started against Argentina (van der Flier was still on Leinster duty) so all eyes will be on that selection. There will also be plenty of interest in the full back selection.
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Irish Times
35 minutes ago
- Irish Times
Spear and loathing: The reckless New Zealand tackle that ended Brian O'Driscoll's Lions tour and changed rugby
Brian O'Driscoll is sick of talking about it. Tana Umaga says anyone still asking needs to put it behind them. But here we are, 20 years on from the tackle that ties them together – and people do still want to talk about it. That moment – in the first minute of the first Test of the Lions series against New Zealand on June 25th, 2005 – still pops up on TikTok and YouTube feeds, still sparks arguments on Reddit threads, still leads hour-long podcasts when players reminisce about how they saw it. And it still inspires articles like this one, long after the men involved have made up and moved on. It all happened on the edge of shot. You see O'Driscoll throw himself into a ruck, then play moves on one phase. The camera follows Richie McCaw as he carries the ball into contact and by the time O'Driscoll reappears, he is face down on the ground, rolling around in agony. Exactly what went on in the few seconds in between would not become clear for a few months, when O'Driscoll found a camcorder video in his cubby hole at Leinster . It had been shot, and sent on, by an Irish fan who had been in the stands. By then, rugby was already working on redrafting the laws around the contact area, the reputations of both teams had taken a beating and O'Driscoll was dealing with the aftermath of an injury that meant he would never be quite the same player again. READ MORE But that is beginning with the ending. To understand why the tackle blew up the way it did, you have to put it in the context of everything around it. The 2005 Lions tour was one of the most eagerly anticipated in history. Between them, the four home nations had beaten the All Blacks in New Zealand twice in 100 years of trying. Combined as the Lions, they had won a solitary series out of 10, in 1971. In 2005, Ireland were still waiting for their first victory against them, home or away (whisper it, but 20 years later, Scotland are waiting still). A New Zealand tour might be the hardest task in the sport today, but back then there was no doubt about it. This one was supposed to be different, however. For the first time, one of the four home nations had won the World Cup. The man who coached England to that World Cup success , Clive Woodward, was now leading the Lions. Neither of which, as it turned out, would do them any good. For one thing, the game had changed so much in the two years since the 2003 World Cup that the England squad, who had been flogged into playing for their clubs the week after their victory, had started to fall apart. They had been overtaken by Ireland, who finished above them in the Six Nations both years, and Wales, who had just won a grand slam. Woodward, in what felt like a midlife crisis, had quit rugby and gone into football with Southampton. His imaginative approach to coaching had been exactly what a gnarly England team needed. His relationship with the older players meant they felt able to cherrypick the best of it and reject everything else. But the Lions did not know any better and the tour was launched with plastic wristbands branded with the slogan Woodward had commissioned, personalised iPods loaded with a selection of his favourite motivational music and sheet music with the words and score of the anthem he had written for the tour. Keen to deal with every last detail, Woodward consulted a Maori elder about how his team ought to meet the haka, which was how his captain, O'Driscoll, ended up kneeling down and yanking up a fistful of grass from the pitch to throw at the All Blacks before the start of the match. There must have been Maori scholars watching who understood the significance of the gesture, but everyone else was baffled and the All Blacks they were playing against looked enraged. O'Driscoll's pre-game speech had been about how he wanted every player to win his battle with the man opposite him. ('I know one thing,' he said, 'Tana Umaga is not going to have the upper hand on me'.) In their very first contact on the pitch, O'Driscoll went into that ruck, Keven Mealamu grabbed him around one leg, Umaga took the other, and the two of them tipped him up like a bottle of ketchup and dropped him down on the ground. Lions coach Clive Woodward shows journalists a frame-by-frame breakdown of the 2005 spear tackle on Brian O'Driscoll by New Zealand's Tana Umaga and Keven Mealamu. Photograph: Getty Images O'Driscoll stretched out his right arm to break the fall and reduce the risk of a broken neck but ended up dislocating his shoulder instead. He knew straight away that his tour was over. On one wing, Gareth Thomas set off chasing the linesman 'who had walked on to the pitch during the preceding passage of play and simply ordered the pair to 'leave him alone'. I screamed at him to get involved, but there was panic in his eyes.' The referee, Joel Jutge, missed it too, so neither Mealamu nor Umaga were punished for it during the match. Years later, Jutge would admit he had the decision wrong. It is harder to understand how the citing commissioner, Willem Venter, decided that there was nothing to see. Two minutes into the biggest Test they had played since 1997, the Lions had lost their captain. They played dismally without him and ended up losing 21-3. As much pain as he was in, O'Driscoll noticed that, unlike his All Black teammate Justin Marshall, Umaga did not approach to ask after him as he left the field for treatment. Which annoyed him because it felt like an insult on top of an injury. Umaga won an award for his sportsmanship when he gave first aid to Wales's Colin Charvis in a Test a couple of years earlier, but on this occasion he was preoccupied with leading his team. Umaga was almost as standoffish after the game. 'It's too late for explanations now,' he said a few days later. 'I could try to explain it but what would that achieve?' Woodward, meanwhile, decided to hold a press conference where he went over the tackle, frame by frame. He had hired Alastair Campbell to run his media team and he made a total balls-up of the job (Campbell may 'disagree agreeably' about this). 'I understood the frustration,' Paul O'Connell wrote later, 'but I didn't think putting the incident up on a big screen in slow motion, in front of a roomful of journalists, was going to help our cause. You can maybe do that when you've won the game, but not when you've been absolutely hockeyed.' The Lions came off like sore losers and the All Blacks were disarmed to find that they were the bad guys. It did not help that their head coach, Graham Henry, did not seem to understand exactly why the Lions and their supporters were so upset. If anything, he felt they were being unfairly criticised. 'The sustained personal attack they launched against me was hard to believe and even harder to stomach,' Umaga wrote in his autobiography. O'Driscoll called the tackle deliberate and there was, and still is, a lot of conjecture that the tackle was calculated to knock him out of the series, something the All Blacks denied. Fans turned up at a New Zealand training session in Wellington, in June, 2005, to let Tana Umaga know what they thought of his part in the spear tackle that ended Brian O'Driscoll's Lions tour. Photograph:The fairest explanation comes from Thomas: 'They were hard men who saw their chance to do what we all do if the opportunity arises – play fast and loose with the laws.' Looking back, these were the wild-west years of the sport, when men trained and played like professionals, but were treated and cared for like amateurs. The administration, coaching and medical support had barely begun to catch up to how punishing rugby had become and a lot of people were hurt as a result. [ Gordon D'Arcy: Lions made lots of errors against Argentina - now is the time to eradicate those mistakes Opens in new window ] O'Driscoll was one of them. World Rugby stood by Venter, claiming that on the basis of the footage available the incident did not necessarily meet what they called the 'red-card test' of 'would the player have been sent off had the match official seen the offence?'. It was only when the amateur footage came out that they realised how wrong they had got it. By the end of the year, they had changed the guidance around spear tackles and referees were instructed to start with a red card, and work backwards from that if there was any mitigation. So, the game changed in those few seconds. While O'Driscoll, and everyone else, hates to think it, the truth, as he wrote in his autobiography, is that 'sometimes in sport you don't get to choose all of the things they remember you for'. - Guardian
Irish Times
35 minutes ago
- Irish Times
Connacht's Ben Murphy out to cap year of stunning personal progress with Ireland debut
Ben Murphy will have an opportunity later in the summer to reflect on an eventful last 12 months and all he accomplished, including his move from Leinster to Connacht , getting selected as a training panellist with the Ireland squad ahead of the Six Nations and now being chosen for the summer tour to Georgia and Portugal. The 24-year-old scrumhalf played 16 matches for Connacht, starting 14 and scoring 11 tries. He also missed six weeks of the season following surgery on a fractured finger. It's an impressive tale of the tape. While Munster scrumhalf Craig Casey will captain the Ireland squad for the upcoming two Tests in Tbilisi and Lisbon, Murphy should get some game time. Others may have doubted the speed of his progression, but the Bray native took a pragmatic view based on a numbers game. He explained: 'From the outside looking in, it probably would have been far-fetched, but I felt that with the movements – Lions year and all that – there was going to be an opportunity for a young scrumhalf to come into the [Ireland] squad [for the summer tour]. 'I just wanted to put my best foot forward to be the one in that position. Thankfully, I got an opportunity earlier with Connacht. I've managed to push forward and get into the squad, so I'm delighted.' READ MORE While his time as a training panellist in January demystified the inner workings of Ireland camp, it hasn't changed his mindset now that he is a bona fide member. That early taster helped, but the onus is still on taking to the training pitch and making a positive impression. Will the Lions tour save Australian rugby? Listen | 48:40 He wants to contribute to the environment in the same way he managed for his province, which was recognised with in Connacht's end-of-season honours list. 'Individually, I was fairly happy with how much I played and how much I contributed to the group, but obviously what it comes down to mainly is the team performances and ultimately, we were too inconsistent. 'There was a lot of frustration around the end of the year, particularly around the Racing game (in the Challenge Cup) and the end of the URC where we felt like we still had a chance and unfortunately, we just didn't take it. It was great learning for me as a young halfback.' Ulster's Jack Murphy and his brother Ben Murphy, of Connacht, with their mother Stephanie after a United Rugby Championship match between the provinces last December. Photograph: Dan Sheridan/Inpho Murphy will enjoy reuniting with a familiar face next season, with Stuart Lancaster taking over as head coach of Connacht. Their relationship that dates back to a two-year spell when the young scrumhalf was in the Leinster academy. 'Yeah [it's a feeling of] excitement. I didn't feel we were too far away from being very good. And I think Stu has the ability to take us to that next step. He's been left a good foundation by the staff that were there last year. 'Any dealings I had with him, I've always had massive respect. You can see the development in the likes of a lot of the Lions players who've worked with him in Leinster, how he's brought them up from 19/20-year-olds to now, hopefully Lions internationals in a few weeks. 'He is very good, not just on the pitch but off the pitch in building leadership skills and driving a team. I'm looking forward to hopefully picking his brain a bit on that.' Murphy is one of six Connacht players in the squad, something that's had a practical positivity ahead of the summer tour. 'I think it's definitely made it easier, because we were able to train in a group and build that excitement and work on things in Galway that can transfer over to here. We're a tight-knit group as it is. It's been an enjoyable but tough few weeks training together.' [ Paul O'Connell minding the house but Andy Farrell kept abreast of Ireland progress on summer tour Opens in new window ] [ Gordon D'Arcy: Lions made lots of errors against Argentina - now is the time to eradicate those mistakes Opens in new window ] There will be time down the road to catch up with younger brother Jack and father Richie. Jack has exceeded expectations in claiming the 10 jersey at Ulster while still in the academy. Richie is head coach in Belfast. Perhaps it's his mother, Stephanie, who merits the summer break most, having taken to the motorways most weekends in support of her two sons and husband. 'Yeah, it's been busy for my mum anyway. She's been up and down the road a lot from Belfast to Galway. It has been hugely exciting obviously. Ulster have had their ups and downs as well as us. We've kind of been on a similar journey I feel. And Jack is the same; a young halfback learning his trade, but he's starting to come into his own now. It's massively exciting for everyone.' The focus for Ben Murphy is to maximise any opportunity that comes his way in Tbilisi and Lisbon in the early weeks of July. An Ireland debut would cap the season nicely.
Irish Examiner
4 hours ago
- Irish Examiner
Ben Murphy's 'far-fetched' Ireland ambition realised after big year at Connacht
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