Mike Hennessy

The Venn Diagram of people who think Jim Gavin is a good candidate for President and people who think it's good for the GAA when Dublin win and All Ireland is a circle.

At the end of the day the Lions is the most profitable enterprise in rugby. That's it's main purpose really.

Excluding one of the four fanbases is just bad business IMO.

The more time they spend together the worse they look.

No relegation this year, they're expanding to 16 teams next year (thank christ)

I think the worst thing that happened for Tadhg Beirne's test prospects on this tour was Itoje being named captain.

They are too similar, he always needed to beat out Itoje for his spot, and Itoje being named captain made an already difficult task pretty much impossible.

TBF I think everyone other than Northampton and Toulouse are sick of Leinster over the last 3 years.

I mean, I'm fairly sure if you offered to him the record he has against Leinster now back in 2021 he'd have taken it.

In my experience the Leinster fans who worry about who I'm supporting seem to be the same ones who take every opportunity to shit on my team. I don't think it's sincere, it's just another bad faith argument to troll with, and ROC certainly has form for that.

What thought crims did ROC and Tony Ward commit to put them offside all of a sudden? 🤣

Yeah, but I think Donnybrook only has a capacity of around 6K

Donnybrook is there like, but it's probably a bit too small

Tbf when it's tied after a hundred minutes of rugby, the question changes from "which team is better" to "which team are we gonna put through."

Having the higher seeded team go through would be better than a scenario where both teams play for penalties for sure.

Modern Star Wars:

"We need to talk to Vrix Mardone."

"But he's all the way on Besparin. We'll need a big hyperspace jump for that."

"How long will that take?"

"Oh, I mean, we did it while you were asking the question."

The Last of Us season 2 really just sucked.

The show cannot function without Pedro Pascal, the best episodes were the ones he featured heavily in.

They introduced a lot of elements to tease season 3, but I don't think they showed us enough of anything to actually pique the interest.

Costello explicitly said they can't in a press conference after they moved down.

Sure look, we can only meet Leinster in a final now, we wouldn't have made the playoffs without the lads so it's all gravy at this point.

I don't think any of us care about the playoffs right now 😅

I find that claim about revenue very difficult to believe.

Like, I accept all the provinces lose money and the Test team is the only show in town from a P&L POV, but just from attendance alone surely all four provinces generate more revenue than Sevens?

I try and tell people this and they look at me like I've two heads

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If it's good enough for the SQL I claim to write at work it's good enough for schadenfreude 😁

NFL draft takes three days I guess?

They're having a break, but they're not trying to advertise anything? What is the fucking point?

There is literally zero audience for this

Love seeing a good underdog story

I liked the way the T-Rex got to show the fancy new raptor who's boss in the first one.

There is no South Cork!

It's not just Leinster obviously, but four (potentially five) years in a row with only three teams making the final is a total disaster for the competition. The playing field is nowhere near level enough.

To be fair, Leinster have 100% of their teams in the play off places

You could do the same for the teams entering the challenge cup on day one, that way if a richer team falls down from the champions cup they're not guaranteed to sweep whoever's in front of them.

A simple solution might be if you get all the budgets in the competition like you suggest, get the max 23 each team can put out, plot them in a boxplot and set the cap to the top of the upper quartile, you'd have a pretty fair salary cap only causing issues for a few outliers.

I don't agree, the level of narrative in this has been consistent since the early 2000s, there's no space for it to increase. I don't think Irish rugby media actually know how to talk about rugby like a normal sport, they've never had to or wanted to.