The importance of a Strong Second (and third) team

First topic message reminder :

Mark McCall has been moaning commentating about how important it is to have a deep squad to cover injuries, call-ups and resting players, if you want to compete on two fronts.

If you want to compete in your domestic league and in Europe you need to rest your top players - especially as these are the guys who will also be playing internationals.

If we look at the Leinster team that will be striving to become only the second team to successfully defend the HC, we can see that less than a handfull of players have been stalwarts in their Rabo12 team, with 107 starts spread amongst the 15 players (maximum of 330 - 22*15):

Kearney 5
McFadden 10
O'Driscoll 3
D'Arcy 6
Nacewa 15
Sexton 5
Reddan 7
Heaslip 4
O'Brien 4
McLaughlin 13
Thorn 3
Cullen 6
Ross 6
Strauss 14
Healy 6

Total 107


Now considering just how well Leinster did in the regular season Rabo we can appreciate just how strong their second team must be.

On the other hand, the Sarries team that played at Welford Road had made almost double the number of League starts:

Goode 22
Strettle 14
Farrell 15
Barritt 15
Wyles 14
Hodgson 13
DeKock 14
Joubert 19
Fraser 7
Wray 11
Borthwick 19
Botha 13
Stevens 7
Brits 16
Gill 14

Total 213

Sarries just do not have the depth of quality in the squad to cope with injuries/call-ups to then rotate players sufficiently to ensure they are at their peak at the business end of the season. At full strength they are pretty decent - they did beat the Ospreys home and away after all.

I am in complete awe at the quality of the squad available to Leinster. While not as deep, tigers may well be developing a solid second team. hopefully next season they can start better so the team is not always playing catch-up.

What about injuries/other reasons for unavailability ?

We did not play a 1st XV full back for 2 months.
That wasn't resting players that was player unavailability - we still played the best player available.

Injuries happen, Sarries missed their two first choice flankers for pretty much the entire season and their second choice flankers for a good chunk of it. It was pointed out that Tigers had rotated their squad more in the lead up to the Ulster game than Ulster, but that was mostly injuries, annoyingly to three key players that might have helped reduce some of the deficit at Ravenhill (not saying we would have won but it would have been less of a slaughter).