Dragons beware - Leinster to unleash big guns
The Dragons may have picked up their first PRO14 win of the season against the Southern Kings on Saturday, but an away win this weekend always looked unlikely against European and PRO14 champions Leinster. That task now looks even bleaker for Bernard Jackman's side with Johnny Sexton, Garry Ringrose, Rob Kearney, James Ryan and Josh van der Flier in contention to start.
It's highly unlikely that all five Ireland internationals will feature against the Dragons, with another home game against Edinburgh and an away match at Connacht to come, before the eagerly anticipated interpro match against Munster at the Aviva Stadium on October 6th. Leinster will be keen to get some game-time into their Ireland players ahead of their Champions Cup opener against Wasps on October 12th.
There were questions in some quarters over the side that Leinster picked for their opening day win over the Cardiff Blues, with Leo Cullen's side bringing in several front-line players for the match at the Scarlets including Jordan Larmour, James Lowe, Robbie Henshaw, Devin Toner, Cian Healy, Sean Cronin and Tadhg Furlong.
There wasn't good news for Jack McGrath, the loosehead prop picked up a knee injury in training last week and is likely to miss the next three matches.
You may also be interested: Concussion forces for Leinster backrow Dominic Ryan to retire.
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I hope super bee and mopar didn’t read it all.
Go to commentsYou’ve got to look forward to next weekend more than anything too.
They really use this sorta system? Much smaller pool of bonus points available, that would mean they have far less impact. Interestingly you must be withen winning range/chance in France’s Top 14 league, rather that just draw territory, so 6 points instead of 7. Fairly arbitrary and pointless (something the NRL would do to try and look cool), but kinda cool.
I said it Nick’s and other articles, I’m not sure about the fixed nature of matchups in these opening rounds. For instance, I would be interested in seeing an improved ranking/prediction/reflection ladder to what we had last year, were some author here game so rejigged list of teams purely based of ‘who had played who’ so far in the competition. It was designed to analyze the ladder and better predict what the real order would be after the full round robin had completed. It needed some improvement, like factoring in historical data as well, as it was a bit skiwif, but it is the sort of thing that would give a better depiction of what sort of contests weve had so far, because just using my intuition, the matchups have been very ‘level appropriate’ so far, and were jet to get the other end of the spectrum, season ranked bottom sides v top sides etc.
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