Privately they may rightfully harbour claims to be the strongest frontrow in the Six Nations Championship. Props Tadhg Furlong and Andrew Porter and hooker Rónan Kelleher are never far from Andy Farrell’s lips as the first names on the page. If people are looking for a point of difference to Wales this weekend, the three Leinster players would be a standout area.
With loosehead Porter adapting strongly to being moved around from side to side and a powerhouse roaming the pitch, Furlong doing his best to make tighthead prop look like a sexy, running, ball-carrying show and Kelleher taking the frontrow athleticism a step further.
He is a hooker who can fall into a backline and make it look like he is supposed to be there and not an accidental tourist. With his clip, he can convincingly masquerade as an inside or outside centre. Already his name is in the betting as a possible Six Nations top try-scorer.
“To be honest, I wouldn’t look too much at that,” he says. “Sure, a lot of my tries would have come at the back of the maul. The lads have done all the work up front for any of my scores really. So it wouldn’t be anything I’d be too focused on, just as long as we win the game.”
Dominant
Deceptive modesty as illustrated by the try he scored against France around this time last year from a lineout on the 22. On an Irish throw, the ball comes down and bounces to the French side but kindly for the Irish man. Kelleher gathers it and he switches on the burners down along the touchline before the French defence can get across. The try brought Ireland back into the match.
So dominant have the three been as a unit that Kelleher was cheekily asked this week if they had given themselves a nickname in the way Scotland’s John Barclay, Johnnie Beattie and Kelly Brown were known as “The Killer Bees”.
“Absolutely not,” said the Irish hooker firmly, killing at source any attempts at mythology making.
“It’s not just the three of us. It’s everyone in the squad,” he says. “You look across the competition for places, it’s pretty impressive at the minute. Everyone is chomping at the bit in training, especially at scrum time. It’s nice to get the recognition that the likes of Tadhg and Ports are getting, so it’s great to be lumped in with them.”
Porter’s transition from a loosehead prop to a tighthead prop and back again to the loosehead side has been a journey of defiantly thumbing his nose at convention.
In the technical world of body positions and binds and the generation of force in particular directions, Porter has been the one doing the moving with Kelleher having to make the minor adjustments.
“It’s just a credit to him how seamless he has made it look,” he says of Porter. “It is incredibly difficult to switch over. For others, it’s learning a new position but for him, he obviously played there when he was younger in UCD and in school so he had some background there. But just how effortless he has made the switch seem has been very impressive.
Energy
“Then obviously to have himself and Tadhg on the pitch has been of incredible benefit to the whole side, just the energy and fitness he brings as a loosehead prop.
“It would mainly be on how he feels and he’d be communicating with all the other looseheads in Leinster, chatting to Cian, Ed Byrne, Peter Dooley.
“For me, it was really just getting the feel with him again, getting comfortable with him on the loosehead side. It was fairly seamless and by the time I was back scrummaging with him, he had done a great job flipping back. We’re still building, we haven’t cracked it yet, still building that cohesion and trying to gel together.”
Player welfare will also play a part with new scrum trials introduced this year hoping to reduce collapses and resets and confer stability. The change is also designed to reduce pressure on players’ necks during the engagement.
“Hookers will be keeping our feet up to prevent that axle loading on the head,” he explains. “Often, in recent years, there would be a lot of weight on binds and that leads to pre-engagements and scrums going down. So it’s about preventative measures to protect the hookers’ and tightheads’ necks.
“To be honest, some games it would be worse than others but it got pretty bad there for a while. I suppose at the time it was just part of the job. But now I’m glad they’re putting in measures to try and fix it.”
It is being introduced as a closed law trial across all Six Nations Championships, male, female and Under-20s.
