Andy Farrell made his first major appointments of the 2025 Lions tour to Australia on Wednesday morning, naming an Irish-dominated list of five assistant coaches.
Ireland defence coach Simon Easterby, attack coach Andrew Goodman and scrum coach John Fogarty will all tour Australia with Farrell. While Scotland forwards coach John Dalziel and England assistant coach Richard Wigglesworth will also travel, making up the five-strong team.
The team of coaches coming from three unions met up as a group for the first time in London on Tuesday night, and according to Farrell wasted no time getting to work.
Speaking at Wednesday morning's coaching ticket announcement, Farrell revealed that he and his five assistants had begun pencilling in a list of 75 contenders from across the unions who could earn Lions caps this summer.
We came up with about 75 men or something like that. Every single one of them deserves to be on that list, There’s going to be a hell of a lot of good players who don’t make the plane and that’s exactly where we want to be. We want to be as competitive as we possibly can.
Obviously, we’re going to be watching other games that are coming up.
The 23 Irish men on Andy Farrell's provisional team sheet
With that in mind, we've set about predicting which Irish players were a topic of conversation at the first official meeting of this year's Lion's coaches on Tuesday night.
After a hugely successful few years and a Triple Crown win in this year's Six Nations, Ireland should stand to be very well represented among those early contenders.
Here's the 23-man list we came up with along with Pat McCarry.
Forwards
Andrew Porter (Loosehead Prop)
Dan Sheehan (Hooker)
Rónan Kelleher (Hooker)
Tadhg Furlong (Tighthead Prop)
Finlay Bealham (Tighthead Prop)
James Ryan (Lock)
Joe McCarthy (Lock)
Tadhg Beirne (Lock/Flanker)
Josh van der Flier (Flanker)
Jack Conan (Eight/Flanker)
Caelan Doris (Eight)
15 March 2025; Ireland players, from left, Tadhg Beirne, Conor Murray, James Ryan, Josh van der Flier, Jack Conan and James Lowe before the Guinness Six Nations Rugby Championship match between Italy and Ireland at the Stadio Olimpico in Rome, Italy. Photo by Seb Daly/Sportsfile
Backs
Conor Murray (Scrumhalf)
Jamison Gibson-Park (Scrumhalf)
Craig Casey (Scrumhalf)
Jack Crowley (Out-Half)
Sam Prendergast (Out-Half)
James Lowe (Wing)
Garry Ringrose (Centre)
Robbie Henshaw (Centre)
Bundee Aki (Centre)
Jamie Osbourne (Centre/Wing)
Mack Hansen (Wing)
Hugo Keenan (Fullback)
Farrell and his staff will now have to whittle that 75-man list down to around 37 players by the time the team announcement comes on May 8th.
While in our eyes only about a third of the contenders hail from these shores, it looks likely that if fit, quite a few of them, including Doris, Lowe, Furlong and Gibson-Park will be nailed on to travel this summer.
The Lion's first test comes six weeks after the team is announced on June 26th, when the representative side will take on Argentina in the Aviva Stadium before heading to Australia.
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