The British and Irish Lions tour is quickly approaching as the best of the best from Ireland, England, Scotland and Wales will tour Australia in a three-test series.
With Andy Farrell as coach and with Ireland's success over the past 4 years since the last tour, there's a feeling that this Lions touring group will be pretty Irish heavy. Those feelings were met when the coaching ticket was announced during the week. Farrell selected fellow Ireland coaches Simon Easterby, Andrew Goodman and John Fogarty as Defence, Attack and Scrum Coach respectively along with John Dalziel of Scotland as forwards coach and England's Richard Wigglesworth as assistant coach.
Obviously with something like the British and Irish Lions each country would like to have fair representation and the lack of Welsh coaches in Andy Farrell's ticket has left some miffed, including Tommy Bowe.
Bowe, who spent time in Wales when he played for the Ospreys was speaking on The Offload Podcast with Donncha O'Callaghan when he spoke about his issue with Farrell selecting John Fogarty as Scrum Coach.
Ireland had the worst scrum success of any team in the Six Nations. We saw what happened in that Welsh match, they were under huge pressure. I love John Fogs, great guy, great coach no doubt about it, but if you're thinking you're picking the best players to go on this tour, John Fogarty could well be the best scrum coach out there. But when Ireland had such a bad Six Nations, particularly in the scrum surely other people from other countries has to be questioning that.
And even then I think of people in that Welsh squad, Adam Jones, who's toured on the Lions before, he's been there done that he gets it, would he not have been a better addition? And having a Welsh coach because there's no Welsh coaches within the setup.
Fogarty was appointed as Ireland's Scrum Coach in 2020 after doing the same role with Leinster from 2015 to 2019 and is highly regarded in the Irish system. However, it's fair to say that Ireland have been exposed in the scrum in recent years, with Andrew Porter in particular being on the receiving end of a fair amount of criticism for his scrummaging. Ireland are a team that don't have many glaring weaknesses but consistency in the scrum has definitely been one of them.
Tommy Bowe is also right to name Adam Jones, who on top of being a legend of a player with Wales and the Lions is a well regarded scrum coach and considered to be one of the best in the game. It's certainly a fair question to ask of Farrell.
