Gerry Thornley
speaker
2,299 appearances
10 recordings
3 series
first heard Apr 2026
last heard 18 Sep
Gerry Thornley’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 10 in all, peaking in May 2026 with 4.
Appearances
And given it was the last contract of his career, one can well understand why James Lowe took it.
We'll see how things will pan out in the next year or so.
But yeah, it's a very unsatisfactory episode.
It looks like Noah wants to stay.
I still argue, though Humphries doesn't agree with me, that it was a bad look for Irish rugby that you invest three years and then ultimately another six years in a player and then you let him go a year out from a World Cup.
I just didn't seem like there was a lot of loyalty attached to it.
I personally think that whoever was primarily responsible knew Sephora for not putting him on a central contract all the way along, which is kind of ridiculous.
Leinster for being fed up that he was playing more for Arnaud, as much nearly for Arnaud as he was for Leinster, and yet they were footing the primary portion of his bill.
And then Leinster and the RFU not coming up with a better offer and leaving it so long in the day that James Lowe has lost the Irish system.
It does seem a shame, doesn't it still?
But
that ship has sailed.
Yeah, and we saw no Munster players in the starting 15 the week before, which is unthinkable.
And New Sephora, in his terms of office, presided over a sharp decline in Munster particularly.
And the gap between Leinster and the other three widened to a point that the gulf has never been so great as it has been in the last while.
When you think back even to the Munster team under Johan van Graan that lost to lose in a quarterfinal goal-kicking competition after drawing with them over 100 minutes, and you compare that team and the stars that it had in it compared to the current Munster team, and Munster have gone backwards, no doubt about it.
I think they've been a little bit unlucky in some of their transfers, but they're not the main kernel of the problem.
is that Munster are just not producing players to anything like the same level they used to do through their own system, through their own schools and club pathway.
And Humphries has sought to rectify that by putting money, an estimated €650,000, and he hopes that money will rise in the next few years, and putting it directly into the schools in Munster and the schools in Ulster and the clubs, because that's the way Connacht think it can be better spent in Connacht.
And it's something that probably should have been done 10 years ago or five years ago.
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