Sam Larner

Yeah, well, I'm a Welsh fan, you know, Scarlets fan.

So the idea of making a final, I would happily make a thousand finals and lose them all rather than what we currently have.

So I think there is room for some perspective that I think Leinster, the heights that they believe they can reach are likely very high.

And so anytime they don't quite reach them, it can feel like the world is, as you say, is on fire.

Yeah, so I think there's a bit of both.

It's interesting because when you look at the data, you're trying to look for massive discrepancies between what happened before Niebuhr joined and what has happened after he's joined.

So he joined, I guess, slightly annoyingly for the measurement here that we're looking at in December 2023.

So you could argue how much could he change at the start of 2024?

So if you look at, say, the two seasons before, if we just kind of discount 2023 to 24, if we look at the two seasons before, they were 12th and 23rd of the teams in the URC kind of over time by Cali.

So about 130 in 2021 and 120 in 2022 to 2023.

Yeah, now they bounced up in the first full year of Mewba.

They went up to 134 and this season they've gone up to 141.

So 141 is the fourth most we've seen in URC, I guess, history since 2021.

So they are the high possession team up there with the likes of Munster and Conor in the last couple of seasons who are kind of bucking the trains in terms of high possession teams.

But I will say we're talking about 10 to 15 to maybe a push 20 more callies in a game.

We're not talking an enormous shift from a kind of a Leicester Tigers, let's kick everything, or the Steve Borthwick England, let's kick everything, to a Fiji.

We're talking a very slight change in direction in the two seasons post-Niwa to the two seasons pre-Niwa.

So it's really interesting because I think it's useful to look at two extremes in this situation.

So, for example, if we look at the 2023 England side, who were probably the most risk averse team we've seen in league play and international play for 10, 15 years, maybe.

So they would have been struggling to break 100 in most games.