What Tadhg Furlong Did The Last Time Ireland Played Argentina Shows How Far He’s Come

Cameraman.

Ireland take on Argentina this weekend for the first time since Los Pumas thrashed Joe Schmidt’s men and dumped them out of the 2015 Rugby World Cup in devastating fashion.

Only a handful of the players from 2015 will be in the squad this weekend, but one man who was in the the stands for that loss most certainly will and that’s Tadhg Furlong.

The Leinster prop has come a hell of a long way in two short years, going from rookie, to one of the world’s very best tightheads and one of the first men on Joe Schmidt’s team sheet.

While he was in the extended squad in 2015, and played a group game against Romania, he didn’t make the team for the Argentina game and was instead in the stands with a camera in hand. Furlong explained the media yesterday exactly what he was doing:

“It wasn’t for personal use, that, to be fair,” Furlong said.
“Yeah, it was for the scrum.
“So, d’you ever see on television, you only get to see one side of a scrum? So the TV cameras are mainly on one side of the pitch. We call it a scrum cam.
“Obviously, when you’re doing your analysis after a game and stuff, you only get to see one side of a scrum, and it’s only telling us a small fraction of what went on.
“Usually, the spare front row is shafted with a camera in the stand. I wasn’t that great doing it at first. The first few times, the hand is very shaky.

Furlong has since developed into one of rugby’s finest scrummagers. The scrum cam clearly did its job!

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