The Scrum Shadow

✅ FACT CHECK

NEW STYLE, FAMILIAR HAND

We’ll give Barry this much…

This morning’s post is a remarkable upgrade from the usual stream-of-consciousness Facebook rant.

📚 Structured strategy.
📈 Development pathways.
🧭 Long-term planning.
🏉 Commercial opportunities.

Quite the literary transformation. 👀

And, yes, we’re going to say it.

The sudden change in style, the timing, and the Australia-heavy strategic framing all point in one very obvious direction:

this reads far more like Rory O’Hara than Barry Coade.

That’s an inference, not a forensic authorship test — but anyone familiar with both of them can draw their own conclusions.

Once you get past the polish, though, the substance is very familiar.

📌 A 3–5 year plan to restore Ireland’s position and target the 2030 World Cup.

Sounds strategic.

🤦🏻 The problem is that the important decisions affecting Ireland’s route towards 2030 come far sooner than that.

That’s exactly why the hard development work has to be happening now, not promised somewhere across the next five years.

📌 Then there’s Wigan v Warrington in Dublin.

Apparently this is a “huge opportunity for IRLXIII” to show how Rugby League should be developed in Ireland.

😂 That takes some brass neck.

This event hasn’t appeared from nowhere.

A huge amount of work has already gone on between Wigan, Warrington, Sport Ireland, the Irish Government and Rugby League Ireland, with RLI centrally involved in getting it this far and how it will impact the sport here going forward.

So after years of telling everyone that RLI does nothing, the alternative plan is now to point at an opportunity RLI helped create and announce:

“Look what we could do with this.” 👏

And what exactly is the revolutionary strategy?

🏫 Schools.
🏉 Youth development.
👩 Women’s development.
🎓 Coaches.
🟨 Match officials.
☘️ International fixtures.
📈 Stronger domestic pathways.

Erm…

That’s not an alternative strategy.

That’s a list of things already being worked on.

And eventually we get to the real point:

“Replace RLI board with IRLXIII.”

🎯 There it is.

So the plan appears to be:

Take the work already happening.
Take the opportunities others have created.
Tell everyone nothing is being done.
Then present yourself as the solution.

🥷 New style. Familiar hand. Same old plot. They’ll all need to get up a bit earlier/later cause…

🦸 We’re always watching

🥷 Ah. This is why retirement never lasts.

BACK BY POPULAR DEMAND

We’d actually been trying to stay out of this. 😢

☘️ RLI has been doing a pretty good job of promoting the game itself lately, and we were quite enjoying our retirement in the shadows.

Unfortunately, some good friends of this page made the terrible mistake of responding to Barry’s latest claims with actual evidence. 🧾

🏆 Barry claimed that RLI Chair Jim Reynolds didn’t present the trophy at the Men’s Grand Final.

There was one fairly significant problem with that.

✅ Jim Reynolds presented the trophy.

🎥 There’s video of it. The video was posted in response.

🗑️ The inconvenient responses then disappeared and commenting was subsequently restricted.

Nothing says “Get your facts right” quite like deleting the facts. 👀

🐂 Then there’s Barry’s curious celebration of the “family that Longhorns are”, referring to the club as “us” and declaring “once a Longhorn always a Longhorn.”

😬 Slightly awkward when Longhorns have explicitly told RLI that Barry Coade has no involvement with their club.

📆 And apparently the Irish Rugby League season is now “coming to a close” too.

❌ Nope.

The men’s domestic competition has finished. Irish Rugby League has plenty still to come, with extensive international activity ahead — including a Wheelchair World Cup. ♿🏆

Perhaps that explains some of the confusion. If your entire view of Irish Rugby League begins and ends with the men’s domestic competition, it becomes remarkably easy to declare that the game is “on its knees” and “nothing changes” while ignoring everything happening elsewhere.

Criticise RLI. ✅
Challenge decisions. ✅
Campaign for your alternative organisation. ✅

All fair game.

But repeatedly publishing misinformation, deleting the evidence when people correct it, restricting their ability to respond and then carrying on as though the correction never happened?

🥷 That’s when the shadows have to get involved again.

🗑️ You can delete the comments.
🔒 You can restrict the replies.

🧾 You can’t delete the receipts.

🦸‍♂️ We’re always watching!

✅ Fact Check

☘️ Our Ireland U19s are in France this week, at the European Championships. They played 🇬🇷 yesterday.

Did Barry wish them luck? 🤔

❌ NOPE - Instead he fan-boy name dropped the assistant coach of an Australian Origin team TWICE in a week.

🔔🔚 That should tell you everything you need to know about Barry and the Brotherhood of Bitter Has-beens.

🦸We’re always watching.

✅ Fact check

🤔We’re going to need a whiteboard for this one lads.

Because we’ve genuinely tried to follow the logic here and… we’ve ended up looking like Charlie Day in It’s Always Sunny with red string connecting random photographs. 🧵🤯

So let’s break it down…

Apparently: 🏉 Masters has “big numbers.”

❓Which means… ☠️ The rest of the game is on its knees. 🤷🏻‍♂️

❓Which means… Masters should be “giving back.”

❓Which means… 💰 Clubs should join a breakaway organisation because there’s a promised €250,000, to be run from Australia… with a buffoon in charge over here.

❓Which means… 📋 Applications opening soon.

❓❓❓❓ What?? Lads, we’ve checked twice and we’re still not sure whether this is: A criticism of Masters, an obituary for Rugby League Ireland, or an advert for IRLXIII. 😂 🤯 🤷🏻‍♂️ 🤦🏻

The funniest part? The “gotcha” seems to be: “Masters has good participation!” - Masters has roughly the same number of registered male players as the domestic open-age game, with the same number of clubs. So why is one “big numbers” and the other “on its knees?”

💰 As for the famous €250,000… We were told about an imminent press conference back in January…

📄 Publish the agreement.
📄 Publish the terms.
📄 Let clubs decide.

Until then, it feels like someone interrupted a rant about the state of the game to hand out flyers for a timeshare presentation.

🔁 Big claim. Random leap. Surprise sales pitch. Repeat.

🦸 We’re always watching.

✅Fact check

🔄 The Coade Cycle™ We know it well by now.

❤️ We love a good “independent article.” Especially when it follows the familiar, predictable formula…

Step 1️⃣
Make increasingly dramatic claims online.

Step 2️⃣
When none of those claims actually happen…

🤔 Quietly move on to the next claim.

Step 3️⃣
Find someone willing to repeat the narrative without speaking to the organisation concerned.

Step 4️⃣
Share the resulting article as “proof” that the original claims were true.

Step 5️⃣
Repeat.

🦸 We’re always watching.

Opening day results

Cork Bulls 50-32 Dublin City Exiles

Banbridge Broncos 38-14 Galway Tribesmen

We’re underway in the Rugby League Ireland Men’s Premiership

✅ Fact check

🤔 So, after months of slandering a former RLI director, Barry has today actually read the CRO listings & notes that (as he had always asserted) he’s no longer a director…

🤦‍♂️ Rather than a magnanimous approach, 🙋🏻”my bad, lads. I got it wrong,” he has doubled down on the jibberish.

✅ He’s right about one thing, though. Resigning as a director doesn’t get one “off the hook for what you have done.”

😉 Equally true of the 2018-19 chairman…

🦸 We’re always watching.

1⃣6⃣🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿☘️🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿🏴󠁧󠁢󠁷󠁬󠁳󠁿🏆
The U16s Four Nations fixtures have been confirmed for 2026 whilst a series of U17s friendly fixtures have also been arranged!

📰https://bit.ly/4d6p2s0

Without engaging directly with yer man’s latest moronic rant… needless to say it follows a predictable pattern…

🚿 and 🔁

🦸‍♀️ We’re always watching