ANOTHER summer tour, another couple of defeats for Ireland.

It's something we should be well used to by now. In 12 touring games that Eddie O'Sullivan has taken charge of during his tenure as Irish coach, his side have lost 10 encounters and won just two, those twin victories coming over Tonga and Samoa in the summer of 2003.

It's difficult to castigate the coach for these statistics, the southern hemisphere, after all, is a pretty tricky place to go and play rugby. But while previous tours have at least given some kind of succour on the performance side of the equation, there's very little comfort you can draw from the tests in Argentina over the past two weekends.

Speaking after the second test in Buenos Aires last Saturday, O'Sullivan stressed that results weren't the be-all and end-all at the outset of this tour and that losing two tests didn't bother him all that much. What must be a worry, however, is the realisation that he surely must have come to over the past couple of weeks that his shadow squad - those who he will depend upon when, not if, a couple of front-liners get injured during the World Cup - are drastically undercooked.

Why are they so undercooked? O'Sullivan would have you believe that it's nothing got to do with him. When one journalist suggested to him last Saturday that, on the evidence of the two tests, his forwards had offered him more options than his backs, he agreed and shrugged his shoulders, offering the following excuse.

"When you look at the backs that were out there today, the whole midfield, none of them are starting for their clubs or provinces. Even in the back three, the only regular starter was Geordan Murphy. There's quite a few players I had to bring out and give them a chance and let them play. But we did look a bit thin in the backs at times.

I suppose that's a lack of experience and a lack of exposure at that level."

The unspoken implication in this was that if these players weren't starting for their clubs or provinces, then how the hell was he supposed to do anything with them? It was typical O'Sullivan, watching his own back dare anyone suggest, first of all, that it was his fault as the side's backs coach that much of Ireland's back play was so disjointed, or secondly, that his conservative selection policy over the years was actually to blame for not exposing some of the backs to international rugby a lot sooner.

To the latter point first.

We've been moaning for a long time now that O'Sullivan's obsession with his first XV - not even his first 22 - has left a good dozen or so hugely capable players, in key positions, without any kind of worthwhile international experience. In Argentina, this point was proved and if the World Cup comes around, a key Irish back gets injured and his replacement is suffering from, as O'Sullivan terms it, "a lack of exposure at that level", then the coach is singularly responsible for that situation. He might moan about bad luck but if Ireland's World Cup hopes fall apart in such a scenario, then he will have failed in his duties as head coach.

On the coaching side of the equation, it's easy for O'Sullivan to blame his backline's inadequacies in Argentina on club or provincial factors but he must take some of the responsibility. Niall O'Donovan, for example, was forced to deal with a new group of forwards heading into this tour yet the Irish line-out worked pretty well, while the scrum was positively excellent in both tests. In O'Sullivan's area of expertise, on the other hand, Ireland were pretty shambolic at times and while poor execution was to blame for some of what went wrong the pitch, you could make a good argument that the Irish backs on view either hadn't been coached at all, or, at all well. Perhaps the burden of not having an exclusive backs coach in his backroom team - Declan Kidney was jettisoned in 2004 remember - is only starting to show now?

Moving beyond questions that don't have definitive answers, to a question that almost does. O'Sullivan has stated that he now knows 80 per cent of his 30-man squad for the World Cup in September and if you add another 10 per cent to that figure, you get somewhere in and around the true number of players he's decided upon.

What's not up for debate is the mix. It will be 17 forwards and 13 backs, as it was for the last World Cup in Australia.

The coach has to bring three hookers and three scrum-halves - not to do so would be foolish - and the only real room he has for manoeuvre is in the back five of the scrum. Bring four second-rows and five back-rows and he could conceivably bring 14 backs. But why would you limit your options in an area where you hold most strength? The 17/13 mix is a no-brainer.

In effect, with that balance in the squad, only three World Cup places are genuinely up for decision when Ireland play Scotland on 11 August.

Trevor Hogan, Leo Cullen and Mick O'Driscoll are fighting it out for one second-row slot, Shane Jennings, Alan Quinlan and Stephen Ferris are all in contention for the final back-row position, while either Gavin Duffy or Brian Carney will fill the last gap in the backs.

If the squad was being picked this weekend, then O'Driscoll, Quinlan and Duffy would be going to France but O'Sullivan will wait for that Scotland game to decide which players get the nod.

Arguably the most interesting decision of all is in the back-row. At the last World Cup, O'Sullivan picked two blindside flankers to play against Argentina in Adelaide and by the way he is talking at the moment, you get the feeling he's going to do the same thing against them in Paris this September.

That's where Quinlan comes into the equation. The player, who likes to chide his colleagues by insisting - tongue in cheek, of course -that his try against Argentina in 2003 saved Irish rugby, might have to do it all over again four years down the line.