Rugby Union News
Blues 46-6 Waratahs
NSW finals hopes crushed in seven-try drubbing
The NSW Waratahs’ season of promise has ended in despair with an ugly, record-breaking 46-6 Super Rugby Pacific loss to the Blues in Auckland.
The Waratahs needed to defeat the defending champions for the first time at Eden Park in 16 years to keep their finals hopes alive. Instead, Dan McKellar’s depleted side copped a seven-tries-to-nil drubbing at New Zealand rugby’s burial ground on Saturday.
Continue reading...Free-scoring Bears face Harlequins knowing a slip-up could open the door for local rivals Gloucester
There will be tries. That is hardly a revolutionary prediction in a sport that has long since rained down on us the 21st century’s manna of entertainment at all costs, but even by those standards this weekend’s last round of the Premiership promises bounty.
The science of prediction is at best hit and miss, but one blind alley all too many “experts” get lost down is consideration of tactics, gameplans and the like, when all that really matters is a team’s motivation. Purity of desire is a special ingredient in a side’s prospects for any individual match. This weekend we have five matches, and they all might be summarised as a team with something to play for versus a team with nothing.
Continue reading...Wallabies coach Joe Schmidt is open to the idea of NSW State of Origin star Nathan Cleary switching to rugby union but is focused on the ongoing development of the national team’s current fly-half options, including Queensland Reds No.10 Tom Lynagh.
Director of rugby said rumours ‘not worth answering’
Leicester prop Dan Cole to retire at end of season
The Saracens director of rugby, Mark McCall, has declined to comment on reports that the former club captain and England fly-half Owen Farrell is considering a Premiership return.
Farrell left Saracens at the end of last season after a 16-year stint with the Premiership club. He moved to Paris-based Racing 92, but it has proved a testing campaign for him in terms of injuries and Stuart Lancaster left as head coach in January.
Continue reading...After a taste of the atmosphere during a post-university year travelling I was hooked and the memories will last a lifetime
June 2001. I’m on an overnight Greyhound bus from Cairns to Townsville. A typical post-university year travelling in Australia and New Zealand has taken an unwelcome turn after an equally typical relationship breakup.
Initially there had been no plans to follow that year’s British & Irish Lions tour, even though I had been enthralled by the classic encounter against the Springboks four years earlier. With my newfound freedom it seemed logical to head south, a couple of hundred miles down the coast, to see the legendary tourists in action.
Continue reading...Under Johann van Graan’s philosophy the West Country giants believe they are on the cusp of a return to the top
Trophies. They are like bloody buses. Or at least that is what Bath fans must be hoping. They wait 17 years for one, and along come …
We are about to find out how many. One has just been. The Premiership Cup pulled up in March to fairly inconsequential fanfare. But it looks as if another, the Challenge Cup, is waiting just a stop away, before we turn our attention to a third, the Premiership, timetabled for the middle of June – but you know what these bloody buses are like.
Continue reading...Steve Borthwick believes Henry Pollock can force his way into the British & Irish Lions Test team for the series against Australia this summer despite having just one England cap as a replacement to his name.
The 20-year-old was the headline inclusion in Andy Farrell’s Lions squad last month after a stunning breakthrough season in which he has helped Northampton into Saturday’s Champions Cup final against Bordeaux.
Continue reading...Immanuel Feyi-Waboso is on course to make his England comeback on the summer tour of Argentina and keep hopes of a late British & Irish Lions call-up alive. Steve Borthwick said the Exeter wing was straining at the leash during a mini training camp on Tuesday.
Feyi-Waboso has been sidelined since late December after finally undergoing shoulder surgery that was put off amid confusion as to whether he would go under the knife or not. The delay, which exposed faultlines in the new club and country agreement, was exacerbated because Feyi-Waboso also had a tooth infection but ultimately cost him the chance to stake his claim for a place in the Lions squad.
Continue reading...Northampton and Bath have a chance to restore English rugby to its pedestal, but French foes will have other ideas
It has not happened very often. Just once in the past 20 years, to be precise. Winning a single trophy is hard enough but English clubs hoisting aloft both the Champions Cup and Challenge Cup in the same season would be a proper rarity. Other than the Covid-afflicted year of 2020 when Exeter Chiefs and Bristol Bears prevailed in mostly empty stadiums, the last time there was a Premiership double was in May 2004.
Back then Wasps and Harlequins were the happy couple, beating Toulouse and Montferrand respectively. This week also features two Anglo-French finals with Northampton facing Bordeaux-Bègles in the main event and Bath tackling Lyon in Friday night’s amuse bouche. A measure of the challenge facing the English duo is that French clubs have hoovered up seven of the past eight available trophies, with South Africa collecting the other.
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Continue reading...Next year’s Six Nations will kick off on a Thursday night for the first time in the competition’s history, with the defending champions, France, hosting Ireland, and will take place across just six weeks after organisers removed one of fallow weeks for the championship.
It is understood the unprecedented move to begin the championship on Thursday 5 February next year has been made after input from broadcasters, with the 2026 Winter Olympics ceremony taking place in Milan the following day. It has also been made with the agreement of all six unions.
Continue reading...Incoming Wallabies coach Les Kiss will get an early taste of international rugby when he oversees the AUNZ Invitational XV against the British & Irish Lions in Adelaide.
Queensland Reds mentor Kiss will team up with former All Blacks coach Ian Foster, who was already announced as an assistant for the July fixture, the first time since 1989 that Australia and New Zealand have combined on the field.
Continue reading...An American rugby sevens star is facing a mammoth ban for brutally stomping on the head of an Australian player in an act of “thuggery” on Saturday.
It could yet be that these two teams will meet again in this season’s Premiership final at Twickenham. If so Leicester will have to look for some different solutions. This meeting of the leagues’s top two was compared to a “heavyweight boxing clash” by Bath’s head of rugby, Johann van Graan, but even the ability of Leicester’s defence to soak up plenty of punishment could not save them in the end.
Bath’s first-choice forwards are increasingly taking no prisoners and this seven-try victory on a glorious early summer evening was the latest reason to fancy they will eventually end up as champions. The highlight was a memorable score from Tom Dunn, setting a new club record for the most Premiership appearances in the famous blue, black and white striped jersey. The hooker’s extravagant dummy and subsequent 20-metre sprint to the line would have been collector’s items even in a game of social tag rugby
Continue reading...With England’s Lions away in Australia, selecting a callow squad would bring pitfalls as well as opportunities
When Warren Gatland named his British & Irish Lions squad to tour New Zealand in 2017 he included 16 England players. Stalwarts such as Dylan Hartley, Chris Robshaw, Joe Launchbury and George Ford were still notable absentees but England had won the previous two Six Nations titles, 17 of Eddie Jones’s first 18 matches and, accordingly, their contingent was substantial.
The very next day Jones named his England squad for a tour of Argentina. He refused to engage in the merits of the selected Lions touring party but at the time you sensed Jones did not particularly like Gatland hogging the spotlight. England might have lost their most recent match, against Ireland in Dublin, denying them another grand slam, but the Australian was still basking in an extended honeymoon period and all eyes were on his old adversary. Jones proceeded to make a statement with his squad selection and it did not feel like coincidence that he was doing so 24 hours after Gatland.
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