Heavy-hitters: All 16 URC squads by average weight and height

Umm, I was kinda agreeing with you about ROG 😁

But, point taken.

Rob 45 minutes ago

Not many modern Irish tens to compare him to and Munster fans have been particularly negative on Prendergast so I think it’s fair to hold him up to their standard is all.

My general point is most tens are pricks, the good ones anyway.

ZamaZama 1 hour ago

Well, to be fair, ROG is not a role model. He's more of a horrible example ...

RedWarrior 5 hours ago

He didn't start it. He was shoved and pushed back. The Munster players were testing him. Now everyone knows not to touch him. Well played young man!

Edinburgh edge Glasgow but Warriors have last laugh

RedWarrior 5 hours ago

Great win by Edinburgh who ran Leinster close first match.

Glasgow's problem now is almost certainly they will have to defeat Leinster in Dublin in the knock outs to retain the urc title. They are too far behind. That encounter might prove useful for scouting, but nothing else. They have to face Leinster in Dublin last match of the league also probably needing to win to hold position. Leinster will hurt them.

This Leinster defense is starting to look outstanding.

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Longshanks 5 hours ago

Shamus Hurley-Langton: 'When your club has three All Blacks, no-one cares much about me!'

He played for manawatu, but you state Counties Manukau at the beginning of the article and list Counties players, Sotutu, Roigard, & Papali'i as playing for Manawatu.

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Ed Pye 5 hours ago

Shamus Hurley-Langton: 'When your club has three All Blacks, no-one cares much about me!'

I think you might have some provinces mixed up there - Sotutu, Roigard and Papalii play for Counties, not Manawatu

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GP 7 hours ago

TJ Perenara's Black Rams Tokyo pull off big scalp in day of League One upsets

I hope Brave Lupus do well and indeed win the comp, as they did this year. So pleased for Todd Blackadder , a legend here in these parts, ( Canterbury/ Crusaders), country. Like wise the brilliant first-five Richie Mo'unga, who did it again since joining that team. Two guys I know well and were great with the people off the field, though in different era's. Though Toddy did coach Richie for one season in 2016. But I am talking there playing careers. It was fitting that they came against the Wild Knights in the Final coached by playing and coaching red and black legend Robbie Deans.Lots of great match ups amongst the Kiwi ex-pats in Japan.

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GrahamVF 7 hours ago

Does the next Wallabies coach have to be an Australian?

Hi Nic. Compliments of the season and a gery successful year to follow to you and yours. I know a psychiatrist very well who studied conspiracy theorists extensively and had several of them as patients in her practice. One of the chief characteristics is low self, esteem which is why in their belief system, is encapsulated a need for a villain to deflect their feelings of frustration at their own circumstance. They typically have more than one conspiracy theory. Climate change denial in this case and I wonder what else. Have a great new year and look forward to more of your great insights. And this year is the year I put Doc Craven's sayings - his one line gems - into a little booklet.

Does the next Wallabies coach have to be an Australian?

AllyOz 16 hours ago

List of Australian coaches who have coached Australia to a RWC win who were born in or coached Qld.

........

Note, Alan Jones was born in Queensland but all his high level coaching experience was in NSW.

Does the next Wallabies coach have to be an Australian?

AllyOz 16 hours ago

He had a higher winning percentage than the coach that preceded him and the two that followed him, so I think that is a fair call. Cheika did take a side to an RWC final in 2015 but then tailed off with series losses at home to England (and Ireland?).

Does the next Wallabies coach have to be an Australian?

AllyOz 16 hours ago

Will Will Skelton make the next World Cup age wise?

Does the next Wallabies coach have to be an Australian?

AllyOz 16 hours ago

We won the World Cup in 1991 under Bob Dwyer - but maybe you don't count that as he was a NS Welshman and a former Randwick coach. He was also the coach at the 1995 World Cup where we were, admittedly, a little disappointing, but had we defeated South Africa and won the pool then we would have had Manu Samoa, and that might have changed things markedly (rather than losing to a relatively stronger England in the QF).

John Eales, Phil Kearns, Dan Crowley, Jason Little and Tim Horan – were part of both the 1991 and 1999 Wallabies squads. So there are five players at least that were already World Cup Champions.

At least one of those was Nobody (John "Nobody's Perfect" Eales) - so I suppose you are right in some senses.

I have to say OJohn, as a fellow Australian and Queensland supporter, some of the stuff you put forward is an embarrassment to yourself, your state and your country.

Does the next Wallabies coach have to be an Australian?

AllyOz 16 hours ago

I think he will want to come home to Australia at some point, for family reasons, and perhaps to coach a rugby league team. Wayne Bennett has a 3 year contract at South Sydney and Trent Robinson (who Cheika coached with as an assistant for a short time) is only a young coach but if someone like the West Tigers don't have any luck with Benji Marshall, they might be tempted to take a look at him. Cheika has been reasonably successful in most things he has done in rugby coaching. I think he might have stayed on too long with Australia but I also think there was a fair bit going on with the PI players after the Israel Folau issue and a breakdown in support from Raelene Castle and the board and the imposition of Scott Johnson as coaching director and a different selection process that all might have played into that. Some of the biggest issues in 2019 were around selections at 9 and 10 (10 particularly I thought) and I think that was a significant issues for the Wallabies.

Does the next Wallabies coach have to be an Australian?

AllyOz 17 hours ago

As opposed to Mr 23% for our last home grown Australian coach.

Does the next Wallabies coach have to be an Australian?

AllyOz 17 hours ago

I will preface this comment by saying that I hope Joe Schmidt continues for as long as he can as I think he has done a tremendous job to date. He has, in some ways, made the job a little harder for himself by initially relying on domestic based players and never really going over the top with OS based players even when he relaxed his policy a little more. I really enjoy how the team are playing at the moment.

I think Les Kiss, because (1) he has a bit more international experience, (2) has previously coached with Schmidt and in the same setup as Schmidt, might provide the smoothest transition, though I am not sure that this necessarily needs to be the case.

I would say one thing though about OS versus local coaches. I have a preference for local coaches but not for the reason that people might suppose (certainly not for the reason OJohn will have opined - I haven't read all the way down but I think I can guess it).

Australia has produced coaches of international standing who have won World Cups and major trophies. Bob Dwyer, Rod Macqueen, Alan Jones, Michael Cheika and Eddie Jones. I would add John Connolly - though he never got the international success he was highly successful with Queensland against quality NZ opposition and I think you could argue, never really got the run at international level that others did (OJohn might agree with that bit). Some of those are controversial but they all achieved high level results. You can add to that a number of assistants who worked OS at a high level.

But what the lack of a clear Australian coach suggests to me is that we are no longer producing coaches of international quality through our systems. We have had some overseas based coaches in our system like Thorn and Wessels and Cron (though I would suggest Thorn was a unique case who played for Australia in one code and NZ in the other and saw himself as a both a NZer and a Queenslander having arrived here at around age 12). Cron was developed in the Australian system anyway, so I don't have a problem with where he was born.

But my point is that we used to have systems in Australia that produced world class coaches. The systems developed by Dick Marks, which adopted and adapted some of the best coaching training approaches at the time from around the world (Wales particularly) but focussed on training Australian coaches with the best available methods, in my mind (as someone who grew up and began coaching late in that era) was a key part of what produced the highly skilled players that we produced at the time and also that produced those world class coaches. I think it was slipping already by the time I did my Level II certificate in 2002 and I think Eddie Jones influence and the priorities of the executive, particularly John O'Neill, might have been the beginning of the end. But if we have good coaching development programmes at school and junior level that will feed through to representative level then we will have

I think this is the missing ingredient that both ourselves and, ironically, Wales (who gave us the bones of our coaching system that became world leading), is a poor coaching development system. Fix that and you start getting players developing basic skills better and earlier in their careers and this feeds through all the way through the system and it also means that, when coaching positions at all levels come up, there are people of quality to fill them, who feed through the system all the way to the top. We could be exporting more coaches to Japan and England and France and the UK and the USA, as we have done a bit in the past.

A lack of a third tier between SR and Club rugby might block this a little - but I am not sure that this alone is the reason - it does give people some opportunity though to be noticed and play a key role in developing that next generation of players coming through. And we have never been able to make the cost sustainable.

I don't think it matters that we have an OS coach as our head coach at the moment but I think it does tell us something about overall rugby ecosystem that, when a coaching appointment comes up, we don't have 3 or 4 high quality options ready to take over. The failure of our coaching development pathway is a key missing ingredient for me and one of the reasons our systems are failing.