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'Pretty juicy' - Dombrandt vs Tuisue in battle of the Test hopefuls

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Harlequins No8 Alex Dombrandt and London Irish opposite number Albert Tuisue know all about international rejection and will use their head-to-head clash tomorrow to continue battling for test rugby recognition.

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Dombrandt has just been crowned Premiership Player of the Month and despite a series of storming performances in club colours he has failed to convince Eddie Jones that he is ready to fill the England Six Nations squad void created by Billy Vunipola’s fourth broken arm.

Uncapped Dombrandt is yet to experience test rugby while Tuisue has played seven times for Fiji having given up a career in the Island’s police force to follow his dream. Despite breaking into the Fiji team under coach John McKee, Tuisue had to deal with the bitter disappointment of failing to make the final 2019 Rugby World Cup squad in Japan. With McKee now having been replaced by former Scotland coach and current Montpellier director of rugby Vern Cotter, the door could now be open for the hard-running ball carrier to earn a recall.

Like Dombrandt, Tuisue knows that impressing in the Premiership is the only way he can move up the rankings and Less Kiss, the London Irish head coach, believes his No8 has all the attributes to impress Cotter when he takes over as Fiji coach in the summer.

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WATCH: RugbyPass put some questions to new All Blacks Coach Ian Foster on Sky Sports show, The Breakdown.

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Kiss has seen Tuisue carry the ball 117 times, including 15 during the morale boosting away win at Northampton for an Irish side that is still evolving following the arrival of high profile players including Wallaby test stars Adam Coleman and Sekope Kepu. Irish have just returned from a warm weather training camp near Alicante and now they must try to build on that win over Northampton by subduing Dombrandt and his fellow Quins at the Twickenham Stoop.

Kiss is relishing the clash of the 18stones No8’s and told RugbyPass: “It is going to be a really good battle and Albert floats under the radar for us because he does a lot of the dirty work and carrying. He takes a lot of pressure off the other backrow guys and when we first got Albert over here we thought he had done enough to make the World Cup but he wasn’t selected. That hurt him a bit and he came back to us as a man on a mission and playing in the Premiership has to be good for him going forward.

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Dombrandt Tuisue
O’Brien leaves the field in 2016 (Getty Images)

“Vern (Cotter)is going to see a lot of Albert playing at this level and the great thing about him is he is robust and keeps trucking along. Dombrandt is another beast and he is a good footballer and the battle between them off the base of the scrum is going to be massive. The battle of the back rows will be pretty juicy.

“We are exploring who we are at the moment and Sekope has only been with us for five weeks and that win at Northampton had an impact. You need to go through tough situations and forge something worthy from it an the most pleasing thing was the players fought so hard and to get the victory has to do something for confidence. However, this game can give you a kick in the butt. We trained near Alicante because we didn’t have a getaway pre-season and felt that the most important time to go away was when everyone is here.

“Because we have had to drip-feed new players in has given the season its own character and we had a wobble over the Christmas period but we now have everyone involved.”

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That “everyone” includes Ireland international Sean O’Brien, one of the club’s major summer signings who is still battling to overcome injury. The good news for tenth-placed Irish is that the flanker could be in the mix in a month which makes the second half of the season really significant even if the threat of relegation has been removed due to Saracens’ fall from grace. A fit-again O’Brien allied to the summer move to their new home at the Brentford stadium makes this an exciting time for the club.

Kiss added: “Sean is coming along and has done some full-on contact work and hopefully over the next month we should get some clarity about the timeline. He is getting closer.

“When I heard that Saracens were going to be relegated the alarms bells rang because this game doesn’t give you anything and you wondered if people would take their foot off the accelerator. Thankfully, that hasn’t been the case. I think there is still pressure because you don’t want to come second last in the league.“

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J
JW 4 hours ago
Does South Africa have a future in European competition?

I rated Lowe well enough to be an AB. Remember we were picking the likes of George Bridge above such players so theres no disputing a lot of bad decisions have been made by those last two coaches. Does a team like the ABs need a finicky winger who you have to adapt and change a lot of your style with to get benefit from? No, not really. But he still would have been a basic improvement on players like even Savea at the tail of his career, Bridge, and could even have converted into the answer of replacing Beauden at the back. Instead we persisted with NMS, Naholo, Havili, Reece, all players we would have cared even less about losing and all because Rieko had Lowe's number 11 jersey nailed down.


He was of course only 23 when he decided to leave, it was back in the beggining of the period they had started retaining players (from 2018 onwards I think, they came out saying theyre going to be more aggressive at some point). So he might, all of them, only just missed out.


The main point that Ed made is that situations like Lowe's, Aki's, JGP's, aren't going to happen in future. That's a bit of a "NZ" only problem, because those players need to reach such a high standard to be chosen by the All Blacks, were as a country like Ireland wants them a lot earlier like that. This is basically the 'ready in 3 years' concept Ireland relied on, versus the '5 years and they've left' concept' were that player is now ready to be chosen by the All Blacks (given a contract to play Super, ala SBW, and hopefully Manu).


The 'mercenary' thing that will take longer to expire, and which I was referring to, is the grandparents rule. The new kids coming through now aren't going to have as many gp born overseas, so the amount of players that can leave with a prospect of International rugby offer are going to drop dramatically at some point. All these kiwi fellas playing for a PI, is going to stop sadly.


The new era problem that will replace those old concerns is now French and Japanese clubs (doing the same as NRL teams have done for decades by) picking kids out of school. The problem here is not so much a national identity one, than it is a farm system where 9 in 10 players are left with nothing. A stunted education and no support in a foreign country (well they'll get kicked out of those countries were they don't in Australia).


It's the same sort of situation were NZ would be the big guy, but there weren't many downsides with it. The only one I can think was brought up but a poster on this site, I can't recall who it was, but he seemed to know a lot of kids coming from the Islands weren't really given the capability to fly back home during school xms holidays etc. That is probably something that should be fixed by the union. Otherwise getting someone like Fakatava over here for his last year of school definitely results in NZ being able to pick the cherries off the top but it also allows that player to develop and be able to represent Tonga and under age and possibly even later in his career. Where as a kid being taken from NZ is arguably going to be worse off in every respect other than perhaps money. Not going to develop as a person, not going to develop as a player as much, so I have a lotof sympathy for NZs case that I don't include them in that group but I certainly see where you're coming from and it encourages other countries to think they can do the same while not realising they're making a much worse experience/situation.

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