Ex-Bath lock Levi Douglas seals Pro D2 move after Japan stint

(Bledisloe abbreviated obviously)

I'm gonna write a song called that, it'll be a blues song obviously.! 😁

What would happen if Joe Schmidt becomes very successful as a WB coach? Will be silently withdrawn from office?

Stuart Lancaster was on the verge of recruiting Wayne Smith for England back in 2012 but it got vetoed by the powers that be in NZ... It was felt England might develop too fast!

ABs won the red card period (8-3) when down to 14 in the last final. They bottled it. ABs of old would never have let a team off the hook like that. Not letting Richie punt the last penalty. Huge mistake.

Barnes didn't miss the forward pass in 2007. The TMO missed it.

The boks poisoned ya's in 95. No arguments with that. Those sneaky syringe boks.

Purely banter, lad. Met plenty of kiwis over the years. Never met a bad one. Super craic all of them.

Be good.

Coach education has unfortunately fallen well behind League in Rugby, and the spirit of cooperation within the Australian Institute of Sport has been lost.

Phil Larder told me at there were already 7k League accredited coaches in Aussie in 1983.

When Dick Marks was in charge at the AIS there was a massive emphasis on coach education at all levels, but now it seems to have evaporated. They are the bedrock of the game, esp at unpaid levels like schools and colleges.

Phil Larder once told me he went an event in Australia where 3oo new League coaches were give their accreditation at one time. By 1983 there were already 7,000 of them in Aussie thanks to Peter Corcoran.

Can rugby show hte same investment? I seriously doubt it.

As a player of league and union and follower and occasional coach at basic levels I can say it is if anything worse.

My take is that somehow or other once we had gone pro, and become a top 2 or 3 team (early naughties) the hubris took over.

At high levels (NSW and Sydney RU in my experience), the money that had previously trickled to things like coach the coaches and special days was redirected to "elite" players and (worst of all) previously unpaid board directors.

We were left with "I want to be a Wallaby" stickers!

There was an actual belief that we had become good because of some inate natural skill we had.

No acknowledgement of coaches or hard work or any activity at all outside of Private Schools.

The ant-league sentiment was palpable, and that alone drove kids playing in my son's West Habour Pirates team away from the game. They were told that they couldn't play League on Sundays and Union on Saturdays by the SRU.

Coaches (including assistant coaches like me) were told to force kids to go to Waratah games after their game. Coach the coaches was replaced by a SRU chap talking over us at training and telling the boys not to tackle low like "mungos", throw the lightest kid up in lineouts, not the tallest. There were many ridiculous things that the kids just laughed at.

The inability to pick out a good player or teach basic skills to anyone went with handing coaching responsibility at representative levels to chaps based on the school they went to, irrespective of whether they had ever played or ever coached.

The money with professionalism had the completely opposite effect to what it should have had when it came to trivial things like skills, coaching and selection.

Rave over...

But it is too much for ref to monitor. Just say players ahead of the ball cannot interfere until the kicker [or another player behind him] moves past them.