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London Irish signing casts further doubt on Anthony Watson move

Anthony Watson (Photo by Malcolm Couzens/Getty Images)

London Irish has secured the signing of Tom Collins from Northampton Saints for the upcoming 2023/24 Gallagher Premiership season.

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The move casts further doubt on the possibility of the London club signing England star Anthony Watson from Leicester Tigers. Irish – who are set to lose England rookie Ollie Hassell-Collins to Tigers – had been linked with signing the British & Irish Lions star in recent weeks, but Kidney has already implied Watson might come with too big a price tag.

The signing of Collins certainly doesn’t help matters for Watson.

Collins, who has been a regular with Saints’ first team for the past decade, will be leaving his hometown club to join London Irish this offseason. The Englishman has played 144 games for Northampton, scoring 48 tries for a total of 240 points during his time at Franklin’s Gardens.

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A product of the Northampton Academy system, Collins was also a former England age-grade representative and part of the 2013 U20 Six Nations winning side. His breakout season came in 2014 and saw him named Premiership Breakthrough Player of the Year.

“I’ll always be grateful to Northampton, it’s the Club I have grown up supporting and was lucky enough to play for, but I felt my time was coming to an end and a new opportunity was on the horizon,” Collins said. “Irish reached out and I was really encouraged by the project the club is working under with Declan [Kidney] and Les [Kiss] , I feel like it will be a great fit for me.

“I’m proud to now call myself an Exile and can’t wait to link up with the boys at Hazelwood.”

London Irish director of rugby Declan Kidney was pleased to have signed the 28-year-old try-scorer. “I’d like to welcome Tom to London Irish, he has shown in his time with Northampton what a capable player he is and having him as our player now is a great privilege.

“We are really excited to be welcoming in a player of Tom’s calibre and we are all confident he will become a valuable member of our squad at Irish.”

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J
JW 1 hour 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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