Top 14 2020/21 club-by-club season preview: Bayonne

Boy that is some squad, really looking forward to this tour.

Go the Aussies.!!!

I wouldn’t have picked Marcus for the squad, but I wouldn’t have selected Ford either. Not sure what you think this proves - Marcus isn’t good enough for England, and he isn’t doing well in the premiership or europe, he’s been selected in a squad but we’ll see how it goes when he is given game time!

Ha ha ha.

Oooer.

Where is Little ford too.

No idea .

I rest my case

And against CAN & IRE, we didn’t bother structuring the grunt work up front. We were running around like headless chickens from the word go. Against CAN we had 59% possession but only 41% territory. And they made 247 tackles to our 117. Clearly we spent too much time running around in circles in our own half.

The IRE flankers feasted off our poor cleans & had an immense game, both scoring 2 tries each. Their other try was from their hooker. We on the other hand flashed the ball around our backs, looked amazing at times, but lacked sustained physicality & grunt in the forward battle.

Also, given FRA's recent one point loss to ENG in 6N, I now regard them as serious opposition. A huge step up from WXV1 2024 when we thrashed them.

I see Leti as a bench impact player. Portia wants to play 13 but she’s nowhere near ready for the nuances of that role in tests. Some work-ons: setting up outsides, defense awareness/strategy, chip, grubber, pass, run it up the guts, creating space . . . 2nd nature decision making under pressure. Still good enough to start on the wing. Stacey Waaka's still our top #13 imo.

Coles is the covering tackler and his involvement is 3 fold:

1. He tackles VDF and stops his momentum taking him over the line but is not supporting his bodyweight with his feet. He is off his feet and playing the player and the ball on the ground.

2. He rather strategically lands on VDF and fails to release him (even if not ‘probably’ scoring, VDF could have formed a ruck which could have been resourced by Byrne, Gibson-Park or Lowe who are all close by).

3. He also knocks the ball on with his hand in the act of ‘tackling’ VDF. He follows through on the ground and his trailing knee also hits the ball but it was his hand that did it first.

For me it should have been a penalty try but doesn’t change the fact that Leinster should have already won the game in the last 10 mins which was the only period they were on top in terms of pressure.

Sledging and posturing is very much a part of the game - “four more years”/"just a **** richie mccaw”/any swan dive celebration/English yelling when they win minor penalties/etc etc. Cricket has much the same when a wicket keeper chats in a batsman’s ears, but no one complains about it. Just because we can’t hear what goes on a ruck or maul, or see what goes on, doesn’t mean it doesn’t go on. Sport is emotional. Let’s not pretend that rugby has a history of behaving like absolute gentleman before the final whistle goes off.

The spirit of rugby…now this is an interesting one. What does that mean? 2-3 years ago, the 6-2/7-1 split was against the spirit of rugby, but now it is used by club and country. Does this mean the spirit of rugby can change? In 1974, the Lions had an infamous Call 99. Today, teams are still getting into fights. Other sports don’t do this. Is this the spirit of rugby? I think this phrase is one of those useful ones that means everything and nothing and can be used by both sides of the fence, as well as the fence itself, to justify what they want to see. But perhaps we should not be looking at Pollock, but at ourselves. Are we (you) all not giving a self-described wind up merchant exactly what he wants? I think this conservative group of sports fans needs to realise that just bc they have viewed rugby a certain way for a long time, does not mean that it necessarily needs to be viewed that way for ever and ever amen. That’s gatekeeping and the generations to come don’t like or respect it. As rugby culture breaks into new markets, it needs to constantly adjust.

If a penalty try was awarded and Leinster went on to win the final the same way, they’d be immortals. Free haircuts for life. The style of play wouldn’t have been any different just the margins by which it’s success is measured.

Frawley’s narrowly missed drop goal at the death last final. Could have won as easily as they lost without a style being found out.

The governance of the Welsh and Irish unions is not comparable. On any level.

On one hand talking about expanding for commercial reasons, but then saying younger squad members would play giving big names a rest making it more for development purposes?

The problem with SRP is it serves two masters - fans who want a good competition to watch, but also the national teams in developing players so they can go on to become international players.

The case for maximising young player development:

A major problem NZ and Australia have is at U20s. AR and NZR would be best served by investing in proper U20 super rugby competition that runs in conjunction with Super Rugby, rather than the one-off carnival style thing that happens at the moment. 20 year olds coming out of France and England in particular, but also France are noticeably more developed than the equivalent players from NZ, Australia and even SA.

NZ and Australia probably both have one too many teams in SR. If you’re taking a long term view they are best served by cutting teams from the comp now and improving the quality even more. Although MP have been good this year there is also an argument for cutting them too, and reducing to 8 teams that all play each other home and away in a round robin. It would be a ridiculously strong competition with a lot of depth if all the best players are redistributed.

This in conjunction with a full U20s competition (possibly playing just one round rather than 2) would make NZ and Australia international teams much stronger with a lot more depth.

But that solution would make less money and cost more.

NPC would need to be fully amateur or semi-pro at best in this model. If you cross reference the losses NZR posted today with the costs they have previously published about operating the NPC, you can attribute a huge amount, if not all of the losses, to the NPC. At the moment this is putting way too much money into a failing high performance competition at the expense of development.