Traditional heavyweights are lacking clout as wealthy backers elsewhere discover that bulk is no longer beautiful in today’s faster gameThe Thomond Park spectators exhorted their players to stand up and fight before the start of Saturday’s Champions Cup match against Leicester, a year after many of them stood up and walked out as the Tigers completed the first leg of a European double over the Irish province.This year Leicester sat down and capitulated, not for the first time on the road in the last three seasons. Their director of rugby Richard Cockerill afterwards pointed out that his club, like Munster, had had ups and downs in a decade when the landscape of the game changed. Related: Dylan Hartley banned for...
The hooker can have no complaint at his six-week ban given his poor disciplinary record and the fact that rugby is cracking down on tackles to the headRugby has always been a game of sliding doors. What if Dylan Hartley had started for Northampton in the Champions’ Cup game against Leinster last Friday night, rather than steaming in off the bench with a point to prove? Would he have administered a swinging arm to the head of Sean O’Brien in a Test-match arena, where his recent disciplinary record is good? Would there have been as much fuss if he was not the current England captain and a potential contender for Lions captain?Questions, questions. What we do know is that Hartley...
Dylan Hartley’s greatest opponent is himself, Jamie George and Owen Farrell can both replace him and it was a good weekend for the Irish If Dylan Hartley had not been sent off we would all be talking about Leinster’s excellence. Perhaps we still should be; even when they were down to their third-choice fly-half the Irish side looked revitalised, for which credit must go both to the players and, in particular, their reshuffled coaching panel. The contrast with Northampton’s flat-footed start was particularly glaring, as the home skipper Tom Wood made abundantly clear after his side’s 37-10 home drubbing. Ultimately though, Hartley’s 58th-minute red card for a forearm smash to the back of Sean O’Brien’s head was the kind of...
Against Leicester the Northampton wing hit his head hard, went limp, and lay motionless – so why was he allowed to play on in the match?George North never much liked to talk about concussion. In 2015 he was ordered to take a four-week lay-off because he had taken four bad blows to the head in five months. In the end it was nine weeks before North could say he felt OK and almost six months before he was able to play. In one of the few in-depth interviews he did give on this topic, to Rugby World, North explained that he considered quitting for good. “I thought: ‘I don’t deserve this, I don’t need this hassle in my life.’” At...
Maro Itoje has a perfect mentor at Saracens, home truths for Exeter and New Zealand-born Joey Carbery shows he has a bright future at LeinsterYou can read Robert Kitson’s tribute to Anthony Foley, the Munster head coach who died aged 42 before his side’s scheduled match against Racing 92 in Paris on Sunday, here.Sometimes it is less the number of games a sportsman plays than the heart and soul he pours into the jersey he wears. Anthony Foley had the rare stamina and inner passion to satisfy both criteria, which is why the desperately sad news of his death at the age of 42 cast such a depressing shadow over European rugby. Foley was not just any old retired player;...