Our best XV of this campaign contains players ranging from the experienced Owen Farrell to rising stars such as Cadan Murley15 Santiago Carreras (Gloucester)The 25-year-old Puma has had a remarkable past nine months. Helping Argentina to beat the All Blacks in New Zealand and England at Twickenham is a double to cherish and, having also worn the No 10 and 11 jerseys for Gloucester, the inventive playmaker had to be squeezed into this team somewhere. “It could sound quite arrogant but I want to be the best player in the world,” he said earlier this season. He is already an eye-catching talent.14 Mateo Carreras (Newcastle)No relation to his compatriot but the Tucumán-born winger has made a similarly positive impression on...
Club struggles in a shifting financial landscape mean it is harder to attract top overseas players to the English domestic gameStarter for 10: has the Premiership ever seen a more naturally-gifted player than Charles Piutau? Others have scored more tries, made more tackles or influenced their team’s fortunes more significantly, but has there ever been anyone to match Piutau’s capacity to thrill, to produce those moments that stir the senses?On Saturday he makes his last appearance for Bristol against Gloucester after five years at the club. He arrived to great fanfare, the first £1m player and as the totem of the Premiership’s marquee player policy, but the ledger will show only a qualified success. He was injured at the start...
After being made redundant by Wasps, the England flanker could be a catalyst for RFU to take back control of playersViewed through the narrow prism of current events, one name leaps off England’s squad list for the autumn series. A penny for poor Jack Willis’s thoughts as he seeks to balance playing at the highest level with being made redundant at Wasps. Suddenly, he is also that rarest of unicorns: an English international primarily employed by his national union, not his club.Forget about central contracts being a future possibility because in effect they are already here. If the Rugby Football Union really wanted to be bold it would jump in and offer Willis – and possibly one or two of...
The sport’s days of reckoning are here, and everyone from the RFU to reckless club owners is responsible for the painWe could start with the sheer catastrophic waste of it all. All those years, all those hundreds of millions of pounds squandered. All the fudged decisions and fingers-crossed accounting. The oceans of bullshit, the overflowing reservoirs of self-interest. And yet that’s still not the most upsetting element. Worse is the numbing pain for everyone associated with two disintegrating clubs and the human cost of English rugby’s days of reckoning.There will be some looking at the travails of Wasps and Worcester and giving a resigned shrug. Of course they were spending beyond their means. Of course that couldn’t go on indefinitely....
Financial woes and player welfare concerns abound but rugby union remains a compelling spectacle when everything clicksEvery now and again on social media a video clip will emerge of a lonely surfer trying to catch a skyscraper-high wave off the coast of Portugal. Time it right and the long ride down is truly epic. Get it slightly wrong and the consequences of that misjudgment do not bear thinking about.In many ways the 2022-23 Premiership season feels broadly similar. Increasingly there are jagged financial rocks everywhere and the game’s physicality continues to make it unsuitable for the faint of heart. Continue reading...