How can Ireland be thriving on broadly the same levels of union income and exactly the same number of pro teams?To a casual observer – and in rugby there are plenty of those – the situation is bewildering. Wales have won more grand slams in the Six Nations era than anyone bar France, who drew level with them on four last season. They boast one of the biggest and most charismatic stadiums in the world and – more of an intangible, but very real all the same – rugby runs more deeply through the nation’s culture than anywhere else in the northern hemisphere.Yet Welsh rugby’s facade has imploded this past fortnight. Sitting bottom of the Six Nations table after two...
Hosts’ passion and intensity could not be questioned after a turbulent week off the pitch but it was still not enough Whatever else is wrong with Welsh rugby, they’ve never lacked heart. You could hear it in Katherine Jenkins’ singing, which must have shattered windows in Aberystwyth, and feel it in the heat of the fireworks that spiralled into the bright blue sky beyond the open roof. For all their failings, the Welsh Rugby Union still know how to organise a show at the Principality Stadium. And you could see what it all meant, too, in the faces of those two old friends and teammates, Alun Wyn Jones, 37, and Ken Owens, 36, as they roared the final words of...
In a World Cup year, the coaches of Australia’s five provinces are as much on notice as the playersThe first wave of final auditions for the Wallabies 2023 World Cup squad is about to begin, as Super Rugby Pacific kicks off on Friday with the ACT Brumbies v NSW Waratahs. With Australia seventh in the world rugby rankings, there’s plenty to do and not much time to do it - there is little more than six months until the first pool game in France on 8 September.Already, new Wallabies coach Eddie Jones has likened the task to “a smash-and-grab job”. Luckily, Rugby Australia has hired the wiliest thief in the game: a man with an 82% win-rate at four World...
The Tigers’ win over Saracens on Sunday was a timely reminder that elite sport is not just a matter of youthful exuberanceProfessional rugby is increasingly a numbers game. Pounds, euros, metres carried, kick percentages, set-piece efficiency. Some of it is useful information, some of it clutters the imagination. It is also worth keeping in mind that one of the greatest strengths of a top player cannot be fully measured. To borrow the old saying, it’s not the size of the dog that matters, it’s the size of the fight in the dog.You can, in other words, be the best athlete in the world, with the most chiselled physique and the best gym scores. And you can still be swept aside...
As off-field tensions reach new levels, you have to wonder if the modern international governing body is fit for purposeGot to say, I’m intrigued to see how the Netflix Six Nations documentary covers the Welsh rugby crisis. Given that the Wales team are refusing to cooperate with the Netflix crew, denying them access to team meetings and even turfing them out of Alun Wyn Jones’s press conference last week, you have to wonder what sort of material is going to be cobbled together. Perhaps Wales will simply be pixelated out of the final product: a ghostly apparition at the edges of the screen, implied but never physically present, which, you might argue, is a pretty good way of describing their...