Victory will lift confidence at the start of the Wallaby’s tour of Europe but their Murrayfield performance was underwhelmingFor much of his reign as the Wallaby’s head coach, Dave Rennie has urged the rest of us to focus on his team’s performance rather than the scoreboard. Wins and losses are how most elite sports teams are measured, but the patterns and shapes mattered just as much. At least that’s been the message from the man in charge.Not this time. A messy and disjointed affair, littered with handling errors and misplaced passes, ended with Australia edging a contest that they probably should have lost. They conceded more tries, made less carries into contact, lost the battles for possession and territory, were...
Australia must find form ahead of next year’s World Cup but face a tough assignment in the first match of their European tourAfter their spluttering winter of three wins from nine starts, the Wallabies are now in Europe for a five-Test Spring tour they hope can springboard them into contention for the 2023 World Cup in September. The big bounce must start against Scotland early this Sunday morning (AEST 3.30am) at Murrayfield where Australia haven’t won since 2016 and were pipped 15-13 before a crowd of 63,000 in November.Scotland, ranked sixth in the world, start favourites against the visitors (ninth, their lowest ranking of the professional era) but in their 33 Tests over 95 years, Australia hold a 21-12 winning...
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....
Dr Paul McCrory’s work shaped concussion policy across global sport for the past 20 years – but organisations have been misledThe words land with a slap. “There is no scientific evidence that sustaining several concussions over a sporting career will necessarily result in permanent damage.” They are from a December 2001 editorial in the British Journal of Sports Medicine, called “When to retire after concussion?”It goes on to say that it is “neuromythology” that a player ought to retire after suffering multiple brain injuries. “The unstated fear behind this approach is that an athlete suffering repeated concussions will suffer a gradual cognitive decline similar to the so called punch-drunk syndrome or Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy seen in boxers. Based on published...