Sam Jones shines after England calls, the Kingsholm pitch works against Gloucester, and have Leicester become too friendly for their own good?If table-topping Wasps maintain their current league average by sticking 40 points on second-placed Saracens this weekend, they really will establish themselves as the team to catch this season. England will also take notice, particularly if Sam Jones and Nathan Hughes enjoy themselves against Billy Vunipola and co as much as they did against a second-best Harlequins side. Wasps’ director of rugby, Dai Young, compares Jones, 24, to a young Richard Hill and believes he could fill the openside flanker role if required in the autumn internationals: “He could do the job that [James Haskell] does well … he’s...
Clubs in England and France have enjoyed a substantial increase in TV money – but rugby union must stay in touch with reality to avoid a disconnect with fansAs English football struggles to find its way through the clouds blown up by the Sam Allardyce affair, it is perhaps as well for rugby union that there is barely a transfer market to speak of and no scope for third party ownership. Continue reading...
Significant progress in tackling concussion has been made in the last five years giving hope that Gladwell’s grim vision of the future may be avoidableWhenever a fresh study on the dangers of concussion in sport hits the headlines it reminds me of the ominous prophecy from Malcolm Gladwell: that playing American football will one day become akin to joining the army. “We will disclose the risks and dare people to play,” he warned in 2013. “That’s what the army does. That’s what football is going to become.” In this future mushrooming evidence of traumatic brain injuries will turn the National Football League into a “ghettoised sport” – Gladwell’s words – avoided by the middle classes but still grimly embraced by...
The relentless treadmill of the professional game is leaving a trail of battered bodies and a sport in need of a streamlined Test scheduleThe perfect global rugby season will never exist. Well, maybe it does on paper but not in reality. There are competing hemispheres, unions and clubs to pacify, not to mention different financial imperatives, audiences, time-zones and ambitions. Sticking half-a-dozen adolescent ferrets down your trousers simultaneously is slightly less problematic.Now imagine all six ferrets arriving with their own legal advisers and you begin to grasp the unenviable situation facing World Rugby as it attempts to broker a schedule that suits everyone. Small wonder the initial proposals to have emerged from negotiations have fallen short of jaw-dropping. A suspension...
Bristol’s trials continue, Fotuali’i shines again for Bath and Saints show title credentials even in losingLeicester sit in the top four having won two of their three opening games but they could just as easily be bottom staring at three opening defeats. As was the case in their opening game at Gloucester they should have lost at Newcastle, saved only by a mishit drop-goal by Joel Hodgson with the game’s final kick and a plethora of other missed Falcons opportunities. “At times they made us look very ordinary and there were also times when we made ourselves look very ordinary,” admitted Richard Cockerill, the Tigers’ director of rugby. Newcastle can at least take some solace from the manner in which...