Recent content by Omar Comin'

Personally I think a 6 team competition is the minimum and can work, especially as it coincides with a far greater emphasis on producing American players. Maybe if you accept this competition is not going to be some big commercial success any time soon, and see it more in terms of high...

I can't see it happening. All these teams are really far away from South America. To fly from LA/Seattle/Chicago etc to Buenos Aires takes at least 14 hours. Pretty tough and expensive for a semi-pro competition.

I think it's probably more that they want flashy 'highlight reel' type players and athletes. They'll probably sign more Fijian union players alone than the total number of NRL players, it's just that the league journos have latched onto the story. I bet they target some other crossover...

I read that Brazil were missing a few key players against Paraguay as those games fell outside of the official release window, so they may well be stronger in the final qualifier than Paraguay would have been. It will be interesting to see how their level compares with Namibia and Belgium, I...

I think that's pretty likely, though not impossible it could be quicker. To justify a 32 team world cup (so 8 pools instead of 6) you'd want the 16th ranked team to be at least as strong as the 12th ranked team is now (Wales), the 24th to be as strong as the current 18th ranked team (Tonga) and...

Belgium making it would be good for the growth of the sport, but I'd still probably prefer Samoa to qualify. Samoa with a full strength squad and some warm up games behind them have the potential to be a threat to tier 1 teams, while the others don't. And having more quarter final threats is...

Not infinite, there's a 60 second shot clock to score or you turnover the ball.

Wests Magpies beat Randwick in 2015 under the same rules. Union rules in the attacking half does favour the union side, but it's very continuous which suits the league conditioning, and the league side will make breaks from their own half and score some long range tries. Even when tackled they...

It's not ideal, but I think they're roughly in the same league as most of our options, or at least not far off. We don't have anyone who's kicking at 80%+ year after year, and Sua'ali'i kicked at over 75% in the NRL.

Yeah it's the timing - if they played Italy they'd have to play 4 test matches in 14 days, and it's not like they can risk rotating players in the final qualifying tournament.

A good thing for Carter now is that the Wallabies have a couple of other legitimate goal kicking options in other positions in JAS and Ryan Lonergan. That would take a lot of pressure off him. I wouldn't be surprised to see him get game time in November.

They're going to risk hundreds of millions of dollars in the hope of creating a successful new competition. If it fails as badly as most seem to expect, those investors will lose all their money in 2-3 years and World Rugby will lose next to nothing. Because they're fighting them, the 2027 world...

That's a good point. But I guess if it worked, it would really only involve the very, very top players in the game. Mostly guys who've already developed into world class players, and for whom less games (and perhaps faster but less physical games) may even be beneficial outside of test rugby -...

Do you not think it likely that rugby ends up with 1 or 2 globally popular, mega club leagues that dominates all others? This seems to be what happens in other sports. I'm very sceptical an F1 style traveling league could work in a sport like rugby, but it's arguably preferable to a couple of...

Haha well maybe, I'd like to know! I feel like there's a bit of a difference between something being 93% Saudi owned and controlled vs say 20%, or the Saudi's owning 1 team. I think there is a fair bit of virtue signalling that goes on though to be honest. I haven't seen too many English...