Search results

based on the Barbarians squad named, and presuming you would expect a strong "Australia First" bias in the selection, you maybe have a lineup of: Wright, Anderson, Daugunu, Paisami, Pietch, O'Connor, Lonergan Lambert, Lonergan, Talakai, Neville, LSL (Lukhan Salakaia-Loto), Swinton, Uru, Wilson Nakamura, Kobayashi...

To offer a counterpoint: Samu & Fainga'a have also not been selected for the Barbarians. That's all 3 players involved in the A squad whose current contracts aren't domestic, no?

I think it's very unlikely that there isn't fairly widescale doping just on the fringes of pro pathways just about everywhere. The primary variability will be around scale and how exuberant local regulators and managing bodies are in investigating it.

Turning down Wobs is a just a touch different from turning down Aus A.

Lol

A non-comprehensive list of questions leadership will have to answer, and convince their stakeholders to support the answer are: How many teams? Is it a 8-12 team composition intending to keep costs minimal or a 12-16 team comp that starts ambitious but fully intends to let unsuccessful...

My suspicion is that the squad would have been formally submitted, else Arnold and Skelton would have probably been required for their Top14 teams in last weeks games.

Borthwick's England is now 3 from 9: two of those wins have come against Wales going through their own crisis, and only by 10 & 2 points, the third coming against Italy. Worse than the win-loss, they look system-less: I still think their best performance came against us in his first game in...

Everything might be underwater by then

IDK about Brisbane suburban grounds, but places like North Sydney Oval regularly host First Class and List A Blues Fixtures. And IDK how acrimonious the league teams would be, but places like Leichardt and Redcliffe would surely be options given the limited fixtures they host?

See that's a reasonable attitude to come into the idea of this with. Replacing Professional rugby with a domestic club competition would probably work as laid out in many places. But there seems to be... a failure to acknowledge that it's not smashing together the SS and the QPR, throwing...

Was lucky to be by that much tbh

Which 9 teams get culled to create a 12 team comp, presuming the Tuggers get invited along and nobody from Perth/Melbourne does?

South Africa blew them away but it was interesting to see a NZ team reffed like an ordinary team for once.

A genuinely stupid amount of money supposedly.

Pennies on the dollar supporting the rebs in exchange for Bledisloes and BILs tests at the G is quite different from the sheer scale of short term infrastructure improvements required to host a Comm games.

Have you watched a professional game not involving the Wallabies in the last 4 years?

That looks like a 50 minute team if I've ever seen one. Not that a lot of the other options would change that.

I love a great anti-establishment narrative, but we're barely 6 years on from the Force being chosen as the one to cut because they signed up for the ARUs National Oversight shenanigans. No surprise it's taken half a decade to get to this point again.

I wonder if Mason will be given the lead for this Japan tour as a "yes or no" proposition: if he's ready to be the backup we "mostly" leave the back is, if he isn't then we pursue someone like Hegarty or an NPC bloke as a 1 or 2 season option. Unless we're gonna pull a rabbit out of a hat and...