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Agreed, although I was pleasantly surprised by his eagerness to contest the ball in the old pre-release fashion. Maybe he watched rugby back in the George Smith era.

Is there anywhere else where you post this kind of stuff? I think I've seen your articles on the Roar.

Given time I think he would have been a good international player. Even on the short timeframe that he had, he ended up being limited but not awful.

I accept everything you said about Hayne being able to make an easy transition given enough time, but I just don't buy the myth of the abundant league superstar. Hayne is a freak, and lots of other league players are very very good, but heaps of guys who play at Origin level are nothing special...

That's a crazy comment - are you saying league players are so magical that a regular Wallaby couldn't compete with the likes of Will Chambers?

It might happen (Leicester City won the EPL, so I'm not ruling anything out in sport) but I'd be really surprised purely from a conditioning point of view. By the time he's in decent enough shape the Olympics would have started - that's too much of a gamble to take.

Sportsbet are paying $3.50 for him to make the Fiji Olympics squad - I think that's probably about right.

They'd have a useful principal/coach, too, in Sir Graham.

Legendary, thanks.

I wanted to check in with people about Pro Rugby in the US. I've been watching highlights and the standard seems pretty high. Particularly, some of the handling out wide has been pretty exceptional (which surprised me a bit - as that kind of skill-level often seems to be the last thing to...

Far out that's good. I met a rugby player from Spain once - he reckons there's a pretty solid sub-culture of it over there. Partly driven by the south of France, partly by interest in Argentina, and partly just a standard university campus rugby club scene.

I know I'm not saying anything controversial here, but I continue to be stunned that Chris Rattue has a job. In fact, between him and Veitchy, NZ sports commentary is actually a pretty bleak landscape.

One swallow (in this instance, the swallow is a 9-try flogging) does not a summer make. The past four years have yielded: 16-12, 18-8, 10-18, 16-12 (again), 14-6, 10-12, 8-12, 6-4... Hell, even last year managed a 10-11. Compared to typical NRL scores, those are very low. It suggests that the...

I think that's a pretty fair summary. I've always also thought that league (at least at the NRL-level) is about very good players beating pretty average players. Because of 16 teams and the salary cap, every side has a whole bunch of fairly mediocre players, and the likes of Thurston etc...

Also, I acknowledge that a kiwi TV show about Hawke's Bay is literally the least appropriate thing possible to post in a thread titled 'Rugby news from unexpected places'.

This is totally off-topic, but I got a real laugh from this scene in the Almighty Johnsons. For anyone who hasn't seen it, the Almighty Johnsons is a kiwi TV show about the Norse gods being reincarnated in Hawke's Bay - it's a mix of absolute crap and genuine genius. This scene is them meeting...

He was talking about the London 7s, not the Sydney 7s. Although I am worried that the NSW Government (with its opposition to anything fun) is going to try and crack down on this. Some of the police comments afterwards about having to kick out ~80 people each day weren't encouraging.

This looked like a decent match - was it?

Between this, and the replacement of Ferdinand the Bull with a bloke in a bull suit, does that mean there are no more actual animal mascots in the ITM Cup?

Crazy. With the AFL and NRL just a few weeks away, and Auckland 9s this weekend, the back four pages of the Telegraph are all rugby union. Goes to show - if we put on good product (like the Wallabies at the WC) the papers will start paying attention.