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I think we'd beat either Scotland or Japan without too much trouble. Japan making the quarters would be incredible. However Samoa should be winning this game easily and are only up by 3. And Scotland are a 2nd half team.

Very silly from that Samoan guy holding back Laidlaw. It's not like he was ever going to stop the try. Just a stupid way to turn 7 points into 3.

And just another stupid, unnecessary penalty gives Scotland the opportunity to score from the maul.

Geez, lucky he didn't hit his head there, would have been a red card for sure. Very dumb. Crucial 10 minutes coming up here.

With Samoa's discipline as it is they'll probably need to score about 6 tries to win.

Wow some great tries from Samoa!! But geez, if they end up losing this by 7 or less than they'll have themselves to blame for that absolute gift of a try they gave Scotland. I can imagine Eddie Jones and Japan watching this through their fingers!

Basically the developing unions need to be included in more meaningful tournaments outside of world cups. But they also have to be able to access their best players. The 6 Nations is unlikely to change and the Rugby Championship unlikely to expand in the short term. But I would love to see a...

There's 20 teams now, it would be going from 20 to 24. Give it 8 years (2019 will be under the current format) and it'll be possible to get another 4+ teams at least to the level that Uruguay and Namibia are at now. Both teams only just qualified for this tournament as it is (narrowly ahead...

Cuthbert is a liability in defence. And North obviously doesn't play that often at 13. Those 2 defending next to each other is a situation I think we can exploit.

It depends how many scrums are in the match. If they go channel 1 on their own ball, and there aren't that many scrums on our ball then that advantage won't be a huge factor in the result. When Wales played Fiji I think there was 1 scrum on Fiji's ball in the entire match and it was after...

Yeah I expect Georgia will now spend the next 4 years giving a lot of experience to their most promising younger players. Their u-20's and u-18's have had the best results in their history this year, so there's obviously some good talent coming through. And already one of those guys, the 18...

I think Georgia would have won that match by 20+ most of the time. A lack of composure and lot of handling errors from Georgia (perhaps due to the match being so important to them) kept Namibia in it. I also think a few of the refereeing decisions went against them and that kept it close too...

Are there many South Africans in Singapore? Gotta think they'd be the easiest to attract. Hopefully there's enough novelty value to get others to show up and support the SunWolves, and that ticket prices are reasonable.

The problem is finding the space in the calendar during a non world cup year. The Islanders play the Pacific Nations Cup in the June window and that's quite a few games over a short period of time - similar to a world cup schedule. And in the November window all the SANZAR teams are in...

The fact there's been just 1 victory of 50+ points so far is the best sign IMO. England against Uruguay and South Africa against USA's B team could add to that, but there'd still be a lot less than there were in the last few tournaments.

The USA are playing a mostly B team (saving players for Japan), so I expect South Africa will crush them. Pretty sure all but 2 or 3 of the starting 15 are amateurs or sevens players.

The 4 that would be going from competing in the world cup to competing in a secondary tournament will not have extra interest. They will have considerably less interest. Their fans won't travel for it, it won't be broadcast, it won't attract crowds. In this world cup every team but Uruguay...

If Super Rugby does okay in this next expansion then I'd guess one of the next teams will be the privately owned Asia-Pacific Dragons that almost got in this time. And I think you can be sure that if it was Spain or Germany making the same sort of strides that Georgia are then they'd be...

I think what will happen is that the FTA networks won't be able to keep paying so much more money for rights. And I doubt the NRL and AFL will be willing to accept a pay cut or inflationary increases. So they'll look for alternatives. And the money will be elsewhere. And all these online...

No, I just know that total advertising in FTA networks is basically flat (and that it's falling as a % of media spend). And I've also heard David Gyngell say that they don't make money from having NRL rights, but that they need them to attract viewers. So if those viewers sticking around for...