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How many leaders do Ireland have? No O'Connell, no Heaslip, no O'Mahony, and they still have Rory Best to step into the gap. I guess that's bound to happen when they have so few pro teams to draw from. I'm a bit disappointed I didn't get to see more of Argentina vs the NH, to see what...

Hard to see anything other than a comfortable kiwi victory here. The only hope France really have is that they can get some pretty serious ascendancy in the scrum, with a yellow or two for repeated infringements. It's hard to know how to rate the french scrum though. A lot of the hype...

I thought he'd wait a bit longer before announcing his move back overseas, but I guess he wants to fly under the radar for once. I think it's to Australian rugby's credit that they did so little to play into JOC (James O'Connor)'s script, which to my mind went something like this: 1. Mend some fences...

Ferners trying to put the mockers on us I see. Time to start a SF: NZ vs RSA thread?

I know the popular narrative is about the fitness of the Welsh, but how many of the likely matchday team would've actually attended the fitness camps? 3/4s? 2/3rds? Half? My gut says the Boks will wreck them, but yeah. Japan. And Argentina. At home.

Having 2 genuinely good front rows would make a hell of a lot of difference at scrum training. I would think that in previous years there'd only be so much pressure they could put on in opposed training before the weakest link folded.

There's at least one guy who's decided his life calling is to try to get Pocock cited. Pretty much every comments section of every online rugby article I've read has him posting links to the 'incident'. Maybe he's an unemployed coal worker. I'm betting that if Pocock's injury turns out to be...

I don't think I've ever seen Sexton finish a game. He always seems to get led off the field early with some exceedingly minor injury while the comms rabbit on about how disappointed he looks and how hard it is to get him off the field. He never looks very disappointed to me.

Well I'm glad he did. I can all too easily imagine the headlines if we'd had a pushover try scored against us. And there would be headlines.

Wales had a lot of chances to win that, on 2nd viewing. If the halfback had just kept his grubby hands off it when the Welsh scrum was marching us back toward the try line they would've had a pushover try at the very least. Instead he decided to go for glory himself and ballsed it up royally...

I asked this question in the Italy vs Ireland thread during that game, and have to ask it again since it hasn't been tackled and is all the more relevant. Is there actually a way to escape a choke tackle legally once it has turned into a maul, short of somehow slipping the ball loose...

Probably just trying to distract attention away from the RWC.

To me league is to rugby what twenty20 is to test cricket. T20 decided boundaries were the most exciting part of the sport so did everything they could to make sure every game was packed full of them. League did the same with tries. Personally I'll take the intrigue and nuances of test...

I reckon it's more to keep the team on its toes. Keeping competition fierce, zing in the training etc. I seem to recall some of the guys have said that he uses so many different combinations in training that nobody knows for sure who's in and who isn't, prior to the start of the RWC at least.

Could someone explain these mauls to me? @15:40 Ireland hold the Italian player up in the tackle: a maul is called. The arriving Italian forwards drive them back at a rate of knots before the Irish players fall over, dragging the whole thing down. Penalty against Italy for collapsing the...

I really hope our guys don't read too much of the stuff being written about them at the moment. It was a great win and of course the English media will go a bit overboard about it given the impact it had on them, but we have bigger games ahead. Almost all of our biggest games are ahead, in...

Just in case anyone begins to pity England

It's okay, Pocock grabbed it off him 0.0236 seconds later.

Remember all those kiwis who smugly told us that jackling doesn't have any place in the modern game, that Pocock would need to change his game if he ever got back to form?

Was a twitter vote apparently. I feel like there should be a sideshot of him right next to it.