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Shared colonial history, matching seasons and because the only strong rugby nations outside of Western Europe have traditionally been Australia, NZ and South Africa. Lets face it, when people talk about Northern vs Southern hemisphere in rugby they generally mean UK & Ireland plus France vs...

Longitude matters more than latitude for fans. And from an Australian rugby perspective you'd certainly hope that in the long term world rugby doesn't split into southern and northern hemisphere tournaments because the South would be the very poor cousin! We should at least get Japan in our...

A genuine European championship between world cups would be great. But Germany would be a very lucrative market for the 6 Nations to crack so if they get to a decent enough level I think they'd be straight in. Apparently the world cup and the rugby sevens at the Olympics rated quite well in...

Spain also upset Russia overnight so it seems 2nd tier European rugby could be getting shaken up a bit. Also I bet if Spain and especially Germany get to the level of Georgia that they'll be included in an expanded 6 Nations pretty quickly.

But is this really the best strategy to maximise their bottom line? Surely the majority of people would want to go for 1 day and not many of them would buy a 2 day ticket that's going to go to waste. They're relying on people going out of their way to find others to pay half and go the other...

Not offering 1 day tickets is insane. What are they thinking? Surely they'll make them available in the next week or so.

Well that's not the case at least with TPG, and a quick look at some other cheaper ISP's seems to suggest unlimited means unlimited (they have other plans for 50-200GB where it drops down to 256kbps after you pass the limit). Maybe that's not the case with the likes of Telstra, but that's why...

Unlimited broadband is offered by everyone now and it isn't that expensive in Australia anymore. I pay $60 per month with TPG for unlimited. And there are a bunch of ISP's charging around the same price, some are even a fair bit cheaper like Dodo.

I don't think Pro Rugby will come back from this, seems they've lost the goodwill they had. It's a shame as a few of the teams showed real promise of developing a fan base. I think there could be an opportunity for SANZAAR to step in and work with the Canadian and US unions to fill the gap. I...

Fittler did pretty well in the 9's a couple of years ago at about the same age and neither Latham or Larkham would put their hand up for it if they thought there was a chance of embarrassing themselves. I doubt either will get a huge amount of minutes and they'll avoid getting tackled with the...

Hopefully he comes back fine, but it can be really bad. I'm a big tennis fan and a few top players have had it. It basically ended Roger Federer's main period of dominance in early 2008, but he was relatively lucky compared to Robin Soderling, who caught it in his prime in 2011 (he was 26 and...

I doubt that a Fijian team would be in a position to negotiate a proportionally equitable share of the broadcast revenue, but they'd be entitled to something. And as said above, money would go a lot further in Fiji. They would bring added value to any TV deal because their matches would provide...

I don't think Tonga would be any chance of being able to support a Super Rugby team. Same as Samoa. Fiji has a chance because of its much bigger population. It'd be more realistic to have a PI team based in Auckland or Western Sydney that played the odd game in Tonga and Samoa.

Brilliant news!! If they really do have that level of investment behind it you'd have to think it will happen.

Fair enough, but there are other reasons too. If it's north / south then it's very heavily skewed towards the north in terms of competitive teams and the size of the markets involved - and thus the commercial potential. A southern hemisphere tournament would be a very poor cousin. This would not...

I think it's changing. See Japan being added to Super Rugby. Pro Rugby in the US is also playing a season much more in line with our season. The main issue is that outside of world cups it's not really ideal to have games played in the middle of the night for any of the fans in the...

Also, re the likes of Australia's shadow squad playing Romania or Georgia - I'd like to see this too, but I'm not sure if there's much appetite for it from the tier 2 countries. As they're not test matches they don't count for ranking points, and they tend not to be able to get top players...

I guess the intrigue is in the knockout phases, which today we only get in the world cup. And I think it'd take time to be more competitive but this is happening slowly but surely and the more opportunity tier 2 and 3 teams have of competing with better teams the quicker they'll improve...

I've never liked the Southern and Northern Hemisphere split for inter-continental tournament ideas like this. I think time zones are the most relevant factor, thus longitude is more important than latitude. To me a 3 way split would work better - Africa plus Europe, Americas, Asia-Pacific. As...

Great result for Germany and good to see Spain so competitive with Tonga. Results like these support an increase in the world cup to 24 teams from 2023 (even if most of the new teams will probably have to come from Europe). It's good to see Tier 2 and 3 teams getting more games.