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It's a small investment for creating a lot of positive attention at home, as well as any benefits they pick up from the US. It did seem to generate a lot of fans travelling from Australia. I'm guessing next year they'll be pushing the "NRL-approved travel packages" much harder.

Yes, I like the new administration, but even with making good decisions around coaching, etc, a $22 million debt from one team could derail everything.

And News Corp had been talking down Australian rugby even before the rights negotiation started. Let's not get all Stockholm Syndrome on this, we're better without Fox.

The worst time to be a Waratahs supporter is 7 days after a great performance.

Note for all future restart receipts - Joey Walton to make every exit kick. His second half exit from a kick-off that ended up with a Crusaders line-out 30 m from their line? Amazing.

I've always been shocked how many players don't wear a mouthguard, and Tupou chews gum on the field!! But I thought the requirement was now that all would have to wear one, once each team has had access to them for two weeks, so we will see some changes on the field in the next week or two.

It's clear that Waugh's approach is the polar opposite to McLennan's, so I don't see any issue with him serving up bland quotes for the media. He managed Eddie out the door and brought in Schmidt without getting into media slanging matches. Fine by me.

The article from Tom Decent in the SMH (marked as 7:45pm) seems relatively positive - I'm not sure there's any new information really, but it does talk about "precautionary scans" and that he's likely to miss multiple matches. I'm taking that as a positive, given what it might have been.

Eastwood don't seem to want to provide a whole lot of detail on this, but I think they sold the land to North Ryde RSL previously, but with the condition that they wouldn't get the money until re-development started. Ryde Council has blocked that development, and the Council wants to acquire the...

This is good, though I suspect with the earlier publication of teams, we'll see some more bracketing of players, or "TBC", either due to injuries or coaches wanting to obfuscate.

I'm not sure ESPN could justify running independently in Australia, I'm not sure it would have any big draws - all the big sports are elsewhere. But conversely, it's very handy for Kayo, in providing a lot of other content. I had ESPN for years through Optus and Fetch, and it was probably best...

Conversely, the BBL has just finished a season that was shorter than the last couple of years, and drew pretty solid crowds.

So...business as usual? If RA have only had one sponsorship opportunity rejected, they're not trying hard enough. There's not many teams across any code that don't need to get out there and ask for sponsorship, it doesn't come on a silver platter. Do we get regular reports on how many...

Interesting decision in the Scotland-Wales 6 nations game - one of the Scottish players made contact with a Welsh player's head as the Welsh player made a tackle and the Scottish player looked to drive his player forward, or start the cleanout of the tackler. Unclear whether initial contact was...

It seems like a perfectly reasonable approach to me. And yes, RA should be making this decision. Selection of head and assistant coaches for the Super franchises should absolutely be done with central input, it's a critical element of developing coaching pathways in Australia.

That story about the A-Leagues is grim reading. I thought rugby could burn money, but that's next level. They've basically taken the investment from PE, burned it, and are now in the same position, except they're giving away 33% of every dollar they earn to SilverLake.

Supposedly, one of Eddie's gripes with RA was that they'd promised more progress on centralisation than they had delivered. At the time, it seemed like crap. But maybe that announcement a few months ago was partially to soothe Eddie and to try to push the process along, without the appropriate...

Wamby, I think this has been discussed before, but - how many international coaching jobs aren't about walking into a sh*tstorm? Very few coaches get to walk into a high-functioning, successful program - coaches get appointed because the previous coach got the boot.

The response to Schmidt is so positive, Marto knew he'd hit the headlines by being the only person to whinge about it. Or at least getting in before Campo.

Still incomprehensible to me that a new Gabba will cost even $2 billion.