The Bledisloe is the biggest rugby event of the year in Australia. Many casuals go to the game to watch international rugby. Nowadays to watch the ABs, in the recent past to watch the Wallabies too. If you play the game in Moore Park you are satisfying the rugby strongholds but a game in Homebush is more suitable for people from GWS, Parramatta, Bankstown, Auburn, Eastwood, Penrith, etc etc. And we are talking about one game, if you eliminate that game, your presence in that area is zero. That's area is a League stronghold and even AFL has more presence than rugby nowadays. It doesn't make sense to me
Agree.
Just checked again today and we are still 9th. Still nothing to crow about.
This is the new rankings, from tomorrow (Europe time zone):
I am not going to lose sleep over a net 1.66 pt slip in the rankings that was due to losing to the All Blacks by 3 pts and Fiji thumping Eddie's Japan. I've said elsewhere that the rankings don't resemble reality until the NH teams are actually playing, if we are still at #10 after the spring tours I will put my tail between my legs, concede defeat and buy you a bottle of Rittenhouse. No none is suggesting we are about to see a return to the Macqueen era, but we are building ahead of the Lions.
Claiming moral victory, moral points and expecting moral humility from you.
9 or 10 is the same for me. You have to beat Ireland or England to really climb the rankings
I realise this, the reason we are where we are is the one in 70 year double point loss to Fiji at the RWC. To their credit Fiji thumped Eddie's Japan without their NH based stars, but I think that was more to do with the opposition. Argentina have proven they are pretty good by beating all 3 SH powerhouses in the last 6 weeks. We have a game against the AB's this weekend, and then we play 3 more teams ranked higher than us on the tour. I reckon we need to win 3 of the next 5 games to restore some proper credibility, 2 will get us up to 6 or 7, depending on other results.
I totally agree with your points but the rankings have some resemblance to current reality which I think has importance. If we slipped from 5th to 6th I would shrug my shoulders 10th is closer to hell in a strong rugby state.
Is he in possession of any Morals?
Isn't the answer simply that we have no depth, so when we rest key players against "weaker" teams on tours, our b-teams aren't good enough to beat their a-teams?
I guess the obvious one was Italy with Rennie which I thought was madness. Why are professional players training at this level not available for every International game? We used to have a B team that played states and occasionally clubs but be replacements injury or out of form.We would put out our A team for all internationals. Injuries I accept and that could have been part of Rennie's thinking as we had a disastrous time in S&C ATT. There are 13 international games in 2024 and 15 rounds of Super Rugby plus one game in finals if lucky. 28/29 games a year IF they play all games should be doable by a pro player.
This was true but with the 'finishers' doing a better job than the starters, it adds to the confusion which is Aus rugby.
And they could say something like this: Beating Joe's Wallabies is simple - just score as many points as possible in their first 20 minutes and that's all.
I think Argentina would argue differently. We are far more inconsistently bad.
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