Author: Jamie Miller
Let’s start with a quick disclaimer: Australia lost a series that they should have won. They lost largely because their discipline, game management, and accuracy at key moments was not as good as Ireland’s. On top of that, they scored 55 points across 3 test matches, or just 18 points a match, which is a reflection of a poor attack. However, all that being so, the refereeing was really poor across the series. But in order to understand why , we need to think more conceptually about how the referees are being trained to manage the situations they see out…
In 1990, a relatively unknown Belgian soccer player, Jean-Marc Bosman, was cut by his local club RFC Liege. An equally unremarkable club in France, Dunkerque, wanted to pick him up, but since the two couldn’t agree on a transfer fee, Bosman was stranded. It all happened from there. Bosman took his club (and various other parties) to court, eventually ending up at the European Court of Justice. Its decision in his favour, in 1995, enabled the free movement of out-of-contract players and thus ushered in the era of high finance, global soccer that we know of today. Clubs have to…
I think we can all almost feel it. The sweet release of getting into test rugby. This year: the Irish. Sell outs already (in more ways than one?). So, a few thoughts: 1) The Irish are worried Here’s the schedule for the top Irish players: A Lions tour; A full season of league and European rugby (Leinster won the whole thing); Then a whole year of continuous rugby, with November tour, and Six Nations, then a World Cup. Jonny Sexton, Conor Murray et al had to have a break, and everybody thought it’d be in June 2018. But it isn’t.…
It is 5 May 2018. Brookvale Oval is packed. The fans are on the hill, downing beers, excited to see their Waratahs play their favourite sport: rugby union. The scene looks great on tv again. This is Sydney’s north shore, one of the hot-beds of global rugby. Matt Burke is from here, so too Michael Hooper. Players, mums, and dads are flooding into the ground, many of them after spending all day at schoolboy rugby matches earlier. Australian Super Rugby teams have lost an incredible 36 straight games against New Zealand teams. But tonight, the ever-resilient Sydney rugby fans are…
Last week professional rugby kicked off in America for the, err, second time. Two seasons ago, the ill-fated PRO Rugby blazed the trail. There were five teams, based in San Francisco, San Diego, Sacramento (all California), Denver (Colorado), and, strangely enough, Ohio. Each was a franchise. Everything, from wages to intellectual property, was controlled centrally by PRO Rugby. The game plan for PRO was to run a beta version in season one, with games streamed online. Having shown that the product was viable, PRO would then roll out its offering to TV networks and sponsors for season two. They never…
Since the Australian Rugby Union has refused to be transparent with fans, much less consult them, about its plans for the future, I thought I’d take this opportunity to lay out the core questions that the axing of the Western Force raises: 1 What is your vision for the future of Super Rugby, and professional rugby in Australia generally? The fans are your core constituency – no fans, no money, no professional rugby – and yet we have *no idea* what your vision for the game in 5 or 10 years is. 2 Are the South African teams looking to…
Every team has good days and bad days. Performance varies; some things come off sometimes, and not others. That’s inherent in the nature of sport. But what’s so frustrating about the current run is that fans can see that the Wallabies are encountering the same problems over and over again. If they can’t fix them, the Cheika Wallabies just aren’t going to break out of this trough that they are in. Defence The stats from Saturday aren’t awful: 101 of 115 tackles made, for an 88% success rate. That said, European teams at both club and international level are regularly north of…
The Wallabies have found all manner of ways to lose this year. They’ve descended into rampant indiscipline and tactical ineptitude (England in June). They’ve butchered a boatload of tries (Ireland). They’ve defended like a turnstile (NZ in Sydney). And they’ve let bad teams drag them down to their level (South Africa in Pretoria). But Saturday was an exemplar of a different way of losing: playing well for stretches, indeed very well for the first 15 minutes or so, but losing a slew of the key moments in the match. 5th minute Lady luck has been allergic to the Wallabies this…
If it’s 40 degrees and 95% humidity, it must be the start of a rugby season that once began in April. And what a season it will be. A post-World Cup year features an all-new Super Rugby format, provides opportunities for new players to fill openings in the national set-up, and will feature precisely none of the mock dog fornication and mass drug use of the other codes (we hope). We got the GAGR brain trust together and asked them for their fearless predictions for the year. We will of course look back later in the year to draw attention to…
It’s official: Quade Cooper has signed on to the national Sevens program. How excited should we be? It’s been a long time coming, with a few murmurs out of ARU HQ that Cooper couldn’t get official clearance until he, err, was actually eligible to be an Australian Olympian. With the nationality qualifications for international rugby being (much) looser than those for the Olympics, the NZ-born Cooper didn’t actually have all the documentation he needed to represent his adoptive country at Rio. Now he does, and rugby’s worst kept secret is front page news. Certainly, there was plenty of hoopla around Cooper’s…
So the match didn’t quite go the way we wanted it to. But as we get the body clocks back into a normal rhythm, it’s hard to miss that the future is looking good. This World Cup was the culmination of a variety of trends that all have Australian rugby’s stock pointing upwards. This bandwagon is going places. The Wallabies Results at the top have been key. There was simply no rational basis to think, a year ago, that the Wallabies would be in a World Cup final. The entire “program”, to use an Americanism, was in turmoil, from top…
View image | gettyimages.com On Tuesday, World Rugby threw one of its most esteemed referees, Craig Joubert, under the bus. It issued a press release focused on one single refereeing decision, from the 78th minute of the Australia v Scotland quarter-final. The press release notes that Joubert applied Law 11.7. For the record, Law 11.7 reads: “When a player knocks-on and an offside team-mate next plays the ball, the offside player is liable to sanction if playing the ball prevented an opponent from gaining an advantage. Sanction: Penalty kick” World Rugby clarifies: “On review of all available angles, it is…
“It’s easy to criticise, Dad”. “Fun, too”. So said the great philosopher of our day, Homer Simpson. And so are people laying into the Wallabies. But let’s take a constructive approach to the Scotland match, in the cold light of day. What wallabies lessons do we need to work on this week, looking ahead to a semi-final against Argentina? Keeping the Initiative is Working The attack was good, very good. We recycled ball quickly. And we played with real width (as the places where we scored the tries, almost all right in the corner, showed). We also cleaned out with…
The Wallabies team to face Scotland in the Quarter Final has been announced – the two best players are missing and guess who’s on the bench
The various discipline panels have just met over in the UK and delivered an array of suspensions to World Cup players. Having shaken the magic 8 ball, they have come up with the following: Sean O’Brien, Ireland: punch (above), one week. https://twitter.com/gavinc42/status/653584263607123969 Ross Ford and Jonny Gray, Scotland: lifting tackle (above), three weeks each. Marcelo Bosch, Argentina: lifting tackle, one week. For Australian fans, this means Scotland will be without both lock Gray (brother of better known Richie) and mobile hooker Ford this weekend. For the game more broadly, the whole process is beginning to look ridiculous. O’Brien punched a guy in the…
The match officials for the RWC quarter-finals were announced today, with Wayne Barnes, Nigel Owens, Jerome Garces, and Craig Joubert getting the nods. Owens will referee the blockbuster between France and New Zealand on Saturday at the Millenium Stadium, soothing a nationwide blood pressure surge at the prospect of Wayne Barnes getting the job in a reprise of 2007. Craig Joubert will look after the Wallabies v Scotland encounter. His no-nonsense approach towards slowing the ball down, cynical play, and players rolling into the 9 should be good news for a Wallabies team that will look to play up tempo…
Australia’s performance aside, one of the heavyweights of the game bowed out of the World Cup this weekend, and at home to boot. Selections mattered. So too did coaching. But these need to be seen through the broader optic of identity and mentality: how the English rugby establishment understood what the team would try to do on the field and why. Traditionally, the English game has been little more than ten man rugby: forward dominance and field position. As the game has gone professional, however, English rugby has broadened both in style and personnel. As to the former, the English…
Wales did just enough to defeat Fiji 23-13 in their third Pool A match overnight. Reminders of losing 38-34 in Nantes in 2007 were all the talk in the lead-up, but a battered Welsh outfit scored two tries to one to register the big W. Vibe Both of these teams traditionally like the open play. So it was no surprise to see plenty of that, though the match interspersed classy with scrappy. Wales started all guns blazing with a great run from George North ending with a penalty on the line. The med in red knew that they needed a bonus point and…
England have named their line-up for Saturday’s do or die match up with the Wallabies. Ben Youngs and Jonathan Joseph were both ruled fit. Courtney Lawes is out for Wasp Joe Launchbury, and Billy Vunipola is replaced by Ben Morgan, who has also been under an injury cloud. The man with more angles than a dodecahedron, Joe Marler, keeps his spot, though Romain Poite will/should be watching him very closely, especially early on. On the bench, Nick Easter is preferred to James Haskell. Sam Burgess, as expected, rides the pine instead of Henry Slade. Both are direct rather than expansive…
After a week of torrid press speculation, South Africa have announced a Springbok World Cup Squad full of surprises.