Off Topic The Rugby Thread

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How **** are England? Not getting fifty with the ref’s help and us only having 13 for a quarter of the match? Bloody hell, the Frogs beat us by 1 more point last year ….. <whistle> :D

In all seriousness, we were so poor that it is difficult to assess just how good England are.

It will be either England or France this year - with the winner of that match likely to achieve the Grand Slam.

As for us, Italy’s win today I think virtually guarantees yet another wooden spoon.

I know Steve Tandy reasonably well: in all honesty, he failed as a Head Coach at the Ospreys (as Max Boyce would say ‘I know coz I was there’), rehabilitated himself as a Defensive Coach with the Jocks but that’s not the right pathway to be an International Coach.
 
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One of the Welsh pundits, I think it was Dan Biggar, was very perceptive on discipline and confidence. Essentially he said that when individual and team confidence is low, the discipline goes - push too early in the scrum, interfere at the line out and breakdown - because you feel you have to to get that tiny advantage. And it’s a really hard habit to break, to have the confidence to believe that you will win the scrum or the line out without having to break the rules.

Welsh confidence, and therefore by this logic, discipline is at an historic low point. Hopefully for the good of the game it won’t last.

English discipline has been **** for years. Our confidence has always been fragile. No matter how good this team appear they can still lose the next game. Even against Scotland.
 
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Watched that with my Welsh cousin, who is visiting from south Wales. Couldn't even gloat because it was so one sided it didn't feel fait to rub it in.
 
More problems for Welsh RFU cash flow as there are 15k unsold tickets for France game on Sunday, 6.5k unsold for Scotland game and 27k unsold for Italy game .... Price seems to be main reason..... although Wales being so poor on the pitch would also be a factor....
 
Trammers said:
More problems for Welsh RFU cash flow as there are 15k unsold tickets for France game on Sunday, 6.5k unsold for Scotland game and 27k unsold for Italy game .... Price seems to be main reason..... although Wales being so poor on the pitch would also be a factor....
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In some respects, people are, for want of a better phrase, ‘voting with their feet’: not necessarily because of the poor run of results - when we’ve been ‘poor’ previously, matches were still sold out.

This time it’s partly - if not largely - a protest against the WRU, an organisation that in my humble opinion (the opinion of someone who was involved in one of the leading Club sides in Wales, and then spent 3 years on the Board of one of the Regions in the 2010s) has done enormous damage to the game in Wales for decades.

Don’t be fooled by the success achieved during the Gatland years - up to and including the Alun Wyn’s, Biggars, Tipurics et al - those players started out before the advent of Regional Rugby: the historic and proven player development pathways were re-routed via the Regions….

Since then there has been in my opinion mismanagement and immense arrogance from the upper echelons of the WRU…
 
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Calcutta Cup at Murrayfield, England should expect a Scottish backlash after last week's disaster in Rome. I thought despite the size of our win last week we weren't as ruthless as we could have been, we'll need to up our performance in what is always a tricky match...
 
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