General Rugby Discussion 3

breezy1985

Talk of expanding the professional game to the far edge of Europe when we can't even expand it to Aberdeen or north Wales is absolutely bonkers.

Lost Ormond

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/123368336#Comment_123368336

A lot of expansion in scotland and wales is due to money.

Georgia has large interest in sport. Is competitive. Getting more competitive at age grade even if irfu and others have done their best to try halt their progress at times over the years. Goergia has clear interest in the sport. When black lions plqyed at home to clermont in challenge cup last year they got 17000 at the game. The sport needs to get more countries and eyeballs on thr game. That welsh and scottish rugby havent been able to do enough in areas of their own countri3s is no reason to refuse to look at countries where there is clear interest in playing top level rugby

blackwhite

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/123368330#Comment_123368330

Whatever about sporting reasons - you cannot point to financial reasons as justification for targeting Georgia for expansion.

It's total GDP is less than half of the GDP of Northern Ireland - and it's GDP per Capita is approximately one quarter of Northern Ireland.

Lost Ormond

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/123368482#Comment_123368482

So world rugby get involved amd help them. Just like you had countrirs help fiji and drua with super rugby and the australian tournament they competed in before super rugby. In purely rugby terms georgia deserve huge supports but theyve been ignored for most part. That isnt good enough as a sport. You need to support the next countries who may be competitive and have shown theyre best of next tier of sides playing.

blackwhite

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/123368579#Comment_123368579

I'm not arguing the sporting reasons - which are indeed strong. I'm disputing that there are financial reasons to make Georgia a growth target.

Coupled with the fact that World Rugby, and nearly all the existing unions, are already in poor financial health then it makes it difficult to see a financial rationale at all.

breezy1985

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/123368579#Comment_123368579

Well if World Rugby can just step in and wave magic wands then why not just save whatever Welch team is about to go to the wall.

ersatz

Georgia probably has the strongest rugby culture of the also rans, similar to Romania but with a higher level of performance. Doesn't change the fact that the logistics alone of including Georgia in regular Tier 1/URC competition are very impractical. Much better off figuring out how to make the Rugby Europe competition more competitive. Georgia are fairly dominant but they aren't that far ahead of Portugal and there are a few teams there or thereabouts. That comp building audience seems like the best way to go. The potential there is big though, their U20s are consistently competitive in the top 10-12 teams and have beaten England and run France close recently and their domestic all star team (the Black Lion) perform ok while losing almost all their matches in the EPCR challenge cup. Getting their best players involved isn't going to happen though as they are all playing in France. I don't see how any Georgian club team is going to be competitive in the URC. They're still quite a bit off the Welsh teams.

https://www.rugbyeurope.eu/competitions/rugby-europe-men-s-championship-2025

ersatz

BBC Weekly series on Bloodgate. Surreal but slow.

It's not real Blood

Lost Ormond

Interesting to see former Kilkenny hurler Walter Walsh in the leinster junior squad for junior interpros which are on the next few weekends. Playing outside centre

sydthebeat

i see the RFU have signed a deal with Castore:

https://www.englandrugby.com/follow/news-media/england-rugby-confirms-castore-official-technical-kit-partner

It will be interesting to see how the fcuk up an all white kit ;)

icdg

Reports circulating that TNT are on the verge of renewing their rights to PRL for a five year, £40m sterling a year (on average) contract, which will bring the payments back to pre-pandemic levels. (The reason the rights fees dropped was not the pandemic. It was because PRL played games with talk of another bidder which didn’t exist and it backfired horribly on them).

AbusesToilets

I think it reaches 40 mil only in the final year?

icdg

The UK media reports I have seen say €40m per year as an average. However the fee does apparently increase YOY throughout the reported five year lifetime. A deal isn’t done yet but those are the terms being reported in the UK media.

sydthebeat

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/123389377#Comment_123389377

Remember though that CVC now own 27% of the premiership so that money is not all going to the clubs, so it's unlikely the clubs will be back to "pre pandemic" levels by virtue of this deal. CVC are laughing though.

Edit: although now with two less premiership teams, there's more in the kitty per team

niallm77

Glaws Taking Exeter apart

36-0 after 30

niallm77

67-7 after an hour

niallm77

Glass 79-7 after 70 minutes. 100 possible the way Exeter are defending.

darkened_scrum

Wtf has happened to Exeter? Gone from Prem/Euro champs to this in not a very long time.

pickarooney

The owner didn't want to keep throwing money at the team and they gambled on youth coming through.

Can't blame them when the alternative is going the way of Wasp, Worcester and LI.

niallm77

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/123397041#Comment_123397041

Exeter have suspended two coaches after yesterday's game and are conducting an investigation into the performance. Some weird stuff.

Jacovs

Les Kiss taking over at the Wallabies from Joe Schmidt.

Larbre34

Have we decided that Les is a top coach now, or still something of a journeyman in the mid-pack?

AbusesToilets

Seems to have the Reds in a competitive spot at the moment. Mad how many coaches Aus have gone through

PMC83

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/123404288#Comment_123404288

Hard to tell really. He had a successful period as number 2 next to Joe with Ireland, then after things at Ulster didn't go well but not sure if that was down to just him. London Irish was him and Deccy and they played some alright stuff. Similarly Reds playing well. He looks like a fairly solid appointment to me, if not a world beater

icdg

In the small print is that Schmidt has taken what on paper is a year (though in reality only this years Autumn Nations Series) extension on his contract, until June 2026, to allow Kiss to see out his own contract with Queensland.

Paul Smeenus

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/123404288#Comment_123404288

Should maybe wait to see how Oz go under him?

Ben Bailey

Interesting piece on 'Bonus Points' from The Breakdown (Robert Kitson in The Guardian)

'The business end of the domestic season has arrived and the Premiership and United Rugby Championship tables, as ever, are being carefully scrutinised. Two from Bristol, Sale and Saracens are now vying to make the Premiership playoffs with two games left while the race for the URC top eight will boil down to the final weekend.

At which point some know-all will intone the well-worn mantra: bonus points will be crucial. And we’ll all nod solemnly and start contemplating how Team X or Team Y can best set about scoring either four tries or losing by seven points or fewer. Without necessarily stopping to think whether the cold, hard mathematics support that supposition – or indeed ever have done.

If you go and consult Dr Ellie Nesbitt, a senior lecturer in sports management at Nottingham Trent University, a very different picture emerges. Having crunched the Premiership numbers for the past 25 years, she found bonus points made a major difference to – wait for it – just 2.28% of team positions in the 24 seasons in which they have previously featured. “Bonus points are not quite irrelevant but they’re definitely not making the impact they were probably designed to do,” she says.

Hang on. That hard-earned losing away point in the rain at Sale? That valiant fourth try in the dying seconds against Bath? It turns out they barely count in the wider scheme of things. Nesbitt discovered that a whopping 92% of Premiership league placings were totally unaffected by their inclusion. No fewer than 10 of those aforementioned 24 Premiership seasons would have ended up with precisely the same league table had bonus points not been included. And in the 8% of occasions where teams would have finished in another position, it still made little material difference in terms of playoff or Champions Cup qualification.

Which, for the curious-minded Nesbitt, prompts wider questions. Hailing from a football background, she only became interested in rugby union because her partner was playing at Burton RFC. Watching his team constantly looking for bonus points set her analytical brain whirring. “Even in their league they chase them. But then I looked at the data and told them: ‘It didn’t make any difference.’ I take the caveat that it potentially creates more of a spectacle but at the end of a season the difference is so marginal. So then you start to question it. ‘What is the point of all of this? Is it time for a refresh?’ For me it warrants a look at the effectiveness of bonus points. But no one in rugby union seems to be bothered that they’re not making an impact.”

It is a fair cop. Take Sale who have claimed only nine bonus points – the second-lowest in the league – and still sit in the top four. What will almost certainly determine their final placing in relation to the Bears, as ever, will be their respective number of wins. It is more than possible the Sharks will finish ahead of Bristol with six fewer bonus points. So much for attacking rugby paying extra dividends.

But let’s open our minds up beyond decimal points. Nesbitt’s research around competitive balance, incorporated last year into the Leonard Curtis financial report into English club rugby, invites us to contemplate a landscape totally free of such added complications. What if even the slightly tweaked French system – a bonus point for scoring at least three more tries than the opposition – is a hareng rouge?

Because what if the extra layer of complexity, rather than enticing more people to enjoy the sport, is actively diluting rugby union’s popularity? “It’s weird to me that bonus points only really exist in rugby,” says Nesbitt, suggesting football’s relative simplicity is not an insignificant part of its appeal. “Rugby has so many layers that it’s difficult to get into. And when something is difficult to get into – whether that’s sport, music or history – people switch off. I don’t think rugby has helped itself over the years.”

She also wonders aloud if playoff semi-finals represent another well-intentioned idea that might have had its day. The team finishing either first or second in the regular season has gone on to win the Premiership 20 times out of the past 22 editions. Nesbitt’s logical academic brain tells her it would be much simpler to save everyone a ton of hassle and just stage a final between the top two sides.

Looking further ahead, she argues, the league also needs to work out who, exactly, it is trying to please. At present, amid plans to launch a franchise Premiership model in autumn 2026, she suggests it is being hampered by blurred vision. “The reason why a franchise system works in America is because they also have the draft and a salary cap. Rugby union seems to have this half European, half American approach but it doesn’t seem to work for them either way.”

Rather than using bonus points as a comfort blanket, accordingly, her analysis points to a more equitable spread of talent and spending power across the league as being more important. “The issue with rugby union is that the same patterns occur each year because no changes are made. What are your motivations? What do you want from the league?

“If they want to make it a spectacle and make people excited about rugby, I have no doubt the franchise approach could do that. But it is not necessarily going to fix all their problems.” Plenty for us all to ponder, whether you love bonus points or not, before this season’s final push.'

Podge_irl

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/123443235#Comment_123443235

It is an interesting argument, though I'd highlight they mention the URC at the start and then don't bring up any stats about it. Cause even a cursory glance at this season's table shows that BPs are having a fairly massive impact. Munster- Benetton would be a dead rubber in Benetton's favour without BPs etc etc.

Ben Bailey

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/123443961#Comment_123443961

I like the BP regime in the Top14, as it adds an extra incentive to the team to maintain their +3 try differential and not just empty the bench when the BP is reached.

Kitson's column is always worth a read.

Jacovs

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/123443961#Comment_123443961

Think I posted last year's URC without BP and it didnt have any impact on the end log result.

But this year, if removing BP, then it looks like this:

Leinster - 60

Bulls - 52

Sharks - 48

Glasgow - 44

Scarlets - 38

Benetton - 38

Stormers - 36

Cardiff - 34

Munster - 32

Edinburgh - 30

Ospreys - 30

Both Munster and Benetton would have something to play for in the last round. Munster win then they have 36 points and go 8th, Cardiff lose against Stormers and stay on 34 and go down to 9th. Benetton win against Munster and go 42 points, could grab 5th position even if Stormers win their game.

I think this might be 1 of those rare seasons where BP does play a slightly bigger role than usual, but will know for sure after the last round of games, what could have been.