Tom Savage
I can’t imagine the pressure sitting on Joe Schmidt’s shoulders this week. Four years of preparation, squad building and system management boils down to 43 days of rugby and seven games if he’s lucky. Who’d be a coach? Schmidt’s legacy as the greatest Irish rugby coach in living memory is all but assured, but adding…
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The hiring of Graham Rowntree and Stephen Larkham is no guarantee of success. But if you were looking for a way to push Munster on from recent losses, the hiring of this kind of combined coaching experience would be exactly how you would go about it. For that, the PGB of Munster Rugby deserve unanimous praise. The…
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The margins between a line break that leads to a try and a phase that ends in a ruck reset are smaller than you’d think. All it takes is one slow pass, one blown line, one bad alignment and one bad decision to let the defence back into the equation. As an attack, I think…
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Sport, like life, is a wheel that you don’t know you’re on until you get crushed at the bottom. Actually no, that isn’t quite true. Sport is actually like real life but on ketamine. You’re a loser until you’re a winner until you stop winning and then you’re broken, a has been. Not only that,…
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It’s easy to draw attention if you don’t have any standards for yourself. Don’t believe me? Just strip naked and start loudly abusing passers by in your local shopping centre and you’ll have eyeballs on you before long. Now, as the crowd swells around you, some to fight you, others to watch the chaos, happy…
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“Where do you see Wycherley’s future – lock or blindside? If Cloete is injured POM could move to 7 to allow him (or Botha) to 6. “If he does play 6 how does the game plan change as he is much more of a traditional blindside to POM’s 6?” – OTHP. Interesting question. My first…
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An interview with Niall Scannell in the Irish Independent (April 2017) featured the above little nugget of rugby advice. Scannell was detailing the chat that he had with Eusebio Guinazu when the Argentine hooker arrived as a medical joker in 2014. “He was very much, ‘Get better at what you’re good at’. I used to…
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I was delighted to see the emergence of some young Munster players into the national rugby consciousness over the course of the U20 Six Nations. What Munster fan wouldn’t? The likes of Craig Casey, Josh Wycherley, Jake Flannery, Jonathan Wren and John Hodnett, along with guys like Ben Healy and Sean French have massive potential…
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There was one name trending on Irish Twitter during Ireland u20’s win over France and subsequent Six Nations Championship win – Craig Casey. I know Twitter tailors your trends to your interests but, to put it in perspective, the only other guys I’ve seen trending during games are the likes of Peter O’Mahony, Johnny Sexton,…
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They call him “The General”. As squad nicknames go, it’s a pretty good one. You don’t get a nickname like that for nothing in a rugby squad. Normally they’re just not that, I don’t know, cool? So for Tyler Bleyendaal to be referred to as “The General” is something special. To get a nickname like…
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