Tom Savage
Being a pro rugby player is class. You get paid to train, push some iron around and then play in games where, if you’re lucky, you’ll get to do cool stuff and have every think that you’re unreal, at least for a time. Look at Ben Healy against the Scarlets. Clock in the red, a…
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Ireland’s recent loss in Paris felt especially disappointing. Not just because it was an 8 point loss when a 7 point win would have secured the championship – although that doesn’t help – but because of the manner of the performance. Forget about Stockdale’s late consolation try because it wasn’t any kind of consolation, really.…
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We’ve got a lot of rugby ahead of us over the next few months. There’s Super Saturday in the Six Nations, the PRO14, the very Pro Evolution 5 sounding Autumn Nations Cup and that’s before we consider the return of the European Champions Cup which, now that I think of it, is extremely Pro Evolution…
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Even before his unfortunate dislocated shoulder suffered away to Benetton, there were rumblings about Jordan Larmour and his “form” coming into the restarted Six Nations Championship as Ireland’s incumbent fullback off the back of some iffy performances for Leinster since the restart. Larmour’s work under the high ball has been the main focus of the…
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While I was waiting for the Glasgow vs Edinburgh game to start last Sunday I happened to catch one of the classic games that Eir often use to fill airtime on their sports channels. It was far from a “classic” game in the traditional sense of the word – it was a non-descript Division One…
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The ending of the locked-down 2019/20 season was a bad one for Munster Rugby. Losing to Leinster in a knockout game in Dublin has become an unpleasant yearly tradition for this Munster group but, for whatever reason, this season’s felt worse than the other two. Maybe it was the lockdown, maybe it was the rising…
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I’m not sure why this semi-final hurt more than the last two. Maybe third time’s the charm. Either way, three days out from another defeat to a Leinster side that seems to have forgotten how to lose I’m sitting here feeling the sting. Another semi-final loss to Leinster. Another fever dream of Gordon D’Arcy’s disembodied…
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So it comes down to this. A season like no other, disrupted by a global pandemic, comes to a head this Friday night in an empty Aviva Stadium. It’s a Guinness PRO14 semi-final. It’s a trip to Dublin and it’s Leinster standing between Munster and a chance at silverware. Feels familiar, doesn’t it? This has been…
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A few hundred people showed up at Cork airport in 2003 to welcome a slightly confused looking Christian Cullen to Munster. Cullen was one of the very best back three players in the sport at the time and if you’re looking for a modern-day comparison, imagine signing the Cheslin Kolbe we know today – that…
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Money talks, bullshit walks. When it comes to rugby union post-Coronavirus, I think that idiom will become money shouts through a megaphone, bullshit sprints away to the airport with papers flying out of its suitcase. It’s not as catchy, I’ll give you that. The Coronavirus interrupted the world – you might have noticed that over the…
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