Ahaha sure thing champ.

I’ve been a poster on this site for literally half a decade with close to a thousand comments (which you could have checked if you had bothered to take a second). I’m pretty clearly not Homer.

Not gonna bother with the rest of your post as you can’t bother doing the bare minimum to confirm your accusations so I don’t believe you’d bother to do any other research either.

Based off your reply to Homer it sounds like there is some history there which I am not interested in.

But I do have to ask, how are you differentiating between ‘an adaption to a recent (rule) change’ and ‘only made legal in the past few years’?

From my understanding the previous rules were very clear. Once a tackled player had been touched by more than one opposition player you could not strip them. The rules have changed to allow stripping of the ball once other tacklers drop off which makes new tactics with multiple players legal?

Again, no idea about whatever background you two have but Homer seems to be entirely correct here?

At first I thought it was just a mistake, but now that it’s clear that updating an old article and then reposting is new thing on The Roar. I just want to say it is honestly terrible.

I get why you’d want to update an ‘each team’s run home’ or ‘wallabies team news’ but then you need to make it clear that it’s an update rather than a new article and start a new comment section. This website is primarily driven by a phenomenal and active community and we don’t want be looking at comments from early July when reading article about ‘each team’s run home’. It honestly completely defeats the purpose of the comment section which is (for better or worse) the life-blood of The Roar.

Just read the comments on the articles and see how many people have accidentally replied to a comment that is multiple weeks old. For me it’s completely antithetical to what made love this website.

I just love how unironically telling this post is.

Hooper had an average game and was scored accordingly (although I’d argue he is marked far more harshly than most due to how good he usually is).

But instead of ‘Hooper had a rare average game and was scored accordingly’, it turns into ‘see he’s terrible and if he isn’t in MoM territory every game then I’ve been right all along!??!!!’

I’m still genuinely unsure as to whether the 3 or so accounts that post this stuff (and all consistently like each others posts about Hooper) are one troll or an actual group of conspiracy theorist nutjobs.

Either way, it’s hilarious to see the convoluted reasoning.

I’m sorry, but I’m not sure anyone, anywhere, ever has argued in favour of this comment:

‘Those in support of endless reviews say it’s for the best. They say that modern technology is foolproof.’

Honestly this comment is so absurd that kind of makes it hard to take the rest of the article seriously..

I’m mostly just confused what PR team he is talking about. I’m a young professional who grew up playing rugby (only stopped due to COVID) and I live in the city which is about 2 kilometres from Moore Park so I’d assume I’m a pretty key target audience for the Tahs and I have seen quite literally no PR, good-bad or otherwise.
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Obviously Zulu isn’t someone who is really worth replying to anyway, but it’s just kind of funny that it would seem more likely that that we literally don’t even have a PR department given how poor a job they do as opposed to them going into ‘overdrive’.

Sorry mate, you’ve missed the mark massively on this one.
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Does Djokovic get enough credit for just how phenomenal he is? Not really, no. Is this because the general tennis community just likes Federer and Nadal more? Yea, partly.
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But this whole article is a massive strawman. Sure, I can appreciate his greatness, but to me, he just comes across as a generally unlikeable person. He’s an anti-vaxxer who literally held a tennis tournament at the height of the pandemic that got 50+ people sick. He also believes that you can alter the makeup of food and water with your mind which just feeds into the terrible belief that people who are suffering are essentially choosing to do so because they aren’t strong enough. It’s a seriously narcissistic mindset.
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Also, I only believe in “my body, my choice” when it comes with the caveat “my consequences” and I’d argue that it’s a pretty common concept. The people that truely believe in the “my body, my choice” (with no consequences) are all over social media supporting Djokovic so I’m not really sure what your point is here.
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Aside from ALL of this, he / his team applied for the wrong Visa and was rightly denied. Let’s not even get into the absurdity of his father comparing him to Jesus as some sort of martyr… You are just so far off the mark on this one mate.

Ripping through the English batting lineup definitely isn’t a great barometer of success right now, but good bowling is good bowling regardless of the opposition and the last hour today was some of the best fast bowling I’ve seen in years. Consistent line, length, speed and accuracy. England was extremely lucky not to be 6-7 wickets down in 12 overs.

Any team in the world would be pleased to finish the day with 3 or less wickets down if they were in the same position.

That was a truely exceptional hour of fast bowling. Hope we can replicate that against better teams in future.

Every once in a while I find myself sympathising with the ‘I want this to be a close game’ crowd. And then days like this remind me just how much I love it when we demolish England. I absolutely love Test Cricket and as diehard fan of many sports, a closely fought game of Cricket is just about as good as it gets.

But if I was given a choice before the game – would I take a ‘close game’ with a chance of losing? Or us demolishing the English with the result never really in doubt?

Demolition job every day of the week and twice on Sundays.

You missed the worst ‘above’ in the ‘who really rates him’. Pretty important part of the comment to be honest. Almost seems like you were just looking for a reason to be indignant about something.

You do realise that the Eastern Suburbs of Sydney is generally regarded to be the most desirable place to live in Australia for ‘wealthy’ people? I’m not saying that I personally agree with that, but it’s definitely a factor for players. When you combine that with the fact that the pool of top tier number 9s is probably at its lowest point of the last 20 years, then yea. No team should be able to hold onto two top 5 9s and it’s honesty pretty silly to suggest otherwise.

Great article as always. Dupont was a worthy winner and there is a very good argument to be made that he has been the best all-around player in the world over the last 2 years.

I do feel that Hooper very slightly edged him and I’m pretty confident that the AB / France had an outsized influence on the award. But I really can’t argue overall.

My biggest issue is that the whole ‘fan vote’ thing was a terrible, terrible idea. When the population of the best rugby playing country (NZ, 5m) is less than 10% of three of the world rugby powerhouses (England, France, SA 60m+), it makes a vote completely useless.

Dupont was a worthy winner and should be celebrated. But 20 years from now people will read that there was a ‘fan vote’ and the fact that the judges had the final say will be completely lost to history and his award will be considered a popularity vote.

Mate your writing here is absolutely excellent. Flows well, builds a narrative and was just a pleasure to read. Great work.

To your point, I’m largely in agreement too. Like others have said I’m very much in the ‘naivety over malice’ camp until proven otherwise. He really does need to wise up a bit though and I completely understand why the Storm would be upset.

Seriously why even bother commenting if you don’t follow the sport? Almost all of them are either unavailable due to club or personal reasons or injured.

I’ve never understood people who get indignant about something that they have no idea about. So odd

Hard to work out exactly what you’re suggesting happened. But based on what you’re implying in your message it’s pretty clear you’ve never played rugby.

Absolutely agree. I’ve been critical of his ref management and decision making as a captain in the past, but if you doubt his ability to lead from the front you’re clearly not watching the same game that the rest of us are.

I’ve mentioned it before, but I played against Hooper for years when he was playing club rugby for Manly from U11s to U16s. We played against them in the Grand Final 4 or 5 times (it’s been a while, can’t remember exactly) and even though we had a clearly better team man-for-man, Hooper dragged the team on his back and they actually beat us in two of them. He was also always a genuine guy and played a hard but clean game. He’s continued on and done the same thing for both the Waratahs and the Wallabies. Nothing but respect for an Australian legend of the game.

Half marks, lived in Sydney for most of my life but born in Chicago. But if we’re playing the guessing game, my guess is that when Hooper is nominated for World Rugby Men’s 15s Player of the Year in a few months (for the second time) you’ll still pretend that no one rates him outside of Australia. And if he wins it, it’ll be some kind of conspiracy I suppose?

This is just so very wrong it’s actually laughable. Very hard to quantify but I’d argue that Hooper is up there with the players who are most commonly rated more highly outside their country than in it.

Love this article. Sure, it’s probably a slightly overly optimistic view but really, who cares? When is the last time us Wallabies fans have had a chance to think like this with any sort of claim to realism. For the first time in at least a decade it feels like the fundamental building blocks are there for us to be a genuine top 2-3 team for the rest of this World Cup cycle and until it’s proven otherwise, this is a hill I will absolutely die on. How good is rugby!

It’s been nice to see you around less Tooly, but I have to give it to you, this comment is up there with your worst attempts ever. Suppose you’re going for (lack of) quality over quantity these days.

This is a really weird comparison and it makes me wonder if you watched the games? Kellaway is primarily getting praise for his all-round game and the 7 tries is just the cherry on top. This is literally the polar opposite of Folau who was a try scoring freak and largely deficient elsewhere.

Hard disagree on this one and I think you’ll find it’s awfully lonely on this hill. Aside from the few trolls and their multiple alternative accounts, of course.

I think that’s a bit harsh. We emptied our bench and conceded two tries, one of which was extremely questionable, while still showing great effort and intent. We were also up by 30 points.

Definitely wasn’t a great finish, but didn’t feel like a standard Wallabies collapse either.

Well yes, it’s not all about stats, but in no world is Bell ‘undersized’. Tight-five players generally mature later than other positions and Bell is definitely still learning his way, but I don’t think that size or power is an issue for him right now. He will definitely get stronger over the years, but his biggest issues are around experience and technique as opposed to size.