This was by far the best Oz game this year, gives me hope we can start lifting ourselves out of the hole.

The first 20 minutes were good by both teams. Tahs were hampered by a continuing inability to transform possession into scoring. They then had an also too often brain fade and the Rebels played some good rugby, deserved the nineteen point difference. Second half was all one way, started with the incumbents, the subs continued the good form. Not sure what happened to the Rebels decision making, it just went from bad to worst in the second half.

Agree Foley made a difference; his underling does seem to have skills, but doesn’t have the experience to guide a team around the park like Foley. It’s a shame Phipps game has fallen so much, alas, gave Gordon a chance to debut.

Disagree with the negative comments on big Willie – he carried quite a lot and made the gain line every time.

Folau was better at FB, but I wonder if the fact that the backing wasn’t firing in the first four games tainted the experiment of having him at centre. He played some good games as centre last year.

Hodge did look very good for the Rebels, made a real difference. Good performance from Styrofoam and Deb too.

Prognostic for next week – still a tough one. Oz teams are in a historical low, while Kiwi teams are on a historical high. Kiwis are dominating not only against Oz but against the Saffas too, exciting time for then. I hope we play as in the second half, make it a real game (hope it’s not raining too).

Cheap shot. You lost me when you said the game is boring, but let me qualify my statement.

Before moving to Australia in 2003, I had never even heard of League. I started watching it with an open mind, though the cousin code might worth watching. Open mind lasted less than a season, because the game is very, very boring. More like the warm-ups I gave the kids before starting with the real stuff. It feels like something is missing – it starts well enough, and when you will dispute the ball it stops, player wiggles on the ground and the team gets a free ball. Very boring. It’s a wonder it caught on in Australia, as it’s the same impression I heard from Brits, Irish and South Africans when I was living in London. Very, very boring.

Mind you, I had never heard of AFL either, and now find it interesting. Not as much as I enjoy rugby, but I could become interested.

Regarding the whole BS about too many teams, Australian teams have won Super Rugby after the expansion to five. We are in a low at the moment, but I see it just as something temporary.

Only point I agree with is that we are at risk of losing the grass roots. It’s fundamental to invest in the clubs and schools to generate the players that will be the future stars, and I think not enough is being done.

Rugby doesn’t need to be the number one sport in Australia, it just needs to be big enough to attract a portion of the population. In football mad Brazil, we’ve won gold in Volleyball, Basketball, swimming, judo and other sports, and rugby is the fastest growing sport there now. Will any of these supplant football as the top sport in the country? Certainly not, but it doesn’t matter. There are enough people who like these sports to generate volume.

League (argh) and AFL will continue to be the top sport in Australia for a very long time. It doesn’t matter, all I care is that rugby is healthy and provides me with the entertainment I seek.

100% agree Bret.

You don’t make Australia rugby better by reducing the opportunities for players to play at the highest level. I actually find that very narrow minded, Intelectually weak thinking.

Mind you, as a Tahs fan I wouldn’t be directly affected.

The real issue to address is grass roots rugby – how do you make the base stronger to feed those five teams. Make the clubs stronger, get to the schools. I coached junior rugby here and in the UK, the resources and organisation there are much stronger, and you don’t have the ridiculously short season.

Sad, just sad ?

Went to the game and was going to write something very similar to Cynical, beat me to the punch.

Let was named man of the match and probably deserved it. But I wasn’t surprised, thought he was coming up well last year.

Skeleton was a pleasant surprise. Aside from a few dropped balls, he was very good, good carries, good presence. I couldn’t see his line out work from the stands, someone who saw it on TV can better adjudicate. But as an overall performance it looked very good.

Robinson is an interesting case – his kicking technique, even the way he places the ball on the tee, is very different. But it doesn’t matter if he gets the results, and yesterday he kicked 5/6 in difficult conditions.

Ref did slow the games down, when it was destined to be slow already under the conditions. The fact he didn’t give a yellow for the neck tackle on Hooper is beyond belief.

I’m happy with the starting front row, but when the subs came on every single scrum collapsed, we gave away three or four penalties for that. Yes, conditions were slippery, but Kepu and Robinson managed to stay on their feet.

All this said, the game was a scrappy, dour affair, riddled with handling errors. Conditions and rust didn’t help, but still it does need to get much better than this.

That’s great Michael. Let’s do this then – you go and watch that, report the results back to us then, ok.

Rest in Peace, Dan.

Condolences to the family.

Thanks for the rap, Rob, great to see a good summary of the Aviva in one place. Happy for the Quinns!

Thank you for the great three years Paddy, best wishes on your next endeavour.

Congrats and good luck Dean. While I’m not a fan of your present form, I have great respect for what you’ve given the Tahs and Australia over these 13 years (and am also told you are a top bloke). Hope you succeed in helping make rugby thrive in Oz. Cheers ?

Thank you for the good update No Brain. Rooting for the Jags (except for if they play the Tahs, naturally :-)).

I actually watched the proto-jaguars play the Tahs B team in 2015, in Eastwood, in preparation for their inaugural season. Even practiced my rusty Spanish with one of the team doctors.

Hopefully someday a Brazilian player will also make it to the squad. Here’s hoping.

I won’t get into the discussion on whether a developing nation should host an Olympics in this rugby forum.

On historical buildings being demolished for construction of the Vila, I couldn’t find any reference to it in Brazilian press (which is free and quite caustic). Historical buildings in Brazil are relatively well catalogued (and very poorly maintained), so if they were demolishing one there would be an outcry. Sadly, slave housing (senzalas) were quite widespread in Brazil, I visited a few of them.

They did disappropriate a favela (slum). That happens when you have major works, two dozen houses nearby me (in Sydney) were demolished to make way for the tunnel that will connect the M2 to the M1 (Hills district); a neighbour was in tears, as they had just done a big renovation.

I have reservations on how it was done in Rio (there was some police violence against owners who refused to move out), but not on the fact that some had to be moved.

Good article, but as a die-hard Tahs supporter I think the chance of them coming in third is very slim, luck of the draw.

Last year was a rebuild year, with a dozen top level players having left in the previous two years and twenty players from the NRC and junior competitions brought on board. Happily many stepped up and started well.

This year two more big losses (Beale and Tatafu) and only Kepu brought on board (plus some additional young guns and NRL players). I think this team looks good for the future, but this year is not a likely one for semis. I think we can improve from last year, but too soon for Heights. [Worried about 2nd row]

Outside of this, I think you are a bit bullish with SA, expect the kiwis to continue to dominate and am hoping the Argies finally play to their potential.

As mentioned, it was never supposed to be a permanent stadium, it was built using erectable structures, easy to dismount.

Rugby was the fastest growing sport in Brazil long before the Olympics. From when I played in the 80/90s to now it has grown from 20 teams to over 200, with thousands playing.

Still far, far from professional, except for the national sevens team. Highligh was the women’s seven classifying for the World Sevens top tier, on the back of a strong Olympics result.

Men’s 15 played in the inaugural America’s 6 Nations, managed to beat the USA and played well against Canada. Came 5th, which is one better than expected.

About to classify for the World Cup? No, far from it, but growing, gaining volume.

Disagree with the sloppy classification. Don’t always agree with Spiro and agree with you that idea is not good, but its just an idea for discussion.

Agree with you on Growden. It was horrible reading, like having your grumpy old uncle in a bad day writting about rugby – everything was wrong, everything was terrible.

Look forward to reading you more.

You need to exclude players that didnt play and/or put a N/A as an option. For example, I think Latu played (not sure), can’t really remember his performance quite well enough to give a score.

That’s an interesting idea Celtic, better than a copy-cat state of origin. You seem to have thought it through, with games in different states, so die-hards (like me) can go to a live game almost every week. Combine it with showing the WB games on the big screen after the match. Perhaps throw in a NRC match as an opener (or between the match and the WB match). I’d pay for an afternoon like that, with six hours of rugby (and plenty of beer).

On a tangent (and not liking League), I dont get the state of origin thing at all. Very small-minded (excludes great players born elsewhere). Do married vs singles or a blondies vs brunnetts, or a tatooed vs clean skinned. 🙂 🙂 :-). All artificial ways of dividing the players.

Goodwin was ok in the France test and poor in the France Barbarians (didnt pass, few breaks). He seems to have potential, but Hodge has shown some real spark. The player I really liked in both tests is Luke Morahan, hpe he gets some additional exposure.

On a separate thought, if Goodwin can play fly half, cant understand why they didnt move him there when Lance got hurt – Gerard was poor at it, compromised the game.

As others have noted, I’m convinced that whomever wrote this article didn’t really watch the game. Wallabies XV were in no way “humbled”, it was in fact a very close game a the way to the end.

It wasn’t fantastic rugby, but two thrown together teams are always going to be disjointed. Actual Barbarians usually have at least a couple of weeks to try to form a team.

Thought Dempsey, Luke Morahan and Kellaway played well. Sad the wingers never got a chance to play, as the ball never reached them.

Gerard was poor, I know he isnt a fly-half but still it was a disappointing performance. Penalty kicked in the last four minutes shows Skelton isnt a captain. Far too many penalties too, this and the set pieces lost us the game.

What is happening with Fardy? He didnt play poorly, but nowhere near what I’d expect of him. Hope he returns to his old form soon (so we dont have Mumm there instead).

But fair enough, it gave the up and coming lads a run, local supporters enjoyed themselves (my son was in the crowd), an ok spectable for free.

Have to love some people’s lack of understanding of irony. Funnier than the article itself.

Working, just submitted

This was the best Wallabies game this year, shame we didn’t play like this against England or RSA. It was an actual contest for 65 minutes or so and would have been more even if we didn’t allow two soft tries in the first ten minutes.

I think this was the youngest team we’ve fielded this year (haven’t gone back to check), with seven starters and five bench with 11 caps or less. It’s not an excuse for losing, but rather a hope for better things to come.

We lost because of too many mistakes (most AB initial tries were on our mistakes) and an inability to score with ball in hand, which had already hurt us in most of the games this year. Both problems have been a constant this year and need to be addressed.

In contrary to the usual detractors, Phipps and Foley played a good game, and Quade was also solid when he came on (despite the ridiculous booing). These two positions, though, are ones where I’m hoping new talent will appear soon. Genia is playing a bit above the other three, but none of them dazzle me. For 6 there are some good young guns that are injured, but they can slot in fairly quickly when well (no more Mumm, please, and Fardy looks spent), but for 9 and 10 the maturity of the up and coming seems further away. What happened to Jack Debreczeni, who looked so promising?

This NZ team is something special, kudos to them. Their dominance is very similar to the USA in basketball, not a question if they will win but by how much. I hope the other teams rise to the challenge, don’t let it be a constant forever, either else it can become boring. Their ability to destroy the opposition in the last quarter of the game really is mesmerising, even if you are on the receiving end.

The outcome of the game wouldn’t have changed, but to add my 2c on the controversial stuff.

I thought the Spreight disallowed try was an incorrect call. DHP was running to provide support just as much as Savea was to defend. I thought Savea tried to disrupt DHP just as much as DHP tried to disrupt Savea. They jousted for position and Savea came out short (and made a fuss about it). Would it have been a penalty try is Savea had managed to disrupt DHP and catch Spreight? I hope we don’t begin to stop players from a fair dispute for position. I know the rule (no need to keep citing it), my point is that, to me, DHP was just jousting with Savea, didn’t substantially change his line.

Someone wrote above on the “dominance of the ABs scrum”. Pure BS, it was actually very even all game. When the scrum is stalled and neither side can hook or push, it’s a tie, not a win by the defending scrum – they can’t hook it out either. If you look at the scrum outcomes throughout the game, fairly even, and the Wallabies were closer than before in the lineouts too.

Congratulations to the ABs, who replaced a large number of retiring legends with a group that is even more dominant.

I hope the Wallaby renewal continues and that we rise to challenge them (hopefully in the not too distant future).

Media stunt by L’Equipe.

Thanks Brett, looking forward to these games.