I can accept the difference, and would also have accepted a red for Kolisi. Two sides of a fine line. I think the one that All Blacks fans are aggrieved about though was Etzebeth - I don’t think this contact was called at all
Nope. Completely missed (certain by me) but mentioned above.
It does look interesting, I will have to put it on my list. Pain in the arse for me to get, that type of sports title seldom gets publication on this side of the Atlantic, it is the kind of book I often end up buying in airports. No trips to Europe/UK scheduled right now.
I found his comment about the Laws should embed a guiding principle of blowing your whistle as little as possible really interesting. I don’t know rugby nearly as well as football, but my sense is that rugby is extraordinarily difficult to officiate compared to footy. The fifteen sub-rules about rucking, etc.
Barnes and his family have been through a bit of hell on social media not only after the recent world cup but going way back as well.
Personally I think he’s grown into one of the best referees out there over the years. That’s in an incredibly complex and heavily scrutinised role.
I can fully understand his decision to step away.
Wow, Dupont is apparently skipping Six Nations play in order to focus on Olympic Sevens.
Wow. Out of the blue that one.
You beat me to it
WTAF.
Not sure where he would slot in. Good speed for a man his size, but at around 220 lbs he is a bit slight of frame to be a running back. He has the physical tools to play in the defensive secondary, but there are a lot of learned skills involved in those positions. Similarly, he has good hands, not sure how that will translate into fade over-the-shoulder catches of an American football.
This is a real sign of the disarray in rugby, not just Wales, but the English pro game as well.
There is even less room now given the reduced presence of kick returning.
100% right. Smacks of seeking a pay cheque (check) to me, which he’s absolutely entitled to do.
Echoes here of Welsh players leaving for rugby league. Jonathan Davies, Scott Gibbs etc.
I don’t anywhere near enough about American football to know how he’ll fit in but even to me it sounds like a really difficult and almost odd choice.
Most interesting part of this year’s 6 nations might be the race for the wooden spoon.
He is a wonderfully skilled player, and a remarkable natural athlete. But there are dozens of players about his size and speed entering the NFL draft from NCAA Division 1, what will set them apart is the mental and skill parts of the game. In particular, with his size he is what scouts often call a ‘tweener’. He is big and fast, but isn’t big enough to be big, and may not be fast enough to be fast. No idea what his 40 meter time is.
Football is an incredibly structured sport, for me less entertaining to watch than rugby because it has just a few seconds per game of the dynamic improvisational play that he excels in. As Limiescouse says, he might have projected as a kick returner, but that is of declining relevance.
It’s American football. Put on a load of armour, catch ball, run fast. Simples 
More or less, yeah. All the offload ability, seeing space, kicking, etc is irrelevant. Be big and/or fast, catch ball. Learning to run pass routes is a very different skill set.
Off topic I know but I could never get my head around why they never do a simple little pass between supporting players every now and then.
So many TD’s left on the park imo. I guess the ball is made of butter yet they will catch a 60 yard bomb over the shoulder no issue.
There are loads of players who never touch the ball. An offensive lineman can have a Hall of Fame career and never touch one in a game. When possession is everything, an offload is a potential fumble. In any given play, the guy who can catch the ball over the shoulder is probably taking 50-60 of those passes in practice daily, his blockers never do. So he is coached to make sure he doesn’t lose the ball on contact.
Taking that risk only happens when there is no downside anyway, so you get these very exciting plays that are basically bad rugby, with blocking.
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If you have support runners they are able to block for you and so you deal with “overlaps” that way. Throwing a pass to a guy who thinks his job is to get out ahead of you and block is asking for a turn over.
That’s how to do it, sort of. And so the question then becomes why not? It would cause chaos and be brilliant.
But I wholly appreciate your (and @Limiescouse’s) point on playing to the percentages and possession.
Still I was never quite that percentages guy as a scrum half anyway. Probably should have been.
Anyhow, Garland has wished him luck and stated if he were playing he’d probably look at a 12month sabbatical in Japan.
It’s not even a case of playing the percentages. It’s a case of playing it in line with the way the rules allow you to.
You could imagine some designed plays where a RB handoff results in the equivalent of a miss one pass from an outside half to a wide receiver who had stayed at the line of scrimmage, but it starts getting pretty complex and tricky to design it so he isnt receiving it at a standing start with a DB in his face…and all this in a game where no running back has the passing skills of a rugby 10.
There was a style of play, called the ‘wishbone offence’ (so called because the four man offensive backfield was lined up in a triangle like a wishbone), where the quarterback would run the ball or pitch/lay it off to one of the three running backs - and occasionally they would in turn pitch it one more time in a fairly designed ‘trick’ play configuration. It was one of the more prominent offensive schemes of the 1970s and 80s, although I think it died out in the 90s. But even there, while individual sequences would look rugby-ish, usually only one player was ever deciding to keep the ball or lay it off.
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