You will never convince me that the current obsession with handing out red cards is a good thing.
They have shifted their interpretation of dangerous play, and how it should be dealt with, a long way from where it used to be. But they haven’t changed the card system. It is no longer fit for purpose.
Add in the inconsistency they are applying it with and it is a complete fucking mess.

Straight red cards should be reserved for the worst of the worst. ie. biting, kicking, eye gouging, punching, stomping on a head and deliberate or extremely dangerous foul play eg. A stiff arm to the head.

Tackles that are part of the game but have just been poorly executed in the heat of the game should be dealt with differently. There is absolutely no reason another tier of card allowing for a replacement player after 10min and harsher suspensions wouldn’t work.
Or hey you could even start by not reducing every single ban by 50% because someone dressed nicely for the hearing.

I would be very interested in seeing the stats for how often a team has gone on to win after copping a red card before 60 mins. It is so often a death sentence for the contest.

By the way, im not commenting on the red card in this game. Im not watching it because i refused to pay money to watch a RWC which was so clearly going to be tainted by bullshit cards and inconsistent application of the laws.

For fucks sake.
Im pretty fucking over rugby at the moment to be honest. To put 54 on the Wallabies in sydney and get the win but be pissed off afterward is just a weird feeling.
The reffing of the game at the moment is absolutely killing the game. That Wallabies try was one of the most obvious non tries i have seen in ages. The pass was 1m forward and then a clear offside the angle they made the call on was totally wrong.
Then the non try for BB. The front angle clearly showed BBs hand on the ball first yet they look at some far off angle from behind and the consistency of clear and obvious being required to disallow the try is out the window.

Fuck Barnes.

ABs bench sucked arse.
We need to find a new 3rd hooker and a replacement for Ofa.
TJP was shit again. Has reverted to the old TJ. WTF was that quick lineout? Stupid.

DMac mixed really good with the shit. That is the problem with him.

Ioane, ASmith, Squire and Rettalick really good.
BB's goal kicking very good.

Oh and a big fuck you to the Clown. What sort of professional sits in the coaches box swearing his head off at every ref call, even when it goes his way.
When is he going to get called on his pathetic record as wallabies coach?

@MN5 said in All Blacks v BI Lions Test #2:

On the piss in town last night and I have to say that every single Lions fan is an absolute GGC. Great folk to talk shit with. Such a decent bunch. My Mum is a fan too after getting her car stuck on the ledge of a drive she was using to turn around in. A group of about 6 of them lifted her car ( Suzuki swift ) back onto the roadside. Legends.

Town is just pumping. 2005 all over again, only difference is my fucken head aches way more than it did at 28.

Concussion? Would explain some of your comments around Scottish players.

@mikethesnow said in All Blacks v France Test #2:

@taniwharugby said in All Blacks v France Test #2:

@booboo the French centre reckons it was partly BBs fault....

Doumayrou conceded it was "the straight application of the regulation" but felt the match officials should have taken into account that there had been "a fault of the All Blacks" with Fall "unbalanced" while challenging for the ball.

Was going to wait until tomorrow, but had a few so what the hell.

ALB certainly helped Fall to his final destination quicker than he expected.

Not a legal person but I think that's what the Americans call an 'Accesory After The Fact'

Nothing Fall could have done to avoid the collision with BB

Fall was focussed on the ball the whole time, as was BB

Many have commented that Fall would never have made the catch.

It could be argued that BB knew the only way he could make the catch was to leap above the oncoming player and put himself at the mercy of the collision.

So he couldn't have turned his eyes in the general direction he was running and realised he was going to be beaten to the ball and pulled out? How did all the other players in the match manage to properly judge aerial contests then?

Its a pretty simple situation. Time your run right and get in the air to properly contest or pull out and wait for the guy to safely land. Blindly running to where the ball is going to land and being surprised you take out a jumper is not an option.

Well it appears my first reaction to that squad was the same as everyone elses. Fifita? WTF?

They have lost the plot over the last few years when trying to plan for Kaino’s departure.
Elliot Dixon in and out, Luatua in and out, Squire all the chances in the world despite being shit, fifita all the chances in the world despite being shit, Frizzell in from nowhere then out, Barrett maybe we will use him but not given many chances, Hemopo selected as a 6 but now listed as a lock also given bugger all chances despite showing promise, Papalii in then out, Akira never given a chance despite good form, Jacobson in then......

What is the bet they now try Cane, Read or Ardie there? That is the only reason i can see them picking Todd.

Will be interesting to see what they do at 14 too. Some of those guys need to be tested.

Much better performance tonight. Especially with all the new guys in the team.
Scott Barrett my MOTM. Don't see why people are saying he is too slow to cover 6. Not like Kaino was fast. Would much rather a strong tackler/strong carrier and lineout option with good ball skills over a flaah open field runner like Fifita.

Dmac was also good. Still had some poor moments but for the most part he was playing like a 10.
Hopefully he and Richie can both develop so we have some good depth at 10.

SBW was looking really good. Unfortunate that he got hurt. Think our backline balance with a strong runner at 12 to bend the line.

Thought Goodhue was decent on debut. Especially second half. Hemopo good on debut and i thought Frizzell wasn't as bad as has been said on here but still not seeing what he has over Akira.

Hopefully this is the last time we see Todd miss a squad. Time to have him on the bench in the top team.

Rieko was bloody good again. So much gas. Looked good at centre too.

Think people are jumping the gun on calling Ben Smith past it. He is still a fucking good rugby player.
And while Naholo wasn't great on D tonight he is still a bloody good winger to have in the squad.

One and only thing i will say about the ref/tmo: The Frizzell no try was bullshit. Sure if the ref goes upstairs and says can you see a grounding? And the tmo can't see it you don't give the try. But when the ref said he saw it you don't interrupt then overturn the call because you aren't sure if he got it or not. There was no clear held up just like there was no grounding. So go with the refs call ffs.

Also the NZ anthem was awful. I hate the slow warbling opera types.

@Hooroo said in All Blacks vs Tonga:

@Nepia said in All Blacks vs Tonga:

@ACT-Crusader said in All Blacks vs Tonga:

@pukunui said in All Blacks vs Tonga:

@Canerbry said in All Blacks vs Tonga:

@pukunui said in All Blacks vs Tonga:

Im definitely not sold on the Bridge/Reece combo.

Why is that?

To clarify that probably should have been followed by “as our first choice combo”

I just don’t think it is the best one we can put on the park. Ioane/Smith still #1 for me if BB is at 15.

If Smith is at 15 i would have Bridge in the conversation for 14 but they don’t seem to want to play him there.

With Reece i just don’t rate him that highly yet. He hasn’t done anything in an AB wingers jersey that someone like Jordie hasn’t and he was about as good in Super rugby as Ben Lam was a season or two back. For now i put him firmly in the “flashy new toy” category.

The great thing about flashy new toys is that you only need them for Christmas/New Year period. We only need Reece to perform at the RWC and then let’s see where it goes.

I'd prefer we rely on Ioane (who's performed for a couple of years now and his drop in form has been blown way out of proportion) and Bridge who looks to be the next long term Ben Smith/Cory Jane style player.

I'd prefer we rely on the form winger rather than the grossly out of form winger.

The way Bridge hunted out the ball during the last Bled was enough for me to want to see a lot more of that

Where does this grossly out of form thing come from? He has only played two games for the ABs this season. He wasn’t great against the Boks when he kept dropping the ball but lets not forget Bridge came on and shat the bed letting the boks score at the end. Then he played against Aus in perth where he wasn’t bad despite to forwards getting embarrassed.

It’s not fair to translate his up and down super season into his test “form” because he was playing in a joke of a Blues team and still scored 9 tries.

Surely having an online poll of the crowd to choose the players who go off would get everyone more involved.
They could do the same to choose try celebrations and what colour boots each player wears.

I will stop watching if this sort of shit creeps into the game more.

The good stuff:

• Jordie on the wing, thought he looked good there. Not just because it was Italy too. Showed good pace and aerial skills. Probably doesn't have the same pressure to pull things off on the wing as Fullback. Good to have another option for that tight wing spot.
• Coles looking like he used to was great to see.

The bad stuff:

• the obsession with kicking the ball away continues. Even worse is they scored off it several times so will think it works now. Im starting to think the only powder they had in this tour was the kicking powder. Maybe the rest of it got lost at heathrow.
• Naholo, who was anonymous

The question marks:

• Fifita, looked good. But we already knew he could run rampant against second tier teams. Papalii didn't really get enough time to make any judgements.
• Midfield, borh guys went well. First choice pair in no clearer though.
• Dmac, he scored 3 tries but is still a massive question mark for me. So often his team mates look as confused about what he is doing as the opposition. Still loves to run across field like Lote Tuqiri. Unfortunately they subbed BB so we didn't get a look the Mounga/BB combo.

@nepia said in All Blacks Squad for France:

Shannon Frizell - WTF! Seriously, even setting aside the fact he's a poach, he's the worst selection in the ABs for a long time.

Basically Akira has to move to a South Island team and do some of the mythical graft that @Machpants claims he doesn't do, despite the fact he's week in week out one of the hardest workers going un a bumbling Blues team. What graft has Frizell done in his 34 minutes per game he plays?

Im trying to work out what graft work Fifita and Savea do that Akira doesn't as well.
I could understand if all the guys infront of him were veterans and he just needed to wait for his chance but they are parachuting guys with less runs on the board in ahead of him.

@Bones said in Super Rugby 2020:

@pukunui said in Super Rugby 2020:

An islands team is just going to suck resources away from NZ teams too.

Is it though? There are many bloody good PI players playing outside of NZ. Shitloads.

Are they going to flock back though? Will be a big pay cut from what they are getting up north.

I mainly meant financial resources because presumably they aren’t going to be bringing big bags of money to the table.

I have some serious concerns about some of the options being floated for 2021 and beyond. If the last 15 years of super rugby have taught us anything it is that diluting the quality of the player pool by adding new teams is a shit idea and turns people away because the product is worse.

Of the expansion teams only the Jags have been semi successful because they provided a new player pool.
The Aust, Saffa and Japan teams have been rubbish because they were filled with cast off from other teams and guys who shouldn’t have been playing super level in the first place.

Adding additional NZ teams seems nuts. We don’t have the depth anymore. We will just end up with something that isn’t as good as the NZ super rugby derbies and only moderately better than the top ITM teams playing each other. An islands team is just going to suck resources away from NZ teams too. Especially if it is based in Auckland.

If we are going it alone my preference would be for the 5 existing Super teams to play home and away with a top 2 final.
Then ITM cup and if there is space try and organise a “world club challenge” type thing with other top clubs/franchises from around the world.

Cane was completely anonymous in the early stages of the semi vs England. Just didn’t seem to show up at all.

@Jailbreak7 said in Sunwolves v Crusaders (round 7):

FFS Rugby is dead if that is a red card
Absolutely ridiculous

Yep, rugby is fucked. Two weeks in a row where these bullshit interpretations have reduced teams to 13.

I never would have thought i would lose interest in the game because i was firmly in the die hard rugby fan category, hence spending thousands of hours reading the fern for over a decade. But the last 2-3 years have well and truely killed that. I struggle to give a shit anymore because it is so obvious the next farce is just around the corner.

The administrators are so keen to pack new supporters on the boat that they have completey missed the fact that they have created massive holes in the hull.

@Toddy said in Hurricanes 2020:

Looking at the that Canes 'Magpies' 15 you can see why the Canes don't really bother picking Hawkes Bay players. That 15 wouldn't even make the semis of the NPC.

Wouldn’t you need to compare it to a “non canes” magpie team to come to that conclusion?

@Stargazer should be able to put one of those together pretty quickly. Would be interesting to see.

Yes, “Bring on Ireland” came back to earth with a thud when it was revealed all the powder was used up on Ireland.

@MajorRage said in RWC: 3rd/4th game All Blacks vs Wales:

@pukunui said in RWC: 3rd/4th game All Blacks vs Wales:

Agree with all of that. Especially the myth of Ben Smiths poor form that even Hansen had convinced himself of.
But adding the Ben Smith non selection to the Barrett over Cane selection, bringing in green props on the eve of the RWC, the poor management of Rieko, the muddled selections in midfield, the complete fuck up that was made of finding a replacement for Kaino and the general push towards a helter skelter style of play (aka non RWC winning) to fit BB and DMac into the side and it’s clear Hansen has lost the plot a bit over the last 2 years.

Time for some fresh ideas.

If only Hansen had that perfect 20/20 vision that you had (without the ever so slight advantage of hindsight).

I think you're wrong. I think Hansen knew full well that we simply didn't have the cattle to take on England, SA upfront. At the end of 2018 we beat both England and SA away by bugger all both games and then got comprehensively munched by Ireland. In each of those three games we got completely taken to upfront.

I think Hansen saw both SA & England were seriously building, perhaps that Ireland had peaked and looked at our cattle and wondered if we had what it took to take them on. He then concluded that we probably didn't and realised that our backline was our only real shot. Then came the Bledisloe 1 and he realised that he really had to roll the dice. So he did.

It worked for a bit - we munched Aus in Bled 2 and then due to 15 mins of brilliance got past SA in the opening WC fixture. But I suspect both Eddie & Rassie watched that match and realised we still were extremely beatable up front. And so it proved.

Time for fresh ideas? Maybe. But I think as long as rugby is a pure 23 man game with 6 extra forwards on the bench, we are going to struggle to compete in the forwards battle.

Lack of cattle? Are you serious? What a cop out of an excuse. We have plenty of world class cattle in the forwards. The pack that smashed through the Lions in that first test was largely still there and has been dealing with the Boks just fine. What about the pack that played so well against Ireland a week earlier? Hansen got cute with tactics and selections and it bit him on the arse.

And it’s got nothing to do with hindsight. Plenty of people saw these issues over the last 2-3 years but there was always the cover of Hansen knows what he is doing, they are holding the tactics back, powder dry etc. There was no powder kept dry. It got snorted by Hansen shortly before he decided we don’t need experience to win RWC knockout games, just super rugby flash.

@reprobate said in RWC: 3rd/4th game All Blacks vs Wales:

All the talk of Ben Smith being old and slow was always bullshit I think. He's never been particularly fast, his acceleration and footwork in traffic have always been his strength, along with low error-rate, good option-taking and strength in the air.
He was good all super season at 15, then the ABs drop him from his preferred position and give him really limited shots to get used to wing again in poor team performances and all of a sudden he's out of the 23 for jordie barrett, who - at this stage of his career - is always on for a fucking howler of a mistake, and didn't really deserve a place in the squad in the first place. I was/am okay with the mounga/barrett combo, but smith probably should have started on the wing, and absolutely bloody definitely should have made the bench.

As for Barrett over Cane. Sure you can see the theory, attack the lineout, but you don't drop sam cane to play scott barrett out of position and expect your defence to be okay. the cane/frizzell combo was actually really good in this game, gave the early defensive platform that everything else flowed from.

as for those thinking SBW would have made a difference, yeah, nah. when has he ever? alb has been great all year, and goodhue too - and he was our best in the loss. crotty should have been on the bench instead of sbw for composure and mistake-free footy.

we've got to stop thinking of the bench as being full of ball-runners who are going to stick an extra 20 points on an already-beaten opposition, and pretending that is 'impact'. Rassie showed us this WC what real bench impact looks like: a full tight 5 of big hard fluffybunnies, not a flash-harry amongst them - and they're subbing all the guys who physically are least suited to endurance. that's actually a situation where i could support jordie being picked - if it was just him and a halfback who both barely play barring injury or the result being beyond doubt, to allow a bench stacked with forwards.

Agree with all of that. Especially the myth of Ben Smiths poor form that even Hansen had convinced himself of.
But adding the Ben Smith non selection to the Barrett over Cane selection, bringing in green props on the eve of the RWC, the poor management of Rieko, the muddled selections in midfield, the complete fuck up that was made of finding a replacement for Kaino and the general push towards a helter skelter style of play (aka non RWC winning) to fit BB and DMac into the side and it’s clear Hansen has lost the plot a bit over the last 2 years.

Time for some fresh ideas.

@shark said in 2020 All Blacks Squad:

An area we're sorely lacking in as things stand is grunt from the loose forward group. We have a proliferation of world-class openside flankers we seem to want to shoe-horn in ala Pooper and Smith/Waugh as we lack depth at 6, and as of 2020 we have a dire hole at 8 as well. (Still not dire enough to try Ioane though). Savea is an openside flanker, as of course is Cane. We need a couple of chunky lads in 6 and 8. Maybe Squire comes back and that helps, but we need a Fifita or Frizzell to stake a legit claim and/or a Blackadder to break through in SR. It's noticeable that throughout our game, loose forwards and locks are 'shrinking'. We first see our midget packs get beaten up by SA and England in the U20s and this has started to translate into the senior ranks. We have far too many blindside flankers playing as under sized locks in Super Rugby and even moreso in the NPC, and too few 8s and 6s regularly playing in those positions who have genuine size (around 1.92m+) and bulk. We also have stuff all 2m+ locks coming through (compared to around 10 - 15 years ago when we were flush in that department) and our openside flankers are on average getting smaller I reckon. Look at the emerging talent like Harmon and Kirifi. Harmon replaces another midget in Todd. Dillon Hunt isn't big either.

10-15 years our locks were rubbish, we had Ali and Jack and fuck all else. It wasn’t until Brad Thorn came back and Whitelock came onto the scene that we actually got decent there. Luckily BBBR followed BBBT so there was no drop off.

As far as i know Squire is off overseas too. Which is good because he definitely isn’t the answer to any questions we should be asking.