It’s a mystery to me, the game commences, for the usual fee, plus expenses, He could throw that ball by you, Make you look like a fool boy. As neither Mark Knopfler nor Bruce Springsteen actually sang. But this is it, after months of travel and travails, outlandish skill and outrageous decisions, flashy footwork and plodding power, sleight of hand, nothing bland, we arrive at the knockouts of the URC. The last eight sides still in with a shout, four matches this weekend that could produce some stunning upsets or predictable eye-rolling. Let’s see.
Glasgow Warriors vs Connacht sets the ball rolling in Scotland on Friday night, with 1st vs 8th on the log being about as deceptive as you’ll get. Glasgow are stacked full of internationals and top the table after a fine season, but they had a couple of notable wobbles later on, losing badly on their tour of South Africa, and sneaking past Ulster in the final fixture to guarantee top spot. Connacht really came out of nowhere after a slow start to the season, but arguably finished the league phase as the form side – a solitary loss to the Lions (of course) in Johannesburg their only defeat since the end of January. Eight wins from their last nine, including wins over the Stormers, Munster – and Glasgow underpinning their pedigree, despite the lack of big-ticket names. Can they pull off what would be one of the shocks of the season thus far? Unlikely – the Warriors have a 100% record at home this season and are fiendishly difficult to beat on their home patch.
Verdict: The Weedge by a whisker!
Bulls vs Munster gets Saturday rolling on the highveld at the ridiculous time of 1:30pm this side, when most parents and kids are still at schools for rugby. Oh well. Both sides had indifferent starts to the campaign, but both have gathered a head of steam lately. The Bulls have only lost two URC matches this year (both to the Stormers) and have scalped Munster, Cardiff and the Lions during that run (as well as Edinburgh to avoid outrage). Both home losses were against local opposition, with a perfect record against European teams. A helluva pack of forwards and some good outside backs along with Pollard’s boot has seen off most at Loftus for a couple of seasons now, but Munster ran them desperately close a few weeks back – 3 points in it. Munster? Won six of their first seven URC matches this season and folks were talking about them being back. Since then, though it’s five wins and six losses, which suggests a side still struggling to get on a run and to finish off the tight matches. Both sides are capable of winning, both have the odd brainfart to undermine them too.
Verdict: Bulls by bugger-all!
Stormers vs Cardiff has upset written all over it. But who is the underdog? Cardiff gave the Stormers a lesson in cohesive, quick-thinking rugby a couple of weeks ago and won’t fear Cape Town Stadium, close to Llandudno, a fabulous, overpriced beach community down there. The Stormers got off to a flyer this season, with eight wins on the bounce, bookended by Leinster at home and then four in Europe, with Munster the final one. After that, though, they’ve spluttered through a series of embarrassing performances, their defence more passive than a noun in a corporate training manual, and their attack more ragged than a tramp’s coat in a tempest. They’ve lost confidence and there are dark mutterings in the camp. The Diff gave them the stiff in the last round, but have been mercurial in their own right this season: two relatively heavy defeats to Glasgow and the Bulls aside, most of their matches have finished within a score – eleven out of the other sixteen. They’re difficult to put away, but can also be their own worst enemies, or perhaps are lacking a little on the bench? A wild ride in, with three wins and three losses, but crucially, all the losses were away, with two in South Africa.
Verdict: Stormers by a sailor’s stubble.
Leinster vs Lions: Obviously the rugby world is backing the Lions to slay the rough beast that slouches towards Scotstoun. Not as obvious is how the Lions will achieve this most magnificent of results. Leinster may be battered and bruised from their hammering by Bordeaux, but they still have pretty much a British and Irish Lions side there. Definitely an Irish international side. Despite whispers of Jacques Nienaber stitching them from the inside, they remain a formidable side, well oiled and with excellent depth. A few injuries for sure, but the Lions are without three key players too – and without anywhere near the squad depth Leinster have. The Pride of Joburg ran Leinster close three weeks ago, being within a score until the last 10 minutes or so, before falling away having tackled themselves to a standstill. They stayed in Ireland and have had two weeks to prepare, whilst Leinster have been battling for higher honours. The word is that they’ve taken the lessons on board from that last match and have a plan. But as Mike Tyson said, “everybody got a plan ‘til they get punched in the face.” I fear we’re going to get punched in the face.
Verdict: The Lions will be more brave, brave Sir Robin than Killer Rabbit of Caerbannog slayers. Leinster by a length.
Deliberations by Deebee7
47-10. Can’t be arsed to describe it anymore.
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54-10 now. Sorry, Deebs.
Don’t think Leinster have even been on particularly good form.
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My word! Newcastle have gone from being a palindromic scoreline down (24-42), to having a scrum under their own posts and then going the full length of the pitch to beat Sale 45-42.
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Bloody hell, that wasn’t even in the same postcode as the try line. How was that given?
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Sean Edwards looking for a new job, according to L’Equipe.
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Ooh, that’s interesting. The mister says he’d be welcome back in Wales. I’m sure Ulster would like him too, but his salary might be a bit out of reach.
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While that Stormers try obviously didn’t make the line I don’t think it was that big a deal. If they’d reviewed it properly it would have been no try, but they may well have found a penalty (or even penalty try) and carded someone. Not sure they weren’t on an advantage anyway, can’t be bothered to go back and check. It was a much more one-sided game than was showing on the scoreboard for a long time and remarkably boring considering how many tries were scored and that Cardiff were still notionally ‘in the game’ until about 65 minutes.
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Story with Lowe is tied up with the change in how the IRFU deal with what were formerly called central contracts.
Porter, Sheehan, Furlong, Ryan, McCarthy, Doris etc etc etc were all paid for out of IRFU funds.
But Leinster also received a player budget roughly same as Munster and a bit higher than Ulster or Connacht.
Under Humphreys this changed to having to make a 30 and now 40% contribution. The term is now PONI – player of national interest – and the percentage contributed by the IRFU will depend on how much “interest”. Up to 60 for the likes of Doris. 20 maybe 30% for fringe players.
Having piled up players on centrals – all of the above plus Gibson Park, Ringrose, Henshaw, Keenan – and being able to use their budget on everyone else – now there’s suddenly there’s a hole in the balance sheet – probably up to €5m this coming season.
Lowe was never on a central but Leinster could pay well because they weren’t paying for other internationals. Now they have to choose.
Clearly, they can’t offer Lowe what he was on previously and seems like IRFU aren’t willing to offer a top up for a 34 yo with an increasingly poor injury profile.
Leinster and the IRFU seem to be in a stand off but Humphreys doesn’t seem be the sort to blink.
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So you saying that Lowe is not the show poni we all thought he was?
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Lowe is not the show poni
@thaum
Ironically, not.
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@Trisk – That’s very interesting. Is this already leading to or likely to end up with some Leinster players moving to other provinces?
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@cmw
Yes, the movements have already begun. Frawley moved to Connacht, as has Will Connors (remember him?)
Frawley may be moving for more time at 10 as well. Connors hasn’t a good injury record, so might have been looking at reduced terms from Leinster now money is tighter.
(there’s another who’s name escapes me)
The movements are mainly in the wider panel – as this is where the “free money” went – to essentially overpay the second and third layers to stop them moving to other provinces (Connacht/Ulster/Munster can’t outbid Leinster – match yes, but not offer more)
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@Trisk – Sounds like something that is probably for the best for Ireland as a whole and also maybe for the URC. I guess the flip side of that is that if the talent concentrated at Leinster does get shared out more then the other sides will have fewer players from their own provinces turning out which might feel a bit odd if it becomes a much bigger thing. Of course people might not mind anyway, do you think it could be an issue?
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fewer players from their own provinces turning out
@cmw
This is a good point – the GAA that runs football and hurling is “parish” based – ie your club is the local one (gets a bit messy in some places with multiple clubs) and you can’t easily switch. At least, you can’t switch unless you’ve moved 100 miles away for work or whatever.
Rugby in Ireland reflects that – a bit. In that fans expect to see local players.
However, Leinster’s fee paying schools churn lots and lots of well-drilled players every year – Ulster has it to an extent (Methody, Campbell College) – I’m sure Thaum knows other names. Munster a bit less – really only Christians and Pres in Cork. Connacht hardly at all.
The existence of fee paying schools and their relative numbers reflects the general health of the economy in those locations. Dublin is the growth engine on the island (for reasons good and bad).
So, fans tend to expect / like a local core – not to say that Jim Williams, Doug Howlett, Lifemi Mafi, Rua Tipoki, Paul Warwick, Shaun Payne, Rob Henderson, Jean Kleyn aren’t as warmly regarded and happily remembered as as any local player. Equally, ‘blow-ins’ like Andrew Conway and Tadhg Beirne are/were huge favourites.
But Leinster were stockpiling – Sheehan and Kelleher were 1 and 2 at hooker for Ireland with Gus McCarthy another Leinster player also getting capped and probably #3. This was getting repeated across multiple positions.
Pretty sure Munster fans don’t want to see a ‘Red Leinster’ team – but neither do they want to be in the position of being in trouble in key positions – notably prop while Leinster provided 8 of the 9 FR players in recent Ireland squads.
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@Trisk – Hopefully some sort of happy medium is reached. Thinking about it Ireland must be one of only a very few countries with this sort of issue. Doesn’t really apply in Wales due to all the teams being in more or less the same part of the country and a history of players moving to the bigger clubs anyway. England and France still have proper clubs with lots of money and movement between them, Scotland only having two teams with one of the main rugby areas not represented etc.
Don’t know how much movement there is between the South African teams though I have the impression they might be more ‘local’ than not (?), same with the NZ ones though I remember looking into it a bit ages ago and almost all of the Highlanders team were from elsewhere which isn’t all that surprising really given the population of the different areas.
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Trisk – Methody is a fee-paying grammar school, but it’s £140 per annum. The fee is, I think, for upkeep of the buildings, and there are probably exemptions for lower-income pupils. I don’t think Campbell charges anything for non-boarders. (Northern Ireland still has a grammar school system.)
So not quite Eton or Harrow….
Wallace also has a good rugby programme.
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Me da went to Inst, another rugby grammar school, which currently charges £1745 pa – getting more expensive!
He was forced to play rugby, which he didn’t enjoy. I thought to ask him recently what position he played, and he told me it was hooker, which blew my mind: he’s not big, and was a runner by choice (although a long-distance one, not a sprinter).
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@thaum
Thanks for the background.
Yeah, fee paying schools down here don’t charge huge sums either …
Probably in the 5-10k bracket rather than 30-50k bracket like England….but that’s because state pays all teachers – not just those in state school
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@cmw
My understanding is that NZ will move players around so that Auckland Blues and Canterbury Crusaders don’t dominate
(Completely open to correction / enlightenment)
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Tony Macaulay’s books on growing up poor on the Shankill in the 60s and 70s and being admitted to a grammar school (Belfast Royal Academy, another rugby-playing school) and meeting Cafflicks for the first time are great. They’re very funny and also poignant. The first one’s called Paperboy, then Breadboy, then All Growed Up: What Breadboy Did at University; there’s a fourth, Little House on the Peace Line: Living and Working as a Pacifist on Belfast’s Murder Mile, that I haven’t read but must find now that I know about it!
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They’re sort of like the Proddy version of Milkman, but lighter – although Milkman does have its laugh-out-loud moments too.
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@Trisk – I guess Auckland is quite similar to Dublin in terms of the proportion of the country’s population that live there. I think they also have a disproportionate amount of the Pasifika population who I suspect in turn make up a disproportionate amount of the rugby playing population. I have a feeling the way their rugby is structured under the Super Rugby level has more of the unions feeding into the other franchises though those unions presumably have far fewer players in the first place. When I looked into it a little bit years ago I remember a lot of the players who were playing for Super Rugby teams that weren’t the one in the area they were from were Aucklanders.
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@Thaum – “he told me it was hooker, which blew my mind: he’s not big”
Even when I was at school playing hooker still seemed to be more about being nasty than being big!
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Oh, he can be nasty all right, but not in rugby ways! I think it was probably a case of ‘we have to play him somewhere, and he can throw a ball in straight’.
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I’m thinking he’s of an age when the hooker didn’t (or at least didn’t necessarily) do the throwing in. So I’m afraid in the absence of any other evidence I’ve got him marked down as someone who liked a scrap…
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Nah, that’s exactly why he hated rugby. He’s up for a verbal scrap, but not a physical one.
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Sounds like he was just in the wrong place at the wrong time!
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There’s a fair amount of movement by players in SA to other regions. The top, top schools for many years ahve been concentrated in the Western Cape and Bulls catchment areas, along with Grey College in Bloem (Cheetahs) and to a far lesser degree, schools in the Eastern Cape. Joburg has seldom had school sides that are at the top of the pile.
The advent of professionalism has accelerated that – it used to be that the Sharks poached a lot of talent from Grey Bloem (Jannie and Bismarck du Plessis, for instance) and from the Eastern Cape, but now they have lots of money, so buy up Boks all over the place and still can’t win. The Stormers tend to have good feeder systems from the Western Cape, although many of those players are actually from the Boland Union (Stellenbosch and Paarl areas).
The Bulls have a strong feeder system from schools in Pretoria and north of that, but also poach from otehr regions, whilst the Lions tend to pick up rejects from other unions and integrate them into their system. When they become Boks, the Sharks dangle the chequebook.
Outside of the URC sides, there are fantastic rugby cultures in places like Kimberley and surrounds, as well as Nelspruit area (Griquas and Pumas respectively) that do well in the Currie Cup, especially when the big unions rest their Boks. The Eastern Cape, home to the likes of Siya Kolisi, Lukhanyo Am, Makazole Mapimpi and Aphalele Fassi of curent Boks, should have amongst the strongest sides, but is ridden with corruption and maladministration, as most blazers are politically appointed. It’s a huge shame. All of the above have left for the Sharks in Durban.
The defining aspect of player movement these days is money, with hte smaller unions basically being feeders for the URC sides. Would be wonderful for the game in SA if we had Griquas, Pumas, Cheetahs, Border, Eastern Province and Boland playing at the same level with the same resources as the Big Four.
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Apologies for the numerous typos. Worse hands than a Bulls front rower!
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Bah! Raining at Lords. 17 degrees and miserable. Fairly similar to Joburg today, but at least it’s winter here.
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Down to the last four in the URC. Potentially, two cracking matches, but I think one will be a bit of a blowout. The Weedge-Bulls match could be a classic. It’s being played on actual, real grass, which the Bulls feel will reward their scrum (not that Glasgow are shrinking violets on that score) and give them good launchpads to attack. The Bulls have a very sharp backline too, with hte likes of Papier, Pollard, Moodie, Arendse and le Roux all in fine form. On the bench is where it could get quite scary for Glasgow: the front row has the enormous Wilco Louw coming on, along with the very mobile loosehead, Wessels and the retreaded flank-come-hooker Marco van Staden. Cobus Wiese, Jeandre Rudolph and Nizaam Carr give both grunt and mobility as well. If the Bulls can stay with a Glasgow side that is probably the most polished outfit in URC going into the last 20, I think they can take it.
Glasgow, as mentioned, are a very polished side, and have a brilliant backline of their own, full of running. They create gaps and overlaps with ease and will look to keep the Bulls big boys on the move as much as possible. Glasgow have a lot more than scintillating backs though – a very good loose trio (always a Scottish strength) that’s adept at creating havoc on defence and attack will be key as well, whilst the tight have more than held their own this season. I’m not sure the Weedge bench has what the Bulls can bring, but they’ve had the better of the Bulls twice this season (and beat them at Loftus in ’24 to lift the cup), so they won’t fear much. Both those wins were at Scotstoun, so even though they have to trek across to Edinburgh, they’ve got home and travel advantage, too.
I’ve got the Bulls by a score – it could go either way.
Leinster versus the Stormers I think will be a bit of a damp squib. The Stormers started the season in whirlwind fashion, winning ten matches in URC and Europe on the bounce, but have been anything but consistent since then. Injuries have played their part, to be sure, and with Sacha Feinberg-Mngomezulu out for this match, they don’t have his individual brilliance to fall back on. Jurie Matthee, his replacement, is a very good player and possibly better set up for this kind of match with a more structured approach. The pack is solid to very good, but the defence of the Stormers – a passive drift that would be more at home in Strictly than on a rugby field – will be their undoing: Leinster are simply too good and well organised to allow them over the gain line, as the Lions found out last week. Any thoughts of post-Euro deflation were put firmly to bed by Jacques Nienaber’s lads. Cough. The Stormers pack has a very good front row and back row, but the locks are pretty average. The backs have very little real pace and won’t stretch Leinster’s defence with that, so I can’t see them keeping parity on the scoreboard.
Leinster are Leinster – they were humbled by Bordeaux a couple of weeks ago, but they remain a beast of a side in the URC. Well organised, defensively excellent and have enough game breakers to punish what has become routinely sloppy attacking by the Stormers. I just can’t see a way they’ll be beaten by the Stormers, to be honest.
Leinster by 15 (or more, if the mood takes them).
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Enjoyed today’s maptap!
http://www.maptap.gg June 6
94🏆 99🎯 90🎓 100🎯 97🔥
Final score: 964
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Looks like Glasgow are going well, just from the scoreboard. 21-3 after 30 mins.
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They are indeed! Helped by Pollard getting himself sent to the bin for a deliberate knock-on.
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Bulls have scored now, though.
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Sale vs Bristol – the moveable force vs the stoppable object.
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Bloody hell, Sale have already scored 2 tries inside 5mins.
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Bristol are playing Thacker at 7 today. At least he’s not throwing into the lineout 🤷♂️
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Not a huge fan of the Sale hooker skipping around Bristol tacklers. And Sale score their 3rd try. 19-0 🤬
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4th try for Sale. They create a really good overlap and Carpenter just about gets over the line. 26-0, 25mins.
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Ooh, Bristol score! Thacker breaks into the Sale 22. He doesn’t have support, but keeps the ball and it goes to Heward, who just about scores. 26-7.
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Bristol don’t seem to be playing as a cohesive team. They’ve had 3 line breaks now, where there hasn’t been any other players supporting the breaker.
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Bristol score again, just on half time. Scrum pen in the Sale 22. They put it in the corner and maul over the line. 26-12 at oranges.
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Well, Bulls have won by one point. Has to be said that Glasgow did their level best to throw the match away in the last ten mins or so.
Also, Andrew Brace.
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Is Brace the worst current ref?
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Ouch. Lane, the Bristol FB tries to skip over a tackle, misjudges it and lands face-first, seemingly knocking himself out.
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Sale win 38-17.
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From the ridiculous to the sublime: Hollie Davidson reffing this one.
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Also, Andrew Brace.
Bulls fans down here concurred, in the first half at least. Eventually some grudging consensus that he seems to favour the side with momentum. I missed the first half, so can’t really comment.
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Damn you lot with your maptag! I’m now officially addicted.
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