Glasgow Warriors roll out more Scotland players for Stormers clash

The % of scrum pens will prob rise during the knockout stages as teams embrace less risk, but at least things are moving in the right direction at last.

I’m surprsed nobody picked up Nicky Smith before Leicester did quite frankly. No way did he deserve to second choice at Ospreys when he was obv good enough to be top dog at another good club…

First full season of senior rugby for Opoku, but he will get better and better.

- 2020 NZR received $9.8million from World Rugby and a further >$12 million from their government.

- 2021 NZR received $14.8 million from World Rugby and a further >$15 million from their government.

No, I’m not saying they were trying to extort 30mil out of anybody, it was more a case of trying to force SA to keep the 4 big franchises in Super Rugby and not replace them with the 4 smaller ones.

What they did was release the 'Aratipu' review report to their media as soon as they received confirmation from the NZ Government that they would be receiving +/- 25% of total government bailouts in NZ during the pandemic.

Big take away for me was that you can reduce the number of scrum penalties without eroding the importance of the scrim. Best of both worlds and kudos to both the Prem and SR.

Not sure whether you have an upcoming article on this match, but a key player for me in the Leicester Sale semi was Joe Heyes. He and your compatriot Nicky Smith had a clear edge on our England props Rodd and Opoku-Fordjour and like you said that flowed through to the rest of the forward battle and the match.

Young AOF has looked tired of late but I really wasn't expecting that. Is a 25 match season too big a workload for a 20yo tighthead?

I wonder if Joe will look at Tizzano over Fraser. Fraser has some wonderful steals, but has been too often neutralised y teams who force him to tackle, not jackal. Thought went through my head that if Tizzano had been the Reds 7 in Christchurch, he would have had greater impact.

The Gordon rumour surprises me. Joe usually picks and sticks with his man, and Harry was his man for capt. last year.

Take that first scrum of the game, around 4.30 min. Hotham fed the ball, scrum was solid, I felt play it could have been called. Then the Crusaders put in a bit of a shunt and I felt Newll brought te scrum down fast. I would think that was setting a picture for the ref., and it worked. Mind though, the crusaders were by far the bettter scrum. Just feel some of those calls did go the wrong way.

“Easy, quick ‘channel one’ ball produced between the feet of the number eight and open-side flank” That is one way the Reds could have gone on their own feed to negate some of the Crusaders dominance.