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Hugely experienced scrum half flies into Saracens
By Paul Smith
Experienced scrum half Joe Simpson is joining Saracens on a month-long loan deal.
The 33-year-old no.9 has spent the last two seasons at Gloucester where he has made 19 appearances in cherry-and-white.
Simpson has arrived at StoneX Stadium to provide cover during the early stages of the campaign.
This follows Ivan van Zyl receiving a four-match suspension for his sending off for dangerous play during Sarries’ pre-season game with Ulster.
In addition, Mark McCall’s team will be without Ruben de Haas who is away on international duty.
Following the points deduction that led to the ‘Men in Black’ being relegated for breaching the salary cap, two long-serving scrum halves departed the home of the multiple Premiership and European champions.
Former England no.9 Richard Wigglesworth is now part of the furniture at Welford Road where he has a player-coach role under director of rugby Steve Borthwick, himself an ex-Saracen.
And Ben Spencer, who many view as unfortunate not to have won more England caps in recent times is now plying his trade for Bath.
Simpson has been one of the most consistent performers in the Premiership since bursting on to the scene for Wasps back in 2006, a club where he went on to make 230 appearances.
Indeed, it came as a major shock to fans of the Coventry-based club when Simpson opted to leave following an 18-month spell where he slipped behind Dan Robson in the club’s selection pecking order.
Saracens’ press release describes Simpson as being “hugely excited about being given the opportunity to join Saracens on loan.”
He adds: “They have set the bar, performance wise, for all of the teams in the Premiership over the last decade and I can’t wait to meet everyone and contribute to the club.”
His new boss Mark McCall thanked Gloucester for enabling the loan move to take place before welcoming Simpson to Barnet.
“We are obviously delighted to secure the services of such a high quality, experienced player as Joe to increase our options at scrum-half in the weeks ahead,” he said.
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Latest Comments
Yeah I actually think it was Havili that took it off him. Not bad himself, but on the advice of Razor, who didn't even pursue it and use Havili on a split bench as 10 cover?
One huge cluster#$@% but I think you could be right, I liked O'Connor when he won at the Reds and I've just got a funny feeling he's going to dominate Super Rugby, kinda like how Cooper came back to the Wallabies as an experienced head and spat out South Africa. I think James could do the same with the Blues and other Aus sides. I'd really love Rivez to get a lot of minutes though.
Go to commentsI rated Lowe well enough to be an AB. Remember we were picking the likes of George Bridge above such players so theres no disputing a lot of bad decisions have been made by those last two coaches. Does a team like the ABs need a finicky winger who you have to adapt and change a lot of your style with to get benefit from? No, not really. But he still would have been a basic improvement on players like even Savea at the tail of his career, Bridge, and could even have converted into the answer of replacing Beauden at the back. Instead we persisted with NMS, Naholo, Havili, Reece, all players we would have cared even less about losing and all because Rieko had Lowe's number 11 jersey nailed down.
He was of course only 23 when he decided to leave, it was back in the beggining of the period they had started retaining players (from 2018 onwards I think, they came out saying theyre going to be more aggressive at some point). So he might, all of them, only just missed out.
The main point that Ed made is that situations like Lowe's, Aki's, JGP's, aren't going to happen in future. That's a bit of a "NZ" only problem, because those players need to reach such a high standard to be chosen by the All Blacks, were as a country like Ireland wants them a lot earlier like that. This is basically the 'ready in 3 years' concept Ireland relied on, versus the '5 years and they've left' concept' were that player is now ready to be chosen by the All Blacks (given a contract to play Super, ala SBW, and hopefully Manu).
The 'mercenary' thing that will take longer to expire, and which I was referring to, is the grandparents rule. The new kids coming through now aren't going to have as many gp born overseas, so the amount of players that can leave with a prospect of International rugby offer are going to drop dramatically at some point. All these kiwi fellas playing for a PI, is going to stop sadly.
The new era problem that will replace those old concerns is now French and Japanese clubs (doing the same as NRL teams have done for decades by) picking kids out of school. The problem here is not so much a national identity one, than it is a farm system where 9 in 10 players are left with nothing. A stunted education and no support in a foreign country (well they'll get kicked out of those countries were they don't in Australia).
It's the same sort of situation were NZ would be the big guy, but there weren't many downsides with it. The only one I can think was brought up but a poster on this site, I can't recall who it was, but he seemed to know a lot of kids coming from the Islands weren't really given the capability to fly back home during school xms holidays etc. That is probably something that should be fixed by the union. Otherwise getting someone like Fakatava over here for his last year of school definitely results in NZ being able to pick the cherries off the top but it also allows that player to develop and be able to represent Tonga and under age and possibly even later in his career. Where as a kid being taken from NZ is arguably going to be worse off in every respect other than perhaps money. Not going to develop as a person, not going to develop as a player as much, so I have a lotof sympathy for NZs case that I don't include them in that group but I certainly see where you're coming from and it encourages other countries to think they can do the same while not realising they're making a much worse experience/situation.
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