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Principality Stadium visit leaves Jamie Roberts feeling extreme sadness
By Online Editors
Jamie Roberts has described his feeling of extreme sadness at seeing the Principality Stadium transformed into a 2,000-bed field hospital during the coronavirus pandemic. The veteran midfielder earned 48 of his 94 Wales caps at the Welsh rugby cathedral and he never imagined seeing the ground where he fought for honour and glory in front of sold-out 72,000 attendances transformed into what it currently is.
With his stint in Super Rugby curtailed due to the virus outbreak, Roberts flew back from the Stormers and set about putting his sudden free time to good use as an NHS volunteer working for Cardiff and Vale health board.
This led to the 33-year-old qualified doctor paying a visit on Monday to the Cardiff stadium where he earned his last Wales cap versus New Zealand in November 2017.
What confronted him at the new Dragon’s Heart hospital left him feeling emotional, according to his blog. “The President's Lounge on level 5 of the stadium holds many fond memories as well as a few bad ones!
“My emotions felt completely different visiting the lounge this afternoon as it’s been transformed into a hospital ward to treat Covid patients.
“The efforts of the Welsh Rugby Union and each worker that has helped transformed the stadium are certainly nothing short of heroic.
“I took a wander up to level 6 to have a lookout over the pitch. The size of the operation below gave rise to a feeling of extreme sadness, yet it felt important to focus on its purpose. That is to save life.
“We are all hoping for the best but those in charge are rightly planning for the worst. In a way, we hope the stadium work is in vain.”
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Latest Comments
Nah, that just needs some more variation. Chip kicks, grubber stabs, all those. Will Jordan showed a pretty good reason why the rush was bad for his link up with BB.
If you have an overlap on a rush defense, they naturally cover out and out and leave a huge gap near the ruck.
It also helps if both teams play the same rules. ARs set the offside line 1m past where the last mans feet were😅
Go to commentsYeah nar, should work for sure. I was just asking why would you do it that way?
It could be achieved by outsourcing all your IP and players to New Zealand, Japan, and America, with a big Super competition between those countries raking it in with all of Australia's best talent to help them at a club level. When there is enough of a following and players coming through internally, and from other international countries (starting out like Australia/without a pro scene), for these high profile clubs to compete without a heavy australian base, then RA could use all the money they'd saved over the decades to turn things around at home and fund 4 super sides of their own that would be good enough to compete.
That sounds like a great model to reset the game in Aus. Take a couple of decades to invest in youth and community networks before trying to become professional again. I just suggest most aussies would be a bit more optimistic they can make it work without the two decades without any pro club rugby bit.
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