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Saracens lose Alex Goode until 2025
By Josh Raisey
Saracens veteran Alex Goode has been ruled out for 10-12 weeks after undergoing surgery on a quad injury.
The 36-year-old pulled up in the warm-up of Saracens' most Gallagher Premiership fixture, a 29-32 loss to Leicester Tigers at the StoneX Stadium, and was replaced at fly-half by Tim Swiel, who had only recently signed for the club as injury cover.
The injury to the former European player of the year plunges Saracens further into a fly-half crisis, with Louie Johnson also ruled out until the new year after having an operation on a biceps tear.
Swiel had only been recruited a matter of days before the three-time Champions Cup winners hosted Leicester, and was originally scheduled to start on the bench. Goode's injury threw him in at the deep end though, with director of rugby Mark McCall explaining after the loss that he was not even aware of some of the calls being made.
“We had a lot of disruption to deal with this week. We lost Fergus [Burke] on Wednesday and then Alex in the warm-up,” McCall said.
“Tim Swiel hadn’t run a play with us and for him to get thrown in at the deep end wasn’t easy.
“The lads were making calls and Tim didn’t know what they were. It’s not a great situation, but he managed his way through the game and I thought he did really well.
“Our rugby wasn’t great, but we did have the resolve and resilience and that gets you a long way.
“There’s a good way to lose and a bad way to lose and that was one of the better ways.”
Saracens face rivals Harlequins this weekend in the Premiership Rugby Cup before turning their attention back to the Premiership with a trip to Newcastle Falcons at the end of the month.
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Soccer on a rugby forum…
“Experience is strongly correlated with age, at least among the managers that I named”…
Slot and Arteta are among the youngest you named. They have the least experience as a manager (6 years each). Espírito Santo and Pep are the oldest and have the most (12 years + each). Pep is pushing 17 years experience, all at elite level. There are plenty around his age that won’t have the same level of experience. Plenty.
The younger breed you mentioned (Arteta in particular) may not coach at elite level beyond the next few years if they continue to not win trophies. Age and experience is not always a nice, steady gradient.
The only trend in English soccer is that managers don’t stay on as long with the same club. Due to the nature of the game and the assumed, immediate performance bounce of replacing them at the first sign of trouble. Knee-jerk style. Test rugby has no clear pattern of that.
Why would you dismiss a paradox? Contradictions are often revealing. Or is that too incoherent?
Go to commentsYou can’t compare the “quality”of competitions till they play against each other … what we do know is that nz teams filled with ABs and ABs can go at it with anyone in the world and these other teams and players are competing so would say the quality is high wouldn’t you? How are you determining that URC or top 14 is higher quality than Super I’m guessing you mean in the quality of players and execution ? Are you just assuming that it is because…. I would say it’s much of a muchness and the only indicator for that is international rugby and that is hella even
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