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The one question everyone is asking as 'scared' Wales confirm schedule
By Josh Raisey
Wales' Autumn Nations Series schedule announcement has been met with one response- where is Georgia?
The fixtures for Wales' November were revealed on Monday, with Warren Gatland's side taking on Fiji, Australia and South Africa in consecutive weeks.
However, fans had been teased with the idea of a clash between the Guinness Six Nations Wooden Spoon recipients and the Rugby Europe Championship winners Georgia.
This came after Georgia publicly called out Wales on social media in March, proposing a meeting between the two in Tbilisi. While this seemed like nothing more than a publicity stunt, Wales turned the dial up when they responded to the message on social media by saying they will be "in touch".
Whether the two sides were in touch or not is not clear, but nothing has come from the episode in March, which has left fans online thoroughly disappointed.
After announcing their schedule online, the comments section was almost filled up entirely with fans questioning what happened to the match against Georgia that was dangled in front of them.
"Gatland’s Dragons running from the Georgian Grind?" "Scared to play Georgia?" and "They ducked Georgia," are just some of the comments which give a glimpse into how this schedule has been received.
Other fans are still holding out hope that the Georgia fixture will be announced at a later date. With the first match of the autumn coming against Fiji on November 10, there is the potential to face Georgia the weekend before and still remain within the Test window. However, that is just wishful thinking from fans as it stands.
While a potential match between Wales and Georgia would not have any bearing on the make-up of the Six Nations next year, Georgia described it as the match “rugby lovers everywhere want to see” as it would be a bellwether as to where the bottom team of the Six Nations stands compared to the rest of Europe.
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Latest Comments
They would improve a lot of such a scheme were allowed though JD, win win :p
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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