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Chris Hewett
/ 2 years agoToo many clubs, not enough players
If it ever turns out that the governing body at Twickenham has a monopoly on rugby wisdom, we are all up...
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Chris Hewett
/ 2 years agoShould we care about the world rankings?
CHRIS HEWETT THINKING ALLOWED THE way Clive Woodward saw it back in 2003, the International Rugby Board’s new-fangled ranking system was...
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Chris Hewett
/ 2 years agoDiamonds on the soles of his shoes
Siya Kolisi? What a man. If rugby is built on the stories it tells about its finest practitioners – the fables...
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Chris Hewett
/ 2 years agoBig cats likely to dine on minnows
CHRIS HEWETT THINKING ALLOWED IT MUST be a sobering prospect for the makeweights, travelling to a World Cup with a bunch...
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Chris Hewett
/ 2 years agoHansen’s secrets not hard to guess
There has been quite the hue and cry down there in All Black country following the latest twist in trans-Tasman affairs....
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Chris Hewett
/ 2 years agoA brief history of tackles which changed a game
CHRIS HEWETT THINKING ALLOWED It has been fiendishly difficult to identify rugby union’s precise place in the constellation of professional sports...
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Chris Hewett
/ 2 years agoIgnore the league tough guys, it’s better to be soft and safe
CHRIS HEWETT Contrary to popular belief, there are still differences between the two codes of rugby. Union still has its flankers...
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Chris Hewett
/ 2 years agoA hat-trick for Sam would be deserved
CHRIS HEWETT THINKING ALLOWED We'll know soon enough if Sam Whitelock is finally past it. The venerable All Black lock from...
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Chris Hewett
/ 2 years agoSorry we won’t see Hooper in France
CHRIS HEWETT Wayne Shelford lost matches as captain of the All Blacks as often as he finished second in hand-to-hand combat....
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Chris Hewett
/ 2 years agoCrowds need to be part of the action
CHRIS HEWETT THE best part of 84,000 spectators congregated at “The G” for last weekend’s Bledisloe Cup contest in Melbourne, which...
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Chris Hewett
/ 2 years agoThe day Mouritz showed his desire
CHRIS HEWETT Every so often, rugby sheds its hard skin and shows us its soft side. Not that Mouritz Botha was...
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Chris Hewett
/ 2 years agoThe greatest tour ever? Not likely…
CHRIS HEWETT THINKING ALLOWED IT IS no exaggeration to place exaggeration very high on the list of rugby’s deadly sins. It...
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Chris Hewett
/ 2 years agoAlways room for Bakkies and Co
CHRIS HEWETT SAY what you like about Bakkies Botha – most people don’t, for reasons of self-preservation – but there are...
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Chris Hewett
/ 2 years agoUnder-20s proved the future is bright
CHRIS HEWETT GUEST COLUMNIST DID you hear the one about the trainee fortune teller who gave up because he couldn’t see...
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Chris Hewett
/ 2 years agoEddie’s a head honcho in a hurry
CHRIS HEWETT Eddie Jones is not a man to let the grass grow under his feet, even if his most trenchant...
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Chris Hewett
/ 2 years agoBarrett J has keys to the kingdom
CHRIS HEWETT GUEST COLUMNIST Rugby is a game of infinite possibility, especially when it comes to dreaming up collective nouns. A...
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Chris Hewett
/ 2 years agoLet’s not abandon Fiji for the sake of US
CHRIS HEWETT Not for the first time, the ever-knowledgeable Paul Rees has treated us to a thorough account of the thinking...
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Chris Hewett
/ 2 years agoWhen law and spirit are not the same
CHRIS HEWETT We've heard an awful lot – far too much, frankly – about the spirit of cricket just recently, and...
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Chris Hewett
/ 2 years agoAnother lesson from the French
We are still a few days away from Premiership Rugby’s latest “big reveal”: the fixture list for the 2023-24 campaign, featuring...
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Chris Hewett
/ 2 years agoTime to balance a weighty problem
CHRIS HEWETT GUEST COLUMNIST ACLEVER man once predicted that progress would eventually turn out to be a circle rather than a...
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Chris Hewett
/ 2 years agoThere’s more woe from the Smiths
Rugby's optimists – and there are still some of you out there, just as there are people who continue to think...
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Chris Hewett
/ 2 years agoLaw-tinkerers are a danger to the game
CHRIS HEWETT GUEST COLUMNIST THE odds on Owen Farrell travelling to the World Cup as England’s starting No.10 are even shorter...
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Chris Hewett
/ 2 years agoA new trophy, same old tricks …
CHRIS HEWETT It is one thing for a populist Prime Minister to ride a wave of duplicity before crashing head-first into...
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Chris Hewett
/ 2 years agoSo, who is set to fly in under the radar?
CHRIS HEWETT GUEST COLUMNIST Remember Jean-Marc Doussain’s international debut for France? Probably not. The poor bloke would happily forget it himself,...
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Chris Hewett
/ 2 years agoWood is just the man to talk sense
It would be stretching a point to suggest that Tom Wood, the brick-hard Northampton flanker who won a half-century of caps...
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Chris Hewett
/ 2 years agoWhen the collective carries all before it
CHRIS HEWETT GUEST COLUMNIST Dings Crusaders? Crazy name, cracking club. One of the oldest and most successful of the dozens of...
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Chris Hewett
/ 2 years agoTongans have a plan for Ireland
CHRIS HEWETT Interesting rumblings from down Tonga way, where Toutai Kefu, the magnificent Wallaby No.8 who rumbled all the way to...
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Chris Hewett
/ 2 years agoTime we got round to telling full story
CHRIS HEWETT GUEST COLUMNIST "No story lives unless someone wants to listen.” So said J KRowling, who knows a thing or...
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Chris Hewett
/ 2 years agoFreedom of speech cuts both ways
If Steve Hansen did a million things right over the long stretch of a storied career as an All Black think-tanker,...
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Chris Hewett
/ 2 years agoMasterful Skelton is the talk of the town
CHRIS HEWETT GUEST COLUMNIST IF Simon Shaw of England was a 20-storey tower block of a lock blessed with penthouse levels...
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Chris Hewett
/ 2 years ago‘Chilling’ Nowell leaves us shivering
CHRIS HEWETT When a front-line England player tells his national coach that he is unavailable for World Cup duty – not...
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Chris Hewett
/ 2 years agoNo debate, Hill has to be the Immortal No.6
CHRIS HEWETT GUEST COLUMNIST UP, you could not make it. BT Sport, whose coverage of English club rugby has been close...
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Chris Hewett
/ 2 years agoHow England could use that Limerick spirit
CHRIS HEWETT BACK in the dim and distant, when down-to-earth Munster were the side to beat in Ireland and hifalutin Leinster...
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Chris Hewett
/ 2 years agoWhy Ojomoh could be in with a shout
CHRIS HEWETT GUEST COLUMNIST SO Bath won the big one against Saracens Under-12s and secured their Champions Cup qualification at the...
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Chris Hewett
/ 2 years agoSmith has vision to see through the fog
Wayne Smith, who secured a place in the pantheon of great coaches long before his astonishing triumph with the Black Ferns...
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Chris Hewett
/ 2 years agoNine Lions of Leinster would be in my team
CHRIS HEWETT Mitchell, Aston, Wotherspoon, Rotherham, Bromet, Hammond, Mayfield, Surtees, Thompson: on an early September afternoon in 1891, nine Cambridge University...
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Chris Hewett
/ 2 years agoGatland can get Wales on top again
CHRIS HEWETT Few people on God’s earth know more about professional Welsh rugby than Warren Gatland, who successfully coached the Test...
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Chris Hewett
/ 2 years agoThis time, two into seven just might go
CHRIS HEWETT England's campaign at the home World Cup in 2015 was a big enough joke in itself, but that didn’t...
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Chris Hewett
/ 2 years agoThese pool fixtures will not win any new fans
Poor old World Rugby, the non-governing governing body, has taken a fair old hammering in recent days and weeks. The problem...
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Chris Hewett
/ 2 years agoSounds like Lam putting someone else’s money in his mouth
CHRIS HEWETT Precisely none of the owner-investors who finance professional club rugby in England are in obvious need of a tin...
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Chris Hewett
/ 2 years agoSwitching codes is harder than you think
CHRIS HEWETT Top tip for rugby league players looking to make a name for themselves on the far side of the...
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Chris Hewett
/ 2 years agoWhen familiarity is the key to success
CHRIS HEWETT As feats of the imagination go, the idea that Ireland might be heading towards a first World Cup final...
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Chris Hewett
/ 2 years agoPoliticians should give sport wide berth
CHRIS HEWETT The current US President and leader of the free world (so it says on the press release) is almost...
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Champions Cup
/ 2 years agoCup rugby needs an injection of jeopardy
CHRIS HEWETT The Heineken Cup, as we knew and loved it when Friday nights at Sardis Road and Saturday afternoons at...
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Chris Hewett
/ 2 years agoRooster swoop is ruffling feathers
CHRIS HEWETT RELATIONS between the two rugby codes in faraway Australia are never especially cordial, so the decision of the new...
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Chris Hewett
/ 2 years agoIt’s time to get back to shifting the piano
CHRIS HEWETT Not long after helping the All Blacks to victory over the Lions in 1993, the formidable wing John Kirwan...
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Chris Hewett
/ 2 years agoGood, but Hogg not quite top of the list
CHRIS HEWETT WHAT are we to make of the Strange Case of Stuart Hogg? The scorer of more international tries than...
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Chris Hewett
/ 2 years agoGeorgians to be left out in the cold again
CHRIS HEWETT You have to hand it to our lords and masters at World Rugby, the non-governing governing body: they never...
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Chris Hewett
/ 2 years agoUnfair on Steward – and on ref Peyper
CHRIS HEWETT The trouble with the refereeing profession? Ninety-eight per cent of its members give the rest a bad name. Okay,...
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Chris Hewett
/ 2 years agoForgotten men who deserve a mention
CHRIS HEWETT GUEST COLUMNIST The story goes like this: Richard Hill, the best England player no one ever talked about and...
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