The Rugby Championship 2013

[daffodil]

Round 1

A comprehensive win by the AB's last night, going to be a long week in Ewan McKenzie's camp before next Saturday's game in Wellington. Fast game, great to watch with some lovely tries including from McCaw and Genia. The public's hate affair with Quade Cooper seems to continue as he was booed onto the pitch and whenever he touched the ball!

SA soundly beat the Pumas 73-13, will be interesting to see how they recover for next week as well.

[Fat Bob]

Quade Cooper will always be booed onto a pitch when there's a large number of kiwi supporters as he was born in New Zealand but wears yellow. And he is a bit of a cock.

Does show you that maybe Deans was not the problem for the Lions tests. There are some good individual players on the Aussie side, but not enough to pull the team through.

The kiwis will have to also pull up their socks: the Boks have a better defence and are more solid in the set piece.

As for Argentina: this could be one hell of a walloping year if they don't do something good on home turf. Not seen the game but the scoreline says it all.

Liked the new scrum set up. Seemed a bit more even and more scrums went through to completion. At last the IRB have listened, and good to see an article about what training the refs have been through in order to improve things. Fingers crossed it gets better still.

[daffodil]

Both games were much closer than the 1st round, Australia actually looked pretty good in the first 20 - 30 mins but clueless in the second half aside from a fine individual try from Israel Folau.

The Pumas were really fired up at home, just couldn't hold on in the end against SA. Hopefully the Pumas can show a little more of that fighting spirit when playing away fixtures.

[daffodil]

Final weekend coming up, the SA v NZ will hopefully live up to expectations! Continued poor form from the Wallabies notwithstanding, SA had a cracking game last week although not securing the bonus point may prove costly.

If the Pumas play as well they did for periods against the AB's and will surely dominate at the scrum, Australia will be in for a tough night. Though whether the Pumas can sustain their performance over the full 80 minutes is questionable.

Looking forward to both games!

[baloo]

Australia have been so shit at sport recently that I'm starting to understand what it feels like to be English.

[daffodil]

The Wallabies will be pleased with the thrashing of The Pumas and whilst they looked in better form than last week, Argentina were pretty woeful and played well below their previous matches in this competition.

The SA v AB game was just superb to watch - reinforcing why they are the 2 best teams in world rugby right now.

So, it's the Autumn internationals up next - will be interesting to see how Australia fare against Wales, England and Ireland.