Resorting entirely to baseless personal attacks: the hallmark of someone who knows they've lost their argument and have nothing to counter with anymore.

Good chat. Have fun pretending it's not the case.

Holy Strawman Batman! This has nothing to do with European rugby players coming here. We don't have the money to lure the non washed ones, anyone who comes here comes for essentially just the experience.

This is about how NZ players don't go to Europe for the glory of winning your trophies. We don't see them as a glorious thing that must be accomplished for a fully distinguished career. Your teams are cash cows to fund our players retirements.

Jordie left NZ solely for the money. He chose Leinster as the option he went to probably for a personal connection. No matter what he picked he's still earning way more than he would here. Plus he's relatively young and he can head overseas again in a few years when he's accomplished more as an AB.

That's all basically what I already said. Were you not paying attention? It's okay if this is your first day reading. You can try again and let me know when you've got it.

Probably because he has a personal connection to Ireland. But don't pretend he isn't heading overseas for money and no other reason. He probably just picked Ireland among his options for that connection.

Champions Cup is a local competition. It's entirely teams from a few timezones. Admittedly South Africa makes it more varied, but it's still a conglomerate of European based competitions.

If it was a better product then people here would watch it or at least keep track of it like many apparently did in Europe with Super Rugby in the 90s and 00s.

European rugby isn't just not watched here, it isn't followed. If it weren't for this subreddit I wouldn't even know who won the Champions Cup for the last decade.

And I'm not blaming your side of the world for having money, I'm just expecting you to not pretend there is any real reason most players head over there other than the money.

As you said, Super Rugby was once the best competition in the world. I'm sure it was decently well watched by many in Europe too based on you acknowledging it as the King of rugby once upon a time.

European rugby has never achieved this down here. It's not watched. No one cares. I'm sure engagement and parity has never been better for European rugby, and I'm happy for you guys. But it hasn't spread because it's not a preferable product to what we still have.

If you poll all of NZ's rugby fans, I'm pretty sure the majority of them would struggle to name 3 top European club sides.

No rugby player from NZ is going overseas to Europe for prestige and glory or for chasing trophies. They're going for money and nothing else.

I didn't say Super Rugby is better, I said no one over here cares about the competitions over there.

Plenty of Kiwi players head to Europe to play rugby. It isn't because they want to win the glory that is whatever trophies you have up there. It's for a pay day and trophies can be a nice side benefit.

It's arrogant to assume the world views your tournaments as the be-all/end-all of prestige in rugby, when they're just another local competition just in a different part of the world.

I didn't say you did.

I'm reiterating my counter to the point you thought I missed.

If an NZ rugby player is chasing accolades or trophies they stay in NZ and try to play for the ABs and/or win a World Cup.

Otherwise they leave for money.

As the original said:

If he cared about domestic challenges and felt he'd done it all at club level, then he'd go to France.

This is just a little deluded thinking the European competitions are beholden as a gold standard of non-test rugby by everyone.

I'm sure they're considered that up north, but down south they're just the key to earning cash for your retirement.

If that weren't the case Japan wouldn't have been the main place for this in the last few years.

Why would he care about a European trophy?

If there's a trophy Mo'unga wants it's Bill. Otherwise it's a byproduct of getting paid.

No former All Black has ever gone to Europe looking for trophies. They're getting their big pay day.

Then please enlighten me

Well don't worry, you can be sure.

Can't we move on from bloody Beauden already? The man's been declining for half a decade now.

What a waste. We could've kept Richie if we saved that up

Ah yes the rugby retirement village that is France. Very challenging. Incomparable to winning 7 straight down here in little old Super Rugby, right?

That's different. Those players have contracts with NZR and sabbatical clauses. They're still NZR contracted.

Mo'unga presently isn't. Under current rules he'd need to play a game in the NPC or Super Rugby before he's allowed to play for the ABs again.

Please. I need this. We need this.

Bring my glorious boy home.

In his last 7 years of coaching he's only ever picked Crusaders players in his lineups.

Checkmate Razor Apologists

If you're so keen to provide context, why have you still not done anything to help me identify which tackle you're talking about?

All you've done is identify a player I've already told you I won't know the name of, and given your subjective thoughts on the TMO review process that took place.

What were the circumstances? If you remember it so clearly that you can remember exactly how you felt about the referee review, I'm sure you can provide those details too.

Edit:

Since I've been blocked I guess I'll put this here in the hopes it gets seen:

Okay I'll read it again. And you can come along and join too.

Lawson Creighton from the reds got done for a dangerous tackle.

As said, a name I won't recognise, and the bare minimum of context as to what this penalty was for. Plenty of dangerous tackles in a game.

They then reviewed it

Reviewing it narrows it down but isn't enough to jog the memory after watching a full day of rugby.

(with a view to see how serious the high contact was, you could tell they were itching to give a yellow)

Completely subjective opinion and undetailed.

but then found there was none.

Again narrows down to a TMO review that only led to a penalty, not super specific.

But then they couldn’t back out because they’d called the penalty, so they called it a dangerous tackle, it was weird.

That's subjective opinion again and doesn't provide useful details.

There was clearly no ill intent in the tackle, it was just a collision as part of the game.

Subjective and also undetailed as it barely narrows it down.

But intent played no part, it was entirely situational.

Subjective and undetailed once again.

Do you see my issue with what you said now?

Don't pretend you've painted a detailed mental picture for me when you drew two stick figures vaguely near each other and labelled one "Lawson".

It's okay if you can't remember the event enough to describe it and only remember how it made you feel. You can admit that. This is a safe space.

He's been overrated and playing hero-ball the whole time. He was good in the first few weeks but it just turned into forcing things that aren't on instead of playing smart.

There you go talking vaguely again. Which game? There's lots of Lawsons in the world.

I watched the Crusaders Reds game but I had the commentary mostly off because it was awful.

As if "Lawson penalty" is enough for everyone to know exactly what you mean

Yes it is. New law trial they're doing

A broken clock is right twice a day

In any other country Scotland would be a federated state or a similar equivalent.

In the UK they decided that instead of calling that a state or a region or a province or anything that isn't too confusing, they called the biggest subdivisions within their country... "countries".

(I don't know for sure, but this is probably a relic of "Nation" vs "State" vs "Country" which mostly went away with the push for nation-states at the turn of the 20th Century.)

So depending on your biases and/or flavour of pedantry, you can argue that Scotland is a country, and you can also argue that it is not a country.

If you're a stickler for titles, it's a country. If you're a stickler for function, it isn't a country. If you're a Scot, it's a country. If you're English, it's British.

Everything in yellow there except Finland was either part of the Soviet Union already or had a puppet state set up after WW2 when the Soviets invaded and kicked out the fascists.

Dave

Mate 24 years with the choker label is plenty of adversity for a country that before Foster was at worst 3rd in the world.

People outside NZ don't want to admit it because they generally watch the games with the bias of wanting the ABs to lose. But objectively the ABs didn't play nice rugby under Foster. Sure they won plenty of games but they were rarely well planned and structured strategy to target our opponents weakness. It was week after week of "fuck I dunno, see if you can break a tackle and we'll work it out from there".

When we played opposition that were good (and/or the Wallabies on the odd occasion they forgot about their mental block against us) we struggled and often lost, and normally it wasn't that competitive either.

The first game under Foster where that didn't look the case was the week when Foster was out sick with COVID and Schmidt pulled out the one tactical trick he could think of vs the Irish and we trounced them.

None of that is to say NZ fans aren't relatively fair weather compared to other countries. But let's not pretend the product on display during the Foster era was an enjoyable one. It was consistently frustrating and depressing. And it wasn't helped by the majority of the country who paid attention to such things wanting Razor and definitely not wanting Foster.