#kurtley-beale

#kurtley-beale

I'm really excited to be joining Sale. My body feels good and I'm still performing at a high level. I feel like I can compete with the best of them, and then some, and I think if I retired now, I'd probably regret it when I was older.

When I was little, like 7, and we were living in northern California, most army installations had a rugby team. My dad [a Green Beret] served over 20 years, and there's pictures of me at my dad's rugby games, which is wild to think about how full circle that's all come. He grew up playing football, then like most football players when he tried rugby, concussed himself three times in his first practice, knocked himself out, but he loved it.

Martin Johnson, England's World-Cup winning skipper, believes there is no huge mystery to being a great captain. If you haven't got a good team it doesn't matter how good a captain you are. To suggest that calm, sure-footed leadership is irrelevant in top-level sport, however, is another matter. Even the greatest sides need decisive, intelligent direction, regardless of who supplies it.

I reflect on my seven years at the club with a huge amount of gratitude. I arrived at the club in 2019 with a few suitcases and a girlfriend, I'm leaving the club with a lot of memories, new friends, a wife and baby,

One minute you are riding the perfect wave, the next you're being dumped from a great height and having your world tipped upside down. Which is essentially how Razor will now be feeling after being ousted as All Blacks head coach barely two years into his tenure. On the surface he was everything New Zealand rugby could have wished for. The serial domestic winner who had guided the Crusaders to seven successive Super rugby titles, the empathetic everyman with the break-dancing skills to match.

In likes of Tommy O'Brien, Robert Baloucoune and Jamie Osborne, Andy Farrell has a fresh crop of winners ahead of Rugby World Cup. As the man with the deaf dog says 'it can be hard to call it'. That has been the case in the majority of this year's Six Nations but when Ireland play Scotland we now expect Ireland to win.

Henry Pollock has been such a prominent figure in the recent rugby landscape that we had to double check that Saturday will be the first time he has started a game for England. Such has been the meteoric rise of the effervescent 21-year-old, it's easy to forget that up to now, each of his seven Test caps has come from the bench. That will all change against Ireland at Twickenham this weekend.

Tony Ward, voted the first European Player of the Year two months earlier, was dropped. He had won the award largely for his dazzling form in that season's Five Nations Championship. Then, ahead of the First Test on Ireland's tour of Australia, he was canned. It made the six o'clock news. Ward was a gifted footballer. He would go on to play in the League of Ireland for Limerick United FC, starring for them against Southampton in the Uefa Cup.

Noah Caluori scored four tries to help Saracens thump Newcastle Red Bulls 73-14 at a blustery StoneX Stadium. Sarries ran in eleven tries in their first match since it was announced long-standing director of rugby Mark McCall is to step down at the end of the season. The home side put aside a difficult opening 15 minutes against The Prem's bottom club to secure the biggest margin of victory in the competition so far this season.

Our rugby jury answer the key questions ahead of Andy Farrell naming his team to face France