Who’s hot and who’s not: Bath provide ‘sharp’ Champions Cup reminder, Dragons fire up ‘dream’ and Warriors become the Glasgow ‘Wobblers’
Johann van Graan (left) embraces Alfie Barbery after Bath's win while Glasgow show their dejection after a Toulon try (INPHO/Ben Brady and Ryan Byrne)
It’s time for our Monday wrap of who has their name in lights and who is making the headlines for all the wrong reasons after the weekend.
THEY’RE ON FIRE!
Brilliant Bath: Friday night at The Rec produced an all-English classic that eventually tipped the home side’s way with pantomime villain Henry Pollock in the sin bin and Ted Hill driving over for the decisive score in a 43-41 success. Coming back from 21 points down in the opening half against last year’s Champions Cup finalists was no mean feat for Johann van Graan’s club.
It’s been 20 years – the 2006 18-9 loss to Biarritz – since Bath last made the final four, and the nerves were shredded before they produced an inspired bounce back. The current Investec Champions Cup gets much flak and plenty of it is deserved for not being the old-style Heineken Cup, but a night like last Friday was a sharp reminder that it is still a special tournament that means so much, judging by the final whistle celebrations.
Terrific Toulon: They may be three-time Champions Cup champions, but no one gave the struggling French club much – if any – chance of causing a quarter-final upset at high-flying Glasgow. Their Top 14 form had been underwhelming (just nine wins in 20 outings) and they came within a whisker of a Charles Ollivon hold-up over the line of losing at home in the round of 16 to the Stormers.
Those facts, coupled with Scotstoun becoming a fortress in recent years, a troublesome destination that Toulouse and Saracens attested to after their losses there this season, meant that Saturday’s quarter-final was expected to be a one-sided affair, but Toulon were ruthless and fully deserved their four-try 22-19 win that has fired up the ambition of a fourth European star. Having thrived in Scotland, playing away at Leinster in the semis won’t daunt them in the slightest next month.
Investec Champions Cup semi-finals: Dates, venues, kick-off times and TV coverage confirmed
Red-hot Dragons: It’s been a horrendous season for Welsh regional rugby, but Filo Tiatia has shown that it is still possible to dream and achieve despite all the setbacks and recriminations. It doesn’t need saying that the Challenge Cup is very much the poor relation as regards European rugby, but the Newport-based side deserves kudos for reaching next month’s semi-finals.
Losing had very much been their thing for years and while they are still only 15th in the United Rugby Championship having lost nine of their 14 matches, they have won four of this season’s six European games to book a trip to Montpellier. That run included Saturday night’s tension-filled 35-32 win at Zebre, the URC’s 16th and last placed side, and it left their likeable ex-All Black head coach feeling proud and dedicating the progress of his team to the entire region of Gwent. That was a nice touch in a time of Welsh rugby strife.
Battling Bordeaux: French clubs have won the last five Champions Cups and there is every chance that run will stretch to six next month after the defending champions got the better of their arch rivals with a second-half flourish that turned a 5-15 deficit into a 30-15 win. Having been beaten by Toulouse in the two most recent Top 14 finals, Sunday’s Cup quarter-final was a huge test of the Gironde club’s credentials.
When they eliminated Toulouse in last season’s semi-finals, the visitors were without the injured Antoine Dupont. While he was fired up for this rematch, his effort was ultimately a bit too much, as he was yellow-carded just before Ben Tameifuna struck to put Bordeaux into a lead they were never to lose. Their two-in-a-row ambitions remain very much alive.
England’s popularity: The records keep on coming for John Mitchell’s England. Fresh from their Rugby World Cup triumph last September in front of 81,885 at Allianz Stadium, a Six Nations record attendance of 77,120 watched England start their bid for their eighth successive title in that competition.
Those Red Roses fans were left more than happy with a comfortable 33-12 win over Ireland. While their indomitable winning run can be viewed as a negative for the level of the Six Nations competitiveness, what can’t be questioned is the fandom that now exists for Mitchell’s all-conquering team and the new money it is bringing into the sport. It’s momentum that the RFU blazers can’t be allowed to mess up.
Sheehan’s shift: The Leinster hooker walked away with the player of the match award following a performance that began with the ninth-minute try which put his team into a lead they were never to lose. It took some time for the Irish side to shake off Sale’s belligerence, but they were unstoppable once they got going in the early part of the second half and an upset was never on the cards.
What caught the eye most about Sheehan was that when it came to giving sub hooker Ronan Kelleher his 14-minute run with the result settled in a game that ended 43-13, instead of Sheehan exiting, he simply shifted to the back-row in a nod to his positional flexibility. This was recognition that you shouldn’t necessarily take off a star player just because there is bench cover. Instead, let them play the full 80, build your options about the additional positions they can occupy and let them shine for as long as possible.
Lawes’ move: Transfers are two a penny at the minute given the time of year it is in the market, but the revelation that the veteran English enforcer will switch from the PRO D2 back to the PREM next season was a jolting development. It was October 2023, following England’s Rugby World Cup semi-final loss to South Africa, when he stepped away from Test rugby, but he is now looking at a potential return at the age of 37. It was last month, off the back of England’s derisory fifth-place finish in the Six Nations, that Lawes claimed in his Times column that “English rugby is not set up to give ourselves the best chance of winning it”.
There was criticism that the central contracts don’t go far enough to help the players be at their best, that England don’t pick all their best players due to the “damaging” RFU policy of not selecting those based abroad, and how they “don’t play to the strengths of the players they do pick, or at least not often enough”. Lawes got a lot off his chest and yet, four weeks later, he was signalling his intention to quit France and see if he is good enough at Sale to earn a Test recall. What intrigue.
Tuned-up Anthem: The MLR in the United States is a basket case in terms of the turnover of clubs. The financials in America haven’t been adding up and the tournament reached the start line this year with just six teams, five fewer than the 11 in 2025, and an emphasis on producing more American prospects rather than offering overseas veterans one last paycheque.
It was the year before, in a 12-team 2024 competition, when the World Rugby-backed Anthem was formed. After a baptism of fire when all 32 of its matches were lost across its first two seasons, they have suddenly found a pulse. They began the new season with a shock win at California Legion and while they lost their follow-up outing to Chicago Hounds, they showed at the weekend in their 35-24 win over Seattle Seawolves in Carolina that they are no longer America’s whipping boys.
Italy U18s: The Azzurri have been no easy beats for some time now at U20s level, but they have now upped their game in the age-grade two years below, and they finished up the latest Six Nations festival in Vichy as one of two teams to win all three of their matches. Hosts France defeated Ireland on Saturday in that head-to-head between teams that had won their opening two matches, and the Italians were the only other team to depart the eight-team event unbeaten.
The Italians battered England 46-26 with a show of connected, powerful rugby not normally associated with them at U18s, rounding off a tournament where they defeated Spain 52-33 and Scotland 23-19. The loss will have given the English plenty to ponder. Across the four previous festivals, they had won 11 of 12 matches, but they came within a Georgian knock-on at the line of losing all three matches in 2026.
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COLD AS ICE!
Glasgow Wobblers: Franco Smith now knows exactly what it is like to be Gregor Townsend. For years, the Scotland national team has been hyped up only to collapse and fail to measure up to lofty expectations. This happened again last month when they were blown away in the Triple Crown decider by Ireland. It’s now the turn of Smith to put up with Townsend-like failure. Never had the route to a Champions Cup final looked as promising as it did this year for the Warriors, but they bombed out of the competition with an unacceptable level of stage fright last Saturday.
Smith’s team had their permitted wobble the previous weekend, just about managing to tame the Bulls in a game affected by Storm David. But no excuse could be tolerated for their elimination at the hands of Toulon. Having trailed 12-17 at the break, they soon jumped into a second-half lead only to fail to score again in the remaining 30 or so minutes. For a team usually full of scores and creative first-phase attack, losing to a side whose away form in the Top 14 has been dreadful was a serious black mark. Their reputation has taken a Scottish national team-type dent that will take some time to recover from.
Dorian Aldegheri: What the flip was the experienced Toulouse prop thinking when he recklessly clattered into Damian Penaud nearing half-time in Bordeaux on Sunday? In last May’s semi-final, his team had been squeaky clean, finishing nine-all on the penalty count, having zero cards compared to a yellow to their rivals… and were still beaten 35-18. The moral of that loss was that any ill-discipline on their return would only steepen the climb, so where did Aldegheri’s brain fart come from?
Toulouse were 7-5 up and defending around the halfway line when the prop needlessly floored Penaud after he had kicked ahead. Everyone knows Matthew Carley is a ref who likes brandishing the cards, so an incident featuring “high danger foul play” and “no mitigation” wasn’t going to escape sanction. This 20-minute red, which overlapped into Dupont’s second-half yellow, left the visitors vulnerable, and they could have no complaints about a 15-point loss in which the penalty count was 5-11 against them.
Bok exodus: What’s going on at the Bulls? Johan Ackermann was supposed to raise the bar after taking over from Jake White, but something isn’t clicking, not only on the field, where they were eliminated in the Champions Cup round of 16 and are currently only eighth in the URC, but off it as well. We already had the unusual step of Rassie Erasmus seconding a tranche of his assistance to help Ackermann figure it all out, but the brain drain of losing Test squad players is continuing.
Kurt-Lee Arendse is off to Japan and Wilco Louw is joining the Stormers, while a so-called Springbok-in-waiting, senior Bulls player David Kriel, has thrown his lot in with La Rochelle. It has also now emerged that Ruan Nortje has also quit the Pretoria franchise to take up an offer in Japan. It’s a development that doesn’t lend itself to good vibes about the Ackermann era at the Bulls and the disconnect that is potentially happening behind the scenes.
READ MORE: Bulls suffer hammer blow as another Springboks star set to join Japanese club