Who’s hot and who’s not: ‘Ridiculous’ Northampton, Irish lock’s rare ’10/10 rating’, Georgia ‘take the p*** to new levels’ and SARU ‘tantrum’
Northampton's Henry Pollock, left, in back in the good books but Georgia's Merab Sharikadze is very much on this week's naughty step
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.
Northampton: What a savage response from the Saints following their record humbling the previous weekend at Leicester. Phil Dowson came out swinging amid the fallout, especially backing to the hilt the much ridiculed Henry Pollock, and their on-field response – including that of the comical Pollock – was like watching a Formula One car rev from zero to top speed in the blink of an eye.
What a difference it made when they concentrated on just the rugby rather than getting caught up in overheated derby hardman acting. They had 61 points put on a battered Bristol by the Franklin’s Gardens interval, and they eventually went on to record a 94-point tally that included 14 tries. They did give up a four-try bonus point, which bears out another negative we mentioned about them last weekend regarding the need to tighten up their defence, but the standard of their attack play was ridiculous. Well played.
Saracens: It wasn’t that long ago when it seemed as if the Londoners’ final season with the legendary Mark McCall at the helm was petering out to an unsatisfactory ending. There were three losses on the bounce after the Six Nations return, two in the league – including a humiliation at Bath – and also a Champions Cup round of 16 elimination. However, what they have stitched together since then has been impressive.
Four wins, taking 19 of the 20 points on offer, have them suddenly alive and kicking in the PREM, just three points off a play-off spot with two matches remaining. Gloucester were their latest victims, Maro Itoje putting on a clinic, and it would be just like them to give McCall a compelling send-off, having been written off just weeks ago. A nod to Owen Farrell. It was only last week when we had a justified moan about fake hookers, players standing momentarily at hooker and embarrassing themselves. Farrell, though, was like Luke Littler, beautifully hitting the spot with his spiral. Lovely.
Joe McCarthy: It’s been a while since we had a proper all-singing, all-dancing Joe show, but he was back in his element on Saturday when leading Leinster to a 64-point hammering of Ospreys in Dublin. There was a try hat-trick to savour as well as plenty of trademark defensive resolve, and so enamoured was Planet Rugby that his effort – ‘an utterly world-class performance – was rated 10/10. That’s rarely achieved kudos.
McCarthy’s form wasn’t the only reason for Leinster cheer. Not only was the win good enough to secure the No.2 seeding for the United Rugby Championship play-offs, meaning home advantage in the semi-finals if they see off the Lions at the Aviva in the quarters, Tadgh Furlong, James Lowe and Jordan Larmour all proved their fitness in time for next Saturday’s Champions Cup final. That’s a timely tonic.
Ireland great’s ‘weights doesn’t fix that’ verdict on Sam Prendergast’s ‘really bad trait’
PREM wingmen: Noah Caluori drew a try blank at the weekend, but the Saracens teenager is still three tries clear in the race to be the English top flight’s top try scorer for the 2025/26 season. The jostling for the minor placings on this list heated up, though, with Bath’s Henry Arundell and Northampton’s George Hendy both scoring four tries each in their teams’ respective victories over the hapless Newcastle and Bristol.
Neither player has made it into Steve Borthwick’s latest England training squad, but it has been great to watch the 23-year-old Arundell’s reintroduction this season into the PREM following his two seasons at Racing following the collapse of London Irish. Life at The Rec is certainly suiting him. The same can be said of Hendy, another 23-year-old and the super-sub man of the match in Saints’ 2024 PREM title final win. His penchant for threatening the line continues to impress, and he looks the perfect candidate to make the switch to full-back when George Furbank packs up and switches to Harlequins. at the end of the term.
Craig Casey: Munster’s drop off in form and results since December had been alarming. When they fell 14-10 behind approaching the interval in Limerick on Saturday night and were down to 13 players following two yellow cards, there was every fear that they could collapse, lose to Lions and miss out on Champions Cup qualification next season and also fail to make the URC quarter-finals. Casey himself was in the wars as his kick led to Munster to turn over the ball near the sideline on halfway, inviting the South Africans to strike for the lead.
However, his response was proper leadership, helping under fire Munster to stand up and fight. His smart finish wrested back the lead on the blow of half-time, and it was his break that wounded the defence in the creation of the second half Tom Ahern score. It wasn’t in play where he excelled. As captain, he had a way with words that created a strong rapport with referee Andrea Piardi, demonstrating that this responsibility isn’t a burden on his not-so-broad shoulders. Nice.
England: John Mitchell’s side make it eight Six Nations titles in a row on Sunday, winning in France to clinch a fifth Grand Slam in this enviable run of supremacy. You would think that such one-sidedness as regards who wins every year would damage the tournament, but this year’s edition continued the momentum fired up by last autumn’s Rugby World Cup, with some fantastic attendances – five of the six teams set new records: England (77,120), France (35,062), Ireland (31,294), Scotland (30,498) and Italy (4,787) – and growing TV audiences and online engagement.
No one can argue that the English weren’t worthy champions. They were, and they continue to broaden their range of play on the back of the increasing quality of their Premiership Women’s Rugby domestic league. But the development of France – and also Ireland – means this is now a championship that won’t be an England gimme in the years leading into the 2029 World Cup in Australia. That’s a super horizon for the sport.
Glasgow: It’s 11 years now since the Warriors revelled in their greatest day, comfortably defeating Munster in the PRO12 final in Belfast, and they took another big step towards getting their hands on that comp’s current trophy – the URC – with their No.1 seed-sealing comeback to win at Ulster. The Scots hadn’t defeated the hosts at Ravenhill since 2013, and it seemed as if that rotten run was set to continue when they found themselves trailing in the closing minutes on Friday night.
They had drifted off in the second half, seeing a 21-12 interval lead turn into a one-point deficit that would have cost them top spot with Leinster winning the following day, but they somehow found the unity and creativity to fashion the edge that tempted Kyle Rowe to gun for the corner and succeed. It was the sort of galvanising moment worth its weight in gold to a team looking to win the league, and who knows, they could be back in Belfast trying to clinch just that. It seems extraordinary that no large capacity venue will be available in Scotland if they do reach the June 20 final, but Belfast could be a decent alternative to their liking after the weekend’s happy denouement.
Hurricanes: Saturday night in Auckland was supposed to be the moment when the Wellington franchise would have its Super Rugby Pacific title credentials thoroughly examined for the worse. The chat was about the Blues making a statement on their home patch and shaking perceptions up ahead of next month’s play-offs. However, what unfolded at Eden Park only provided further evidence that the ‘Canes are the real thing and a live bet to win their first title since their sole triumph a decade ago.
The efficiency in their play is reaching stand-up-and-applause levels, and they were many miles better than the Blues in a 47-24 victory based on a first-half surge that had them 21-0 up at the break. There is a connectivity in their Clark Laidlaw-coached team that is very easy on the eye, and in the likes of Fehi Fineanganofo, whose 16th try equalled the record for most tries in a Super Rugby season, they have the arsenal to turn promise into June silverware.
Graham Henry: The All Blacks appear to be pulling out all the stops to reignite their aura when their international season gets going in July. They were unceremonious in their dumping of Scott Robertson and replacing him with Dave Rennie, and now have old ‘Ted’ back in the fold as a selector at the age of 79. It’s a tremendous validation that experience is to be treasured in this sport, not something to be pensioned off when someone reaches their 60s.
Henry has the scars and came through the other side, guiding New Zealand from the ridicule of quarter-final elimination in 2007 to winning the World Cup four years later. Still, his rugby brain remains as sharp as a tack, judging the lengthy interview he gave last month to DSPN Rugby. Of course, the proof of his value will be in the outcome of their matches, starting with Ireland in Auckland on July 4, but things are shaping up nicely on paper for the All Blacks.
Zac Ward: Ulster were ultimately beaten in Belfast on Friday, a loss that left them finishing in ninth place in the URC, a position that excludes them from the quarter-finals and leaves them needing to beat Montpellier in next Friday’s Challenge Cup final if they are to qualify for next season’s Champions Cup. However, the individual display of the winger in the defeat to Glasgow can’t pass without acknowledgement.
Ireland controversially binned their men’s sevens programme last year, a season after the team finished sixth at the Paris Olympics. That was a penny-pinching move that now looks foolish given the exploits of Ward and Joshua Kenny at Leinster. Sevens gave them the platform to hone their finishing skills, and Ward was in his element with a two-try solo blast against the run of play. His running highlighted how pace – and the eye for an intercept pass – kills even the best of defences.
Force: The odds are still against the Australian minnows making it into the Super Rugby play-offs. They are still three places and six points off making the cut with just two matches remaining. However, having won just once in their first six games in 2026, they have enjoyed the encouraging flourish of winning four of their last six, and Saturday’s latest victory means they completed the double over the Reds this season. It’s a brutally difficult task to raise the profile of rugby union in Western Australia, where the fortunes of Perth’s two Aussie rules teams dominate, and a new NRL franchise is set to start next year.
But the Force are continuing to fight the good fight, vindicating the decision of Andrew Forrest to keep the club alive after it lost its Super Rugby licence in 2017. That refusal to roll over and die was brave in a sport littered with terrible business decision-making, and his belief continues to be rewarded in the resilience of a Super Rugby-restored franchise securing attention-grabbing results.
Cardiff: The strife that exists in Welsh rugby is so terrible that it’s a miracle that they will have representation in the URC quarter-finals, but the capital club will be jetting out of Cape Town for a quarter-final that they will believe they can win against the Stormers. Cardiff are just the third Welsh side in five URC seasons to make the quarter-finals (in that same time, Ireland have had 15 quarter-finalists, South Africa 14, Scotland seven and Italy one), and their consistency across the 2025/26 campaign must be admired.
The drop off in the Scarlets, last year’s qualifiers who have plummeted from eighth place to 14th on the ladder, is illustrative of the roadblocks the game in Wales is enduring, but Cardiff have somehow produced the resilience to transform their ninth-place finish in 2025 with eight wins into a sixth-place campaign with 11 victories. Their Arms Park has become somewhat of a fortress, as Stormers found to their cost last Friday, and the rematch in the southern hemisphere is an intriguing fixture to look forward to.
Harlequins’ youth: No one at the London club can hide from the fact that it has been a dreadfully ugly season, and their falloff in form hit them in the pocket at the weekend when the Big Summer Kick-Off promotion only attracted 32,000 through the Twickenham turnstiles compared to just short of 50,000 paying up a year ago. However, the PREM strugglers have suddenly found a pulse. While the previous weekend’s 76-point shellacking of Newcastle was something you couldn’t read much into, given how brutal the Red Bull club continue to be on the pitch, what they produced in the closing 45 minutes against play-off chasing Exeter will generate optimism for next term.
Quins looked in the cusp of a rout, having conceded the four-try bonus point to the Chiefs just 32 minutes in at English Rugby HQ, but their unanswered 34-point riposte had those fans who have kept the faith cheering them from the rafters. Not having the cattle up front has been a particular weakness for the Londoners, but lock pair Elliot Williams and Zach Carr, as well as loosehead Will Hobson, highlighted the talented youth that is now emerging.
La Rochelle: We gave a shoutout in this column last week to the French club’s recent revival, and that rejuvenation took another positive step on Sunday night with their 38-10 dismissal of defending champions Toulouse. That was their sixth Top 14 win in seven and their fourth success on the bounce, an unexpected improvement that has them just four points shy of a play-off spot with two matches remaining.
There was a point over the winter when Ronan O’Gara, their fiery Irish coach, lost the run of himself and seemed incapable of turning around a once great team that was crashing downwards towards the rocks, but he has showed a resilient side to his coaching but riding out the crisis and returning them to the consistency that had them winning European titles and contesting French league finals not so long ago.
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BROKEN THERMOSTAT!
Lions: This should have been a week of great celebration for the Johannesburg franchise following their first-time qualification for the URC play-offs, but the fizz has been diluted by two allegations – one proven and one unproven. For a club that reached a hat-trick of successive Super Rugby finals between 2016 and 2018, their sequence of 12th, two 9ths and 11th place finishes in the URC was not a flattering look, so to have punched their play-off ticket at the fifth time of asking was a great validation of the progress made by Ivan van Rooyen’s team.
However, the banning of Springbok prop Asenathi Ntlabakanye for 18 months due to an anti-doping rule violation detected last August was reputationally damaging, especially as the sanction came just days after he had started the May 9 match at Leinster. They were also accused at Munster at the weekend of spitting by one of their players. Incriminating evidence wasn’t found when the footage was reviewed by the TMO, but the allegation was harmful all the same. By the way, their latest loss on their travels meant they still haven’t won outside South Africa since an October 2024 win at Zebre, highlighting how they have it all to do in their upcoming quarter-final at Leinster.
Springboks prop set to miss the Rugby World Cup after doping suspension handed down
COLD AS ICE!
Georgia: The Eastern Europeans have taken the p*** to new levels, literally, with the punishment handed down following the tawdry urine swap doping scandal. Six players and a medic copped nearly 36 years’ worth of bans from rugby, and making the caper all the more bemusing is the revelation that the sample tampering wasn’t to hide the taking of performance-enhancing drugs, it was to conceal the taking of cannabis and tramadol. What the actual f***!
No wonder Richard Cockerill got out of dodge last December. The shenanigans didn’t happen on the Englishman’s watch; the no-good high jinks took place before their depressing 2023 Rugby World Cup campaign, where they failed to build on the 2022 match results that had fans demanding their promotion to the Six Nations at the expense of Italy. Those calls have now been rendered stupid with the passage of time, with several careers now ruined. Merab Sharikadze, for instance, was a 104-cap international respected around the world for the calibre of his midfield play. Not anymore.
SARU: Having a player challenging for 2027 World Cup selection hit with a doping ban was a headache that the Springboks could have done without, but that negative development became overshadowed by the emergence later in the week that South African rugby bosses could potentially pull the plug on the involvement of four of their clubs playing in the Champions and Challenge Cups. While their participation in the URC has generally been deemed a success, their fortunes in the EPCR tournaments have been poor, and fears over player welfare could now see them pull out.
Of course, it can’t be easy that their leading players are on the go 12 months of the year with international and club duties because the global calendar still hasn’t produced a better framework, but is quitting EPCR really going to change much? The South African clubs more often than not have only ever played four matches per season, as they aren’t in the habit of making the knockout stages, so that doesn’t sound like it would make a heck of a huge difference timewise. What will unfold in the boardroom is a tantrum well worth watching.
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Bristol: It was incredulous that the Bears still had a reward from their 94-33 mauling at Northampton. The sooner rugby administrators, like those in charge of the PREM, cop on and bin the current four-try bonus point regulation in favour of the Top 14 system, where a team must outscore its opponent by three tries or more to get the bonus, the better. That point Bristol bagged could be crucial in the play-off race, but no team conceding that amount of points in a single match should be within an ass’s roar of semi-final qualification.
We have all revelled in the Lam-ball approach taken to the PREM by Pat Lam, their long-serving director of rugby. But while the entertainment produced on the days when this all-action style clicks into top gear is captivating, the one non-negotiable in rugby is the ability to defend, and Bristol were reduced to a shambles by the Saints. The Samoan has a contract at the Ashton Gate club through to the summer of 2028, but he is in serious trouble here as the concession of 14 tries is a wrecking ball-like capitulation. If it were Bristol City Football Club, the Bears’ share ownership with, Lam would have been sacked on Saturday morning.
Stormers: The Cape Town franchise are currently stuck in the mire of inconsistency following a superb 10-game winning streak at the start of the season. Ever since waving the white flag for a Champions Cup trip to Harlequins by sending up a second-string team to get 61 points put on it, their run in 2026 has left much to be desired. There have been just four wins in the past 13 matches, resulting in their Champions Cup elimination and only a third-place finish in the URC, which is only enough for quarter-final home advantage.
Having to travel in the semi-finals, if they make it through, will likely be a huge hurdle given the manner of last Friday’s loss at Cardiff. Victory would have secured a top two seeing – and home field semi-final advantage – so they had every incentive to deliver, but they were found wanting by too many in-game frustrations. They have plenty of work to do to be play-off ready.
Eddie Jones: The Australian has long had a spiky reputation for running his mouth off, but his tempestuous nonsense has finally caught up with him as his Japanese paymasters have taken a firm stance following verbal abuse towards match officials during their U23’s tour to Australia last month. Remember, this is a loudmouth whose withering verbal grenades seldom drew any sharp response from the RFU or Rugby Australia, so it’s curious that it is the minnow Japanese who have finally told him to put a sock in it.
A six-week suspension and a salary reduction will surely soften the 66-year-old’s cough, and the irony is that his sanction arrived not long after he hit out at the Nations Championship scheduling that resulted in Japan having to play their ‘home’ match versus Ireland in Australia on July 11. He may have been justified in that complaint, but it’s a terrible reflection that his behaviour now means he is suspended for the previous weekend’s match in Tokyo against Italy. He has potentially hurt his team more than the fixture makers.
Exeter, Ulster and Sale: All three clubs encountered bad defeats over the weekend. The Chiefs imploded after an opening half-hour burst secured them a four-try bonus point and a 24-7 lead, going on to worryingly lose 41-24 and jeopardise their PREM Rugby semi-final aspirations. Ulster, meanwhile, lost out in their URC roulette, following the last-gasp draw snatched from the jaws of victory the previous weekend against the Stormers, with a match-losing, devastating late blow against Glasgow.
That left them finishing ninth on the table and needing EPCR Challenge Cup victory next weekend to secure Champions Cup qualification for next season – that’s a daunting assignment for a club that last won a trophy in 2006. And as for Sale, it was difficult to listen to their boss, Alex Sanderson, spouting the poppycock that if there were another 10 minutes added, they would have beaten Leicester. That was nonsense masking the reality that his team yet again didn’t show up when it mattered in a match.