honestly united

Thanks for the heads up, edited my post! Edit to add - Also wasn't sure on the situation with any of the youngsters so not included them

Smith, Rose and Shankland are away, while Doohan, Cadden and Miller will be back to their parent club so thats 6 that need replacing. Bell, Adams, Higgins, Geggan, Kerr, Crawford, McDaid, Forrest, Moore and Moffat are all out of contract and with the exception of Higgins you could make a case for giving new contracts to all of them, as none have looked out of place in the championship this season.

I think Bhatti will be the biggest miss (obviously Hogg and Dunbar are great players but Jackson (who has played more than Hogg last few years anyway) and Johnson (who is probably better than Dunbar now) are more than adequate replacements), and a strange one him going to Edinburgh to be stuck on the bench most weeks. Hopefully we get some decent 2nd row's in as this has been a weakness, I think we have the lad from Newcastle coming in, but we need some presence in their. Hoping we get some decent players in as we will need cover for the 20 odd players that will be away during the world cup

6 years as it was posted in 2013 surely?

Is it Heaslip on commentary? However the Irish guy is he is so one sided its unreal

Stupid from Gray leads to another Leinster try, still a long way to go but its Leinsters to lose now

am i right in thinking that 4th place goes into a play off for the last European place? So at the moment Embra vs Ospreay's unless Leinster or Munster win in Europe and both get in?

Shockingly looks like the sun making a c**t of it https://www.hmfckickback.co.uk/index.php?/topic/182506-liam-smith/

Although probably cheaper than paying him for a season while out on loan - although Im sure Hearts wanted to keep him but couldnt guarantee him any first team football this season - Smith maybe thinks they were good guys to deal with then so why not go back. Or as its the Sun it could be entirely made up....

Great servant, but as he is down to 3rd choice not a surprise. Wonder if he is retiring or will look for another club? Both Kennedy and Fowles away as well, wonder who they have lined up to come in at scrum half? Also think I must have blanked out Brown being capped. Hamilton was unlucky, got into the Scotland squad while at Leicester, gets injured at the start of his time at Edinburgh, and is now below Mata, Barclay, Watson, Bradbury and Ritchie in the pecking order, wonder if he will end up at Glasgow or be off back down south?

Scotland 7's win the bowl in HK beating Australia (semis) and Japan in the final

Kinghorn looked ok on the wing but a liability at fullbacks

I think there are advantages to both sometimes having a week off before playing a team that has just won 2 games on the bounce with big wins and high on confidence doesn't go well, on the other hand if the team has sh!tfested there way through on penalties the confidence wont be too high and energy levels low playing a team has rested up over the week. Granted it will be playing ICT twice before playing DU.

Edinburgh game was disappointing, as they should have won. For me Pyrgos lost them the game, the number of times the ball was at a back of a ruck and he was nowhere to be seen (Munster got a couple of turnovers from this) or slowed the game down so all momentum was lost. If Embra had got either price or horne last summer rather than Pyrgos I think they would have won today at a canter. As for Glasgow they seem to have gone backwards this season, and granted they have a number of players out injured, but the forwards seem disorganised, and defensively the whole team dont really seem to be following any sort of plan. I know people rave about Rennie as a coach, and at times we produce some fantastic attacking rugby, but defensively and in the forwards especially we have regressed again this season. We did look better at the start of he season, the first game against Saracens for example we looked solid, but since then the forwards especially are off the pace require to challenge in Europe.

IMHO we are a couple of wins off securing 4th as a minimum, the main thing for me is we need to get our early season form back soon to ensure we have a chance of doing something in the play offs. As others have said we win our 3 games in hand on DU we go above them in 2nd (and would put us 12 above Dunfermline) . However I dont think we should get hung up on finishing 2nd / 3rd / 4th its about winning the play off games, and sometimes it can be better to be playing and winning rather than having a week off. Either way there are 8 games to go before the play offs, and we need to have everyone at there best as with the number of midweek games its going to be a squad effort.

The Edinburgh pack today is better than the Scotland pack vs England, and is getting pushed about now by Munster in hte scrums, whereas the scrum didn't move at all s England

If you include the NCL / North Juniors / Tayside Juniors you could go down a few Tiers in the North. You would think over time we should have a Tier 5 of North, LL East and LL West and in the most likely movement across Tiers would be Tayside moving North / East and probably about Lanarkshire for the move West / East.

As England have a proper pyramid system it shouldn't cause any issues at all. You have a set number of teams who will be at that tier, as its only 2 leagues at the same tier the most northern half play in the north, the furthest south play in the south. It probably means teams in the midlands get shunted between the north and south league each year but thats how it works. If the SFA had any gumption they would have taken control of the whole situation and put in place a similar model but they haven't shown any signs of leadership and we are in the mess we are at the moment. The issue is you are playing at a certain tier (you get promoted or relegated to that tier) and the SFA should decide which league you go into ie Tier 5 should be either 32/36 clubs and the 16/18 furthest north are Highland and the rest Lowland. You could then have a number of leagues at Tier 6 feeding into Tier 5 but not tied to the league above (say South, West, East, North) Bottom 2 tier 5 relegated, each champion promoted and leagues re-arranged each year geographically.

excellent bit of business, good that we are getting players tied up early where possible

Personally would have Watson and Barclay above Ritchie, but agree great strength in depth now - Bradbury as well just making the bench

Apart from McInally and Gilchrist thats pretty much full strength from Edinburgh

I had thought the 6N's was being shunted back 2 weeks from 2020 due to this new world rugby calendar thing

assuming its a school of hard knocks style thing then

To be fair to the Scottish defence in the first half, England did to us the exact same as they did 2 years ago. We expect them to crash up close to the rucks and mauls, and our defensive patterns are set up to defend against this (hence no one out wide) but instead England spin it wide and have numbers, and the line out for the 2nd was excellently worked. I think in terms of the tactics in the first half, you could see we were trying to play a more methodical game, but that just doesn't suit us. Not having read through the last 30 odd pages post match, but the one big plus for me was the scrum. We were giving away a fair bit of weight to England, yet the scrums were solid all game, infact I dont remember any of them moving at all on our ball which gave us a platform to attack. In years gone past we would have been going backwards in hte scrum giving us no ball to attack with. I think Townsend will have learned a lot about the players over the last few weeks, and hopefully we can get a settled game plan in place over hte warm up games before the world cup. We have some real depth to the squad now, but we are still painfully short in others. If we lose Finn we have no back up. I think Hastings has played brialiiantly the last 2 games at fullback, and I think he is head and shoulders above Kinghorn their but at standoff he tries to do too much himself. I think there could be a few people who have played a part in the this 6N's not going to make the plane to Japan

why bring on laidlaw, price has been our best player