honestly united

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

we should only play 2nd halfs

Yeah because it is deemed foul play it over rules other penalty, if it was just a knock on of forward pass it would still been Welsh penalty

No the late hit overrules anything that comes before

How bad are Ireland when a ref actually penalises them.for coming in at the side and sealing the ball

The problem with all the talk of re-construction and pyramid structures is that far too many people are only looking at the here and now rather than looking at the potential and how things could look in the future. Granted you could start off with a HFL and the NCL/ North Juniors / EoS north of Tay feeding in, and any team (if they had a licence) may think thats a lot of travelling - however give it 5/10 years the league could be heavily East Coast biased and predominantly Aberdeen / Dundee clubs. Its the same argument in the west where the big junior clubs are whinging about not wanting in the LL as its unattractive to them and the clubs are all glorified boys clubs. Well if the west juniors are that good they will easily fill the LL and be the majority in a few years. A bit of forward planning and looking to see what could be possible is what is required. Any team at the edge of a boundary is not going to be happy about travelling to the other side but unfortunately there are always some winners and losers.

He was injured, but came back a few weeks ago for Toulouse, probably letting him concentrate on getting back in with his club after a lengthy absence, and having not been in the squad for about 2 years probably would struggle with calls, moves, game plan etc in a short space of time. But I would have had him called up.

Would probably have preferred Strauss at 8, shift Bradbury to blind side and Skinner to 2nd row dropping Toolis, but much of a muchness. Ideally Ireland beat wales denying them a grandslam, then we beat england denying them the title. But unlikely to happy - and on 2nd thoughts that would give Ireland the title so that wouldn't do. If wales win though the pressure is off England and they may run riot

If the boundary gets moved any further notth Oban and Fort William will be in the LL! The problem is having a straight line marking north and south, and also building a pyramid bottom up. Much better to start with local leagues at the bottom and wok up.

To be fair I never read the herald just saw the link on the BBC website down below the Steyn call up. Good to see our rugby journalist are as good as our football ones

Given how poor the DC universe movies have been lately (WW aside) the new universe of TV series seem to be hitting the spot. I thought Titans was excellent, and a few episodes into Doom Patrol im loving it so far. So big name actors and not taking itself too seriously makes it a lot of fun

https://www.heraldscotland.com/sport/rugby/17492974.is-steyn-selection-a-black-mark-for-scottish-rugby-administrators/ The Herald having a dig at the SRU over the Steyn call up and the whole SRU development team. Didn't realise it was quite that bad, but only 12 of the 60 / 70 odd scotland players in and around the squad come from outside the private school / borderers / developed abroad which makes pretty grim reading and just shows how far we still have to go development wise. There isn't much detail but would be interesting to see how this relates to numbers through the various levels of the fosroc academy structures as it looks like nothing much has changed in terms of getting average kids playing rugby (outside the borders)

Jackson and Steyn called up. Steyns only played 2 games for Glasgow and could be on the bench against England!

Kinghorn doesn't look interested in defending. We looked much better with Hastings at FB. I don't what's happened but we really miss Dunbar at centre. Watson was our best player yesterday and he played less than half the match. Forwards offered next to nothing, backs had the odd break but nothing to write home about. Tbf I feared the worst before the game so picking up a losing bonus point is more than I thought we would get

I'm actually being as positive as possible as I'm going to murrayfield tomorrow, lol the fact we are playing the 3rd choice inside and 2nd choice outside centres for Glasgow doesn't fill me with much hope.

The welsh with Tupiric and Navidi will be first to every break down , so any advantage of playing Price over Laidlaw will be nulified as we wont get quick ball. And if we do I dont really see Horne and Grigg being able to unlock the Welsh defence. Our only hope of winning is keeping the ball in the Welsh half, keeping it tight, dont try anything expanisive and hold onto the ball until the 2nd half in the hope that the Welsh panic as they need the win more than we do which opens up space for us to exploit. But I cant really see it happening

Is Johnson injured as he has been one of the few bright spots so far. Its all a bit meh to be fair. Also dont see the point in having Hastings on the bench, would have at least had a centre on the bench so we have an option to change things up a bit

I would assume if any new team was set up they would get a portion of players, internationals included, from both teams, as this would then lower the burden of losing players and mean both current teams could have smaller squads