By Alan Dymock IT’S NOT long until the Aviva Premiership season starts and we’ve only just stopped nursing our British and Irish Lions hangovers. However, with the start of the…

By Alan Dymock AS INEVITABLE as the front of the newspapers showing flaxen-haired teenage girls jumping for joy on school-results day, the big guns have made almost no changes for…

By Gavin Mortimer IF THERE’S one man who knows how Arsene Wenger is feeling this week it’s Toulouse coach Guy Noves. Like the Arsenal manager, Noves ended Saturday afternoon with…

By Alan Dymock AS RUGBY becomes more competitive, more sponsor-driven, more about the trophies than the humans involved, there is a chance that some folk could get chewed up and…

By Alan Dymock FRANCE IS a place of cruel and lucrative circumstance, we are told. A place where teams allegedly have to balance slugging it out like dribbling Neanderthals all…

By Alan Dymock “CAN YOU pick a definitive list of rugby’s hard men?” is one of those nice innocuous questions – the kind that comes up in the pub, once…