GOOD DAY
To be an Australian prop, basking in the glow of unheard of praise after a meeting with England but James Slipper is expecting even greater demands to be made of him and his front-row colleagues by specialist coach Mario Ledesma, the former Argentina captain.
“Mario has a philosophy of how he wants the scrum, and it is about training on that, challenging each player to become better. It pushes the overall performance when everyone is at it,” he said.
“We've been worked hard on the scrum, but we have to keep improving as it's such an important part of the game now. It was good, but there is hard training to come still. "
BAD DAY
For solidarity among the sporting men in black as New Zealand settled into Newcastle ahead of next weekend’s big double-header when they will play Tonga the evening before Scotland seek to clinch their place in the quarter-finals against Samoa at St James’ Park.
Aaron Smith, the All Black scrum-half, seemed to open the door to bringing in a bit of extra local support from ‘The Toon Army’ when he expressed his enthusiasm about the venue.
"We're really excited about playing at Newcastle,” he said.
“We get to play in some amazing stadiums over here each week and the boys are pretty excited about that. It will be cool to play at a pretty famous soccer ground."
The follow-up was, then, inevitable as he was asked whether he followed Newcastle, but in spite of showing that he was not bluffing by identifying their hosts’ all-time favourite son in a fellow No.9, he admitted that his football allegiance is to the wrong United.
"I liked them when Alan Shearer was there but I'm actually a pretty big Manchester United fan, sorry bro," he said.
WHAT’S ON TODAY?
It really has been a case of Monday blues for those who like there to be a daily dose of action during the pool stages of major competitions, or perhaps the organisers have merely factored in a bit of time for their own recovery and that of supporters, from the excesses of a sport which is as much about the social gathering as it is about the competition.
It’s a quietish start to the week all round with final training and team announcements for a string of Tuesday and Wednesday matches that are largely about sorting out the lower positions in the various pools, albeit the Springboks Wednesday meeting with the USA will tell us whether Scotland have any chance of topping Pool B.
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