Friday night rugby, with France vs Argentina to kick off things. Then Sat is Ire vs Fiji, Wal vs SA, and Ita vs NZ. Sun is Sco vs Aus, and Eng vs Japan
Been a great 4 weeks, lets hope for some great matches again! Game of the weekend looks to be Scotland vs Australia, and guess who’s going?
We used to do it much more frequently. Scotland often play lower tiered nations with the full team, but with loads rested, and the A only coming out when playing the same week. We have the players, nearly 100 professional in Scotland alone. Money and fixtures I suspect more. The 6n has given up on A matches, with the u20 taking its place essentially. And traveling to far flung places means cash, and an invite to a tier 1 with some mid week team to play. Scotland haven’t done a summer tour to NZ since like the 90s. SA last invited us and Italy together. And Australia didn’t put up a midweek team for us :(
So a few factors, but great to see them last night
Its definitely expensive, maybe given how close that match was sending the A team around Europe which is a lot cheaper would be a good ploy? Good for those lower tier nations getting experience playing better teams and good for the A players to get proper touring experience together as well, even if its on busses & trains instead of planes ;)
Its a hell of a lot easier to do that than NZ bringing ours all the way up north anyway! I guess we only get away with that as it has the benefit of increasing the ABs touring player pool but Razor’s getting away with murder on the squad sizes and given NZRs finances its hard to see how we can sustain the number of players & staff on tour that he wants. For the 2026 SA tour he’s already talked about an All Blacks squad 60+ which is probably only viable because SA is likely not super expensive once you manage to get over there.
For sure. Scotland A vs Georgia, Portugal, Spain, Belgium, NL and Germany would be great to see from my perspective. Even if we invite them over, what’s not to love? They are talking about a hotel next to Murrayfield, why not host some visitors in that? The second tier in Europe needs more games anyway, A teams from all the 6n should be stepping up imo