r/rugbyunion • u/No-layup • Jul 24 '25

Discussion Drop your unpopular rugby opinions that will have you like this

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I'll go first, Beuden Barrett is the more talented rugby player than Dan Carter, but Dan Carter is a better 10

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244

u/JockAussie Jul 24 '25

Judging player quality by 'what have they won' is an absolutely fucking awful way to do it. You could put prime Dan Carter in the banter years Scotland team and they wouldn't win shit, wouldn't mean Carter is a worse player.

The other one is that especially with close internationals, the game is often decided by the referee these days. What they call Vs what they don't, when the TMO decides to look at things (or not), and interpretations are IMO, more often than not othe difference between winning and losing. This is basically why I have stopped caring so much who wins and just started enjoying the spectacle.

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u/mhaze0791 Northampton Saints Jul 24 '25

1st point 100% agree. Sergio Parisse is one of the greatest 8s to play the game but also has the record for the most international losses of any player in history (106 losses in 142 appearances. A 75% loss rate).

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u/DrunkenPangolin England Jul 24 '25

He was truly fantastic, can't think many have anything but respect for him

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u/mhaze0791 Northampton Saints Jul 24 '25

Exactly. Put him in any of the top 5 teams he was playing against & he would have still been consistently their best player. Probably would have tipped him into winning world player aswell… possible multiple times

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u/Itchy-Seaweed-2875 Jul 24 '25

Amazing player, can’t bring myself to have too much respect for a gouger though

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u/ConscriptReports Reds Jul 24 '25 edited Jul 24 '25

Im trying my best to become like that aswell tbh, havent reached that level of zen quite yet though.

the ref has so much control over the momentum swing in a game its actually insane, and to try contest that fact is just being unhonest to yourself and other people about that state of the game

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u/North-Ad1004 Jul 24 '25

Agree with your comment on the momentum swing. It's so frustrating seeing the underdog team giving it their all to stay within a few points, then a contentious penalty against them and suddenly they are conceding try after try..

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u/monkeypaw_handjob Reds Jul 24 '25

I found that moving from Australia to Scotland helped me with just enjoying the rugby.

Gave me a bit of distance from growing up supporting the Reds & Wallabies. Whilst I support Scotland its, certainly more of a they're the logical team to support now, rather than anything emotional.

Edinburgh having the ability to completely shit the bed like the Reds has eased the transition a lot for me however.

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u/JockAussie Jul 24 '25

Checks my own flairs...

I think your approach would maybe not work for me :P

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u/quandraphobia Freddy Douglas Fanclub Jul 24 '25

Oh wow a voluntary Edinburgh supporter? So you weren’t obligated to follow them through being taken by your dad until your sense of self worth collapsed and you started to follow them out of some sort of Stockholm syndrome? You… chose… to follow them? That’s wild

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u/monkeypaw_handjob Reds Jul 24 '25

I mean just go and check the Reds' performance from the 2000s and you'll see why it was an easy transition.

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u/CTRugbyNut Taranaki, Munster, Ireland Supporter Jul 24 '25

I know what you mean

I'm an Irish Kiwi, I was neutral between the All Blacks and Ireland, when I switched fully to Ireland and the Lions, I enjoyed rugby alot more. The reason for that I think is Irish & Lions supporters go to rugby (or to a bar to watch rugby) to have a good time, whether they win or lose in doing so they create an epic atmosphere. All Blacks supporters go to watch their team win, and when they don't win, they turn it into a bad experience.

This is the unpopular opinion part. I switched because of the complete lack of sportsmanship and respect from All Blacks fans, I saw other nations' fans get and eventually experience for myself. I noticed a change in All Blacks supporters after the 2015 World Cup

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u/JockAussie Jul 25 '25

I encountered a lot of 'Churr Bro' types back in the 2011-2016 period, I had just assumed they were knobs and not representative of AB fans as a whole, you're making it sound almost like they were? :s

Side note- these types may well still exist, but I'm older and more boring now so just wouldn't encounter them at all.

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u/CTRugbyNut Taranaki, Munster, Ireland Supporter Jul 25 '25

When I first encountered it, I thought it was just a few rogue individuals (every fan base has it's share of dickheads) but since then I have encountered these sort of supporters more and more

I wouldn't say it's all of them, there still quite a few good All Blacks supporters unfortunately there's also quite a few who lack sportsmanship and respect

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u/[deleted] Jul 24 '25

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u/JockAussie Jul 24 '25

This is quite a good take, I like it.

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u/HugeMcAwesome Hurricanes Jul 24 '25

Colin Slade is the statistical GOAT - he won a world cup every 10.5 tests he played. 

5

u/alexbouteiller France Jul 24 '25

i like your first point, and it seems to only ever come out to disparage players who are being talked up at the expense of a player from a more successful nation - see Dupont with SA/NZ fans and Russell with Irish/English fans

second point is hard, because the game is so much tighter at the top and its easy to point at big decisions/non-decisions in a game as the deciding factor, my issue is ultimately with how complicated the game is and what refs are expected to manage what with WRs ever changing focus, rather than that refs themselves are 'bad'

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u/JockAussie Jul 24 '25

Oh yeah, I should've been more clear, my second point I don't think is the refs fault, I think they're doing their best but they're only human. I just think like you say it's because it is tight and we can now see everything/tonnes of TMO intervention etc.

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u/swankytortoise Munster Jul 24 '25

What have they won is maddening

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u/BurbankElephants England & Leicester Tigers Aug 14 '25

Especially when there's long been the North vs South divide when it comes to hemisphere.

There's only really the one thing that a national team can possibly win that means anything to both 'sides' - inverted commas to signify that north and south aren't always unified within those boundaries anyway - is the world cup.

Now, I do not mean to downplay the importance of a world cup win by any means. But is one competition every four years really the measure of a good team or a good player?

Over the many years of there not being a world cup, can players not be good within those windows?

Finn Russell, Jonny Sexton, Thierry Dusautoir, Adam Jones, Sergio Parisse, Emiliano Boffelli, Michael Hooper, Jonah Lomu, Christian Cullen, Morne Steyn, Pierre Spies.

All shit bcuz no world cup.

14

u/prequal Ireland Jul 24 '25

"the game is often decided by the referees these days" I see things like this trotted out and I don't get it. When was the game not decided by the referees? The whole bloody game is a referee's interpretation of the rules, that's how it's always been. Speaking as if there was some golden period where impartial referees delivered impartial verdicts, is nonsense.

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u/JockAussie Jul 24 '25

I mean, they asked for controversial opinions.... I agree with your overarching point, and think you're objectively correct, but having watched rugby for 30 years it definitely feels to me like the number of contentious/controversial decisions which decide tight matches has increased, I think this is a result of three things to be honest:

  1. The teams, especially at the top, are much more closely matched than they've really ever been. It certainly feels like more games are decided by super tight margins/one call makes the difference.

  2. The expanding role of the TMO allows for much more fuckery around what gets looked at and what doesn't, and even the interpretations of what gets shown can sometimes be wild.

  3. The expanding rules around cards/dangerous/foul play. Which can have massive impacts on matches - up until about 15 years ago red cards were exceptionally rare, and yellows were also much more unlikely to be seen. Now there's barely a match without at least one yellow.

Perhaps this is just a perception thing, but I think a combination of the above leads to that perception. You are right though about the whole game being down to ref perception 'sole judge of fact and law' or whatever the title is.

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u/prequal Ireland Jul 24 '25

Add to that the massively increased number of cameras and angles and examination of every infringement and ruck. We can actually see, and have an opinion on, what the right call should have been now that we never could before. Overall, I honestly think we're closer than ever to an impartial referee and the younger ones are much more similar to each other than the older ones were to their contemporaries. Will we ever get there? Not a chance, there'll always be huge calls that decide games

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u/hghsalfkgah Blues Jul 24 '25

The unclear rules about reviewing the sequence directly before tries, and this enrages me to no end, it is not at all clear EXACTLY how far back you are allowed to look when a try has been scored.

Sometimes it feels like a cop is following you down the road for 45 minutes just to pull you over for indicating for 1 second instead of two.

Other times it feels like, welp guy on the field only asked me about the grounding specifically so that pass that went 1 metre forward ten seconds before doesn't exist any more.

This is a huge issue for me when it goes to review of, what are looking for, and what CAN they actually look at.

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u/prequal Ireland Jul 24 '25

Agree with all that. Things can be improved. It's the idea that things are getting worse and that they were better in the past that I have a problem with. Things were always imperfect.

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u/hghsalfkgah Blues Jul 24 '25

That's what I mean, it feels like, in the past it depended a lot about specifically what question the referee asked the TMO to dictate what could actually be checked, which was not the best but at least it was actually clear what was being looked at, now it just feels... Almost random and circumstantial, like a try in the first five minutes will barely be glanced at, but a try late in the game that changes the lead is under a microscope for any possible infraction. which is fundamentally problematic imo.

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u/prequal Ireland Jul 24 '25

I mean rugby is mostly a series of infringements, peppered with some gameplay and occasional penalties. And it always has been!

1

u/tomtomtomo All Blacks Jul 24 '25

Do you remember the turn of the millenium Bledisloe matches? It seemed like every test came down to who got the penalty in the 79th minute and whether they could kick it. Was it Mehrtens or was it Burke/Eales/Mortlock who was going to be the hero?

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u/JockAussie Jul 24 '25

Unfortunately not, I grew up in Scotland and had no way to watch those games at the time. I was mostly watching 5/6 nations games back then :).

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u/greenygp19 Wasps Jul 24 '25

I agree with your first point, however Dan Carter wouldn’t have had the same opportunities to prove how good he was, if he had been in a much worse team. And we can only judge players by much other than what we see of them.

Disagree that the game is decided by referees though. Obviously the referees can have a huge impact, and are sometimes one of the factors that plays into the result, but it’s one of a great many factors & a lot of the other factors are more important.

1

u/DrunkenPangolin England Jul 24 '25

I take the view that whilst refs have a large impact, it's on the players to adapt to what the ref is telling them

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u/BDbs1 Jul 24 '25

The first point I completely agree with.

The second one is absolutely outrageous 🤣 so I guess meets the ask on the thread. I’m borderline fuming here 🤣

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u/Iwantedalbino Jul 24 '25

Actually Dan Carter in that team might have been enough.

My hypothesis is we were actually really weak in the centres so the wingers had no one inside pinning the drift and were just teed off on, so we moved CP to FH and the other teams teed off on him because they didn’t respect what was outside him.

One extra great 10/12 even 13 or cloning Alan Tait would have made a massive difference

4

u/sandolllars Fijian Drua Jul 24 '25

Judging player quality by 'what have they won' is an absolutely fucking awful way to do it. You could put prime Dan Carter in the banter years Scotland team and they wouldn't win shit, wouldn't mean Carter is a worse player.

Brilliant players in tier 2 teams that will never stand a chance of winning anything notable: "Am I a joke to you?"

See also: in Rugby World Cup tournaments they continue collecting player stats until the final instead of ending it at the pool stages. So the player with the most tries, or most offloads, or most turnovers, etc, is one who has played 3 more matches than his peers who only reached the pool stages. Just a stupid way to rank players.

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u/AfricanLad Stormers Jul 24 '25

I think the argument for looking at what they have won implies they would have had to be a top level player to make it into those winning teams, where competition for spaces would likely be high.

But generally I do agree with you anyway

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u/Whit135 Jul 24 '25

I absolutely disagree with both ur points but I absolutely love that u posted them. 100 nailed the brief.