It's a bit of an ugly game this year, all round. The open, free-flowing, try-for-try game is gone. The tackle contest is now intense. It's absolutely gripping football but it's a different style of play. |
It's an enormously tough game in the forwards. Week in week out, the body contact, the collisions are enormous, so to think you can be a starting player week in week out, potentially over 15 Super 14 games and a dozen Tests, it's an unrealistic expectation. |
It's an open market. If you want to express an interest (in a player) then you express interest. |
It's certainly great to have one of the marquee players in world rugby signing with us for such a period of time, so we're particularly excited. |
It's great to go to the week off having a good win against a New Zealand side. |
Julian is a fantastic young player with a long future as a professional rugby player, hopefully, at the Brumbies. |
Maybe they can get a little bit ill-disciplined so we'll try and play down their end of the park. |
No, I don't think we'll lose players because he's gone there. I think we might lose other players because other teams are able to get exorbitant amounts of money for them. [But] it has to dry up somewhere, and I can't believe that corporate support for non-big-name players will be anywhere near that magnitude. |
Our only focus is on preparing our game, so we're not doing things to shut down Rogers or shut down somebody else. |
The bonus point was there for the taking but we just didn't take it. We just got tired and didn't play particularly smart. |
The medical staff are quite pleased with both Matt and Adam's progress and if they are available for selection then obviously that gives us a nice boost. |
The players are fresher both physically and mentally, but it's also given us an opportunity to do a bit of extra work on our conditioning and strength this week. |
There will be no easy road there and we don't have any expectation it will be. |
They haven't started in a game as the inside backs, but they did a lot of training there over the summer. |
They've got some specific strategies defensively and they work for 80 minutes, so there is certainly no easy way through them. |