Matt Williams

1 month ago | irishtimes.com | Matt Williams

Arthur Schopenhauer was a 19th-century Germain philosopher born in 1788, 35 years before a naughty boy named Billy Ellis picked up the ball during a game of soccer and sprinted away into rugby mythology. While Schopenhauer was obsessed with topics such as metaphysics, morality and eternal justice – how to create an overlap on the blindside of a ruck was not high on his topics of interest. So when he wrote, “Talent hits a target no one else can hit.

2 months ago | irishtimes.com | Matt Williams

An apocryphal story in coaching circles tells the tale of a new head coach who walks into his office on day one and finds three sealed envelopes on his desk. Written by the outgoing coach who was just sacked for a series of poor results, the first envelope was labelled “Open after losing five games”. In deep trouble with playing systems that were not effective, the new coach loses five in quick succession. So he opened the first letter. It contained four words.

2 months ago | irishtimes.com | Matt Williams

During the amateur era, when the Championship was the Five Nations, each team consisted of only eight forwards and seven backs, who competed for the entire 80 minutes. Cuts, dislocated fingers and broken noses were mostly ignored as a matter of principle. Players would only leave the field if they suffered a serious injury. It was the foundation of the joke that soccer is 90 minutes pretending that you are injured, while rugby is 80 minutes pretending that you are not.

2 months ago | irishtimes.com | Matt Williams

The second half of Ireland’s opening match of the Six Nations provided a window into the declining standards in the English Premiership. As every national team is the product of the system that sits below it, in the early days of the 21st century, when the Leicester side captained by Martin Johnson reigned supreme, England were world champions. In 2016, 2017 and 2020, the same years that Saracens dominated European rugby, England won the Six Nations title.

2 months ago | irishtimes.com | Matt Williams

If you are brave enough to cast your mind back to round one of the 2019 Six Nations, when an Eddie Jones-coached English team smacked Ireland at the Aviva, you may get a few shivers trembling along your spinal column. It was a dark day for Irish rugby as an overconfident Ireland, with Robbie Henshaw ridiculously selected at fullback, were belted by an English team whose defensive system and physical confrontation at the tackle bashed Joe Schmidt’s team into submission.