It’s time for our Monday wrap of who has their name in lights and who is making the headlines for all the wrong reasons after the weekend.
THEY’RE ON FIRE!
Bath B: Johann van Graan rolled the dice at the weekend, figuring it would be best for his double-chasing club to rest up his squad’s front-line players ahead of their Champions Cup semi-final at Bordeaux – their first appearance at that stage of the tournament in 20 years – and send an XV packed with less familiar names to Franklin’s Gardens. It was a B-team selection ploy that could have easily backfired, leaving the coach coping with the fallout of a damaging loss heading into a big European week.
Instead, they will race into their prep with an added pep in their step. Bath ultimately didn’t win at Saints, as a last-gasp Fin Smith penalty proved decisive, but they showed more than enough brilliance in their 41-38 loss to demonstrate that the depth of their squad is seriously impressive. The firework contest was also a victory for the reputation of the PREM amid recent concerns that its level of competitiveness isn’t what it should be. Bath and Saints produce such a feast that tickets for their likely PREM final rematch in June will be in high demand.
Stormin’ Stormers: John Dobson’s side have been a curious watch in 2026. They swaggered into the new year having won 10 games on the bounce in the United Rugby Championship and Investec Champions Cup. But their willing surrender in an inconvenient away assignment at Harlequins, which they lost 61-10, was the start of a run featuring just three wins in 10 matches. This inconsistency cost them in the Cup, as they were eliminated at Toulon in the round of 16, but they had a chance to preserve their URC foundation when hosting fellow title rivals Glasgow last Saturday and they didn’t disappoint.
Their six tries to two, 48-12 win shunted them on top of the log with two regular season matches remaining and the treasured No.1 seeding for the play-offs, which would bring home matches in Cape Town including the final, is back within their grasp, provided they don’t botch their upcoming tour to Ulster and Cardiff. Challenging for the title with a series of home matches would be a fitting tribute to their recently passed team manager Christopher Solomon, whose funeral took place last week.
Noah Caluori: We have sung the praises of the 19-year-old for his tremendous feats of scoring 10 tries for Saracens in two outings versus the pitiful Sale Sharks, but his talent was seen in the much tighter confines of a real arm wrestle at the weekend. The London club have generally been counted out of the PREM Rugby play-off race, but the reality is they are seven points behind the fourth-place Exeter with four rounds of matches remaining and so mathematically are still alive. Saracens‘ latest lease of life was Saturday’s tension-filled 19-15 home win over third-place Leicester, and the Caluori treat it contained was exquisite.
There were 21 minutes gone when Charlie Bracken gave him a pass in the 10-metre line and what followed only added to calls for him to be considered for an England debut in July. On reaching the 22, he sent up a kick that he caught perfectly on the five metre, and the momentum he had on fetching took him to the line to score despite Ollie Hassell-Collins hanging on to him. It was a fantastic moment and while the spoilsports might point to the kid’s defending in the Leicester move 11 minutes later that ended with Hassell-Collins scoring, no one can say his attacking play isn’t deadly and worth a Test call-up.
Super Rugby’s Super Round: What a welcome back this initiative of playing all the games in a single round in the one stadium had. It was in Melbourne where Super Rugby Pacific officials had trialled the concept originally introduced to the Super League in England before Australia’s NRL took it up. With the Rebels tossed on the scrapheap after 2024, the Super Round was shelved in 2025 but it returned with such a bang at the weekend in Christchurch’s lovely new stadium that already several cities are competing to host 2027’s round.
Its popularity was clear across the three days of five matches – three sell-outs at the 25,000-capacity stadium with reputedly 13,000 visitors from out of town spending a conservatively estimated NZ$6 million, according to Ali Adams, the Christchurch New Zealand chief executive. All five matches were enjoyable spectacles as well, including the Blues’ golden point win over the Reds. Safe to say the Super Round concept is back and here to stay.
Roaring Lions: A rugby revival in Johannesburg this season definitely wasn’t on the bingo card. Having reached a hat-trick of successive Super Rugby finals from 2016 to 2018, the Lions‘ adjustment to life in the URC has been bang average, a series of 12th, two 9ths and 11th place finishes in which 34 of 72 matches have been won (47 per cent). Their 2025/26 campaign seemed set to go the same way as they reached the end of January, eliminated from the EPCR Challenge Cup and winning only four of their nine URC games.
However, a line in the sand was drawn after their 52-17 home humbling by the Bulls and Ivan van Rooyen’s side now occupy nosebleed territory on the table, running third – just three points off the top – following a run of six successive wins. There is a caveat, though. All half-dozen victories, including Saturday’s 33-21 takedown of Connacht, have taken place at the altitude-influenced Ellis Park home and they must now go to Ireland – to Leinster and Munster – to seal the deal of a home advantage quarter-final. Their attempt to punch that ticket will make for must-watch matches on May 19 and 26.
John Hodnett: Good news for Munster has been something in very short supply since their mid-October URC win over Leinster, but they finally had something to smile about with their generous 41-14 home win over Ulster, which contained an intriguing contribution from the back-rower. The forward inked his name in Irish rugby folklore with his title-winning try in the 2023 final at the Stormers, but his name is now back up in lights as a deadly hybrid player.
Munster’s six-two bench split wasn’t adequate for them to cope with their backline injuries and after Tom Farrell joined Calvin Nash on the sidelines just three minutes into the second half, it was decided to shunt Hodnett to the wing and bring on back-rower Alex Kendellan. It was an unexpected win-win development for Munster – Kendellan scored a hat-trick of tries but Hodnett also showed he was no slouch out wide, adding two tries as a winger to the two scored as a back-rower in the first half. That’s genuine versatility!
Clermont: We have repeatedly seen in recent years teams that start poorly at Toulouse taking an unmerciful scoreboard hammering. Their home score per-game average this season had been 50 points and seven tries and those figures seemed set for an upward revision on Sunday night when the hosts, having scored through Teddy Thomas after just 42 seconds, raced into a 21-0 lead after just 10 minutes.
Rugby, though, can be a very weird sport at times, and what followed was one such example. Despite losing their Argentine forward Marcos Kremer to a 22nd-minute red card, Clermont somehow managed to staunch the bleeding and a defiant riposte resulted in a remarkable 27-24 win where the lead was secured with a 70th-minute Harry Plummer penalty. This masterclass of staying in the fight against the odds earned Christophe Urios’ team their first win at Toulouse since 2014 and lifted them to fifth on the table with four rounds of matches remaining.
Women’s Six Nations: England and France both took their latest steps towards their touted Super Sunday title decider on May 17 in Bordeaux. The Red Roses winning at the weekend was nothing new – they are unbeaten in the Six Nations since 2018 and have won 36 consecutive matches since their 2022 World Cup final loss in New Zealand – but the important thing is the following they have grown on the back of last year’s World Cup success is showing no sign of boredom with winning and a sell-out attendance of just under 27,000 on Bristol was their latest checkpoint.
The great thing for the Six Nations is that the French are living up to their side of the equation, and their 26-7 win over a plucky Irish side in a very watchable contest will fuel their belief that they can cause the English problems in three weeks. A high bar, though, was set in Clermont for the fans who will be in attendance in Bordeaux. Stade Marcel-Michelin is a cathedral of rugby and the atmosphere generated last Saturday night was electric.
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COLD AS ICE!
Harlequins: The end to a wretched campaign can’t come quickly enough for the London club, whose run of results has been indefensible. One spot off the bottom of the PREM isn’t where a team blessed with the attacking talent of Marcus Smith should be. They are still capable of shifting the ball quickly and scoring super tries – check out some of the scores that had them 33-24 up at home to Sale after 57 minutes.
However, their lack of unity in defence was damning and they conspired to turn Saturday’s nine-point lead into a 19-point, 52-33 loss. Despite enduring a similarly horrible season, the late Sale surge was clinical. They only relied on pick-and-jam or one-out runners, but the tactic choked the life out of Quins in what was their 11th defeat in 14 PREM outings. Robbie Deans will have his hands full coming up with a blueprint to stop the rot for next season.
Drua blunder: Mistakes happen when you are a team searching for the solution to maddening week-to-week inconsistencies, but the self-inflicted calamity the Fijian franchise suffered just over four minutes from the interval in their high-profile 42-22 loss to the Super Rugby Pacific champions Chiefs was the sort of panic that shouldn’t happen any player at professional level. With the Chiefs having had the final touch from Leroy Carter before the ball bounced into the in-goal area in Christchurch, all Drua full-back Ilaisa Droasese had to do was ground the ball.
Play would have stopped, with his team having a drop-out and still trailing by just four points. Instead, he inexplicably decided to play on, running into trouble and making a desperately poor grubber kick that didn’t clear the in-goal area. That left Jared Proffit diving on the ball to score and by the time the Drua managed to get off the pitch for the break, they had fallen 18 points in arrears as they didn’t recover quickly enough from Droasese’s bizarre error.
Bungling Leinster: Losing at lowly Benetton wasn’t what Leo Cullen had scripted for his Irish side. With struggling Munster having pummelled the Italians the previous weekend, the plan was for an XV containing several of their stars to travel out and do likewise to bolster their chances of a top-two URC finish and keep the mood all sweetness and light heading into next weekend’s Champions Cup semi-final at home to Toulon.
Instead, they were unceremoniously mugged. A Jamison Gibson-Park try early in the second half put them 19-5 clear and another from Ciaran Frawley had them 26-19 to the good with 14 minutes remaining, but they gave up a converted maul try and then a clock-in-the-red penalty when carrying in their own half to dramatically lose by three points. Rubbing salt into this first defeat in Italy since 2010 was Tadhg Furlong’s injury, which had left him in doubt to face Toulon.
Not so chief Exeter: It was only last week in this very column when we heaped praise on Rob Baxter for the turnaround he had managed at the English club, turning a drifting ninth-place outfit into play-off challengers who still have a European sideline in the EPCR Challenge Cup. They had played well at home to Northampton and didn’t deserve to be beaten by a dramatic final play Fin Smith try, but the ‘goodness’ of that effort was wasted by an unacceptable follow-up display at Gloucester.
George Skivington’s side are currently where Exeter were 12 months ago, wasting away near the bottom of the PREM amid speculation about whether the coach still has what it takes to make his team still tick. However, they finally turned up on Sunday and gave the Chiefs a bloody nose that has imperilled their play-off hopes. The 34-31 loss has left the fifth place Bristol just one point below them with four matches to go.
Ulster: Richie Murphy’s team is another to have recently featured in the top end of this column, earning kudos for the bounce that had them high up the URC table and suggesting they had a shot at the title in them. Now, though, the outlook is far less certain. So badly has the Irish side been hit with injuries that the coach literally adopted the weekend kid’s round theme in the league.
Instead of sticking with off-field initiatives surrounding the clubs, Murphy sent out a whole pile of youngsters at Munster and while they can feel pride in their first half showing, the 41-14 result was wounding. The coach can’t be faulted for prioritising next weekend’s Challenge Cup semi-final at home to Exeter; winning through to a final in Bilbao would be a fantastic experience for his developing team. However, their URC top eight place is now in jeopardy with two rounds of games remaining and Irish rivals Connacht in ninth place keen on making up the three-point gap.
Marco Massotti: The Sharks boss is an owner never shy of publicly stirring things up and his April 23 tweet certainly did that, further fuelling the fire that was lit with his team losing at the Ospreys. There had already been plenty of commentary about the Luke Morgan collision with Ethan Hooker after the South African winger scored and wound up with a dislocated shoulder, but there was a separate incident that Massotti wasn’t willing to let go – the injuries to home team looseheads Gareth Thomas and Garyn Phillips which led to uncontested scrums for the final quarter.
He tweeted: “I walked into the Bridgend stadium last Saturday and felt the spirit of rugby with so many Welsh legends plastered on the walls – only to leave with the spirit of Maradona’s ‘Hand of God’ following the uncontested scrums. The integrity of our URC league demands better. Is anyone involved willing to submit to a lie detector test? I am sure our fans will offer a reward to anyone who comes forward with information.” It was an accusation of cheating that, of course, provoked a huge response.
WRU: The owners of the Ospreys were supposed to have their takeover of Cardiff approved last week ahead of Friday’s URC meeting between clubs, but nothing is ever straightforward in Welsh rugby and last January’s decision by the WRU to pick Y11 as its preferred bidder to buy out the capital club now seems to have been a total waste of time as the proposed deal has collapsed. The more the WRU press ahead with its plan to overhaul its business, the more it seems to take two or more steps backwards in everything it does. How much bad PR can it sustain?