CHRIS HEWETT THINKING ALLOWED THE way Clive Woodward saw it back in 2003, the International Rugby Board’s new-fangled ranking system was a many-splendored thing. “I […]

Siya Kolisi? What a man. If rugby is built on the stories it tells about its finest practitioners – the fables and legends and grand […]

CHRIS HEWETT THINKING ALLOWED IT MUST be a sobering prospect for the makeweights, travelling to a World Cup with a bunch of players registering close […]

There has been quite the hue and cry down there in All Black country following the latest twist in trans-Tasman affairs. Steve Hansen, head coach […]

CHRIS HEWETT THINKING ALLOWED It has been fiendishly difficult to identify rugby union’s precise place in the constellation of professional sports since it took up […]

CHRIS HEWETT THINKING ALLOWED We’ll know soon enough if Sam Whitelock is finally past it. The venerable All Black lock from Palmerston North, home to […]

CHRIS HEWETT GUEST COLUMNIST DID you hear the one about the trainee fortune teller who gave up because he couldn’t see any future in it? […]

CHRIS HEWETT Eddie Jones is not a man to let the grass grow under his feet, even if his most trenchant critics would happily watch […]

We are still a few days away from Premiership Rugby’s latest “big reveal”: the fixture list for the 2023-24 campaign, featuring all those clubs still […]

CHRIS HEWETT GUEST COLUMNIST ACLEVER man once predicted that progress would eventually turn out to be a circle rather than a straight line. As the […]

Rugby’s optimists – and there are still some of you out there, just as there are people who continue to think it was right to […]

CHRIS HEWETT Interesting rumblings from down Tonga way, where Toutai Kefu, the magnificent Wallaby No.8 who rumbled all the way to a World Cup winner’s […]

CHRIS HEWETT GUEST COLUMNIST “No story lives unless someone wants to listen.” So said J KRowling, who knows a thing or two about storytelling: the […]

If Steve Hansen did a million things right over the long stretch of a storied career as an All Black think-tanker, not even his closest […]

CHRIS HEWETT GUEST COLUMNIST IF Simon Shaw of England was a 20-storey tower block of a lock blessed with penthouse levels of skill and self-restraint, […]

CHRIS HEWETT When a front-line England player tells his national coach that he is unavailable for World Cup duty – not because he has suffered […]

CHRIS HEWETT England’s campaign at the home World Cup in 2015 was a big enough joke in itself, but that didn’t stop the smart-arses rolling […]

Poor old World Rugby, the non-governing governing body, has taken a fair old hammering in recent days and weeks. The problem this time? The same […]

CHRIS HEWETT Precisely none of the owner-investors who finance professional club rugby in England are in obvious need of a tin of beans from the […]

CHRIS HEWETT Top tip for rugby league players looking to make a name for themselves on the far side of the great schism: wait until […]