COLIN BOAG

It’s my favourite weekend of the whole rugby season: the quarter-finals of the European cups never disappoint, and the 2017 version was no exception. The Six Nations gets hyped as the pinnacle, but the passion and partisanship of the best that the Aviva Premiership, Top 14 and Pro 12 can offer, swings it for me. There were plenty of talking points.
The first thing has to be the resurgence of Munster and Leinster. When the old, iniquitous, Heineken Cup rules were dumped, many saw this as the triumph of the big budgets, and felt that the Irish provinces would no longer be a...