Kiwis make our game look utterly pedestrian

The Sale coach and former hooker Steve Diamond, honorary life member of the Front Row Union, thinks modern-day scrums are boring. He’s not wrong. But why single out the set-piece for condemnation? Judging by last weekend’s Premiership relaunch, the English game as a whole is about as compelling as a Theresa May conference speech shorn of the coughing fits, the stage invasions and the collapsible backdrops.

- CHRIS HEWETT

The best talent in New Zealand, playing in what may have been the best domestic tournament ever staged, succeeded in sharpening our senses. By comparison, the English version is rugby on decaf: a lower-grade brand with all the stimulants removed.

A sweeping generalisation wholly devoid of fairness? The rugby writer’s equivalent of an Ofqual algorithm? Maybe, especially as Wasps were so eye-catching in beating a much-fancied Northampton side at Franklin’s Gardens.

But we also had to suffer Quins-Sale and Bristol-Saracens, contests that couldn’t have had less speed and movement about them if they’d been played on surfaces of wet cement, topped off with a protective layer of Pritt Stick.

Yes, there was plenty of dodgy weather around. But it rains in All Black land too. A lot.

And anyway, the August downpour did nothing to limit the ambition of Wasps, who produced a style of rugby – hard at the breakdown, aggressive in the tackle, rich in attacking imagination – that might almost have passed muster in Christchurch or Wellington.

Across the ultra-competitive Super Rugby Aotearoa competition, there was not a single match as one-sided as Worcester-Gloucester or Bath-London Irish. Even TJ Perenara, the inexhaustible Hurricanes scrum-half and energiser-in-chief, sounded weary when he confessed: