Ospreys

[laughs]

"I'm just gonna say it, you know, whatever I'm thinking." Um, look, am I gonna go watch Ospreys play, uh, Zebre, uh, in next year's URC? No, I'm not.

Who are you watching?

I'm watching the Hurricanes play the Chiefs.

Meanwhile, other positions such as second row and fly-half have been left perilously thin.

And then there's the Ospreys.

This off season, the Ospreys have been making headlines by signing several experienced players from Australia.

This approach represents a totally new recruitment strategy for the club.

Previously, they have prioritized younger Welsh talents.

However, this season having let 10 players aged 27 or younger go, seven of whom were Welsh qualified, the Ospreys have chosen to replace them with six players aged 27 or over, of whom just one is Welsh qualified.

How about another case study? This time, let's turn to women's rugby and talk about squad management in the PWR.

So far, we have found a number of examples across multiple competitions showing that a high volume of external player recruitment does not correlate with on-field success.

I think Bridgend, again, have had a good sort of transfer window, have signed solidly.

Both have had a few allocated Ospreys, although I don't think it fully tells the picture in terms of there's a few players missing, both senior players and maybe...

A few more junior players aren't on the full list that was announced earlier today.

Yeah, I think there's two sides here that are going to play some good rugby this season.

But yeah, I think the big thing for Swansea is not for this fixture, but for the season, is St Helens is going to be sort of, hopefully for them, starting to get into a bit of shape.

Because I do think that they missed that a bit last year.

And if they can make that a bit of a fortress and maybe get a bit of a crowd going off the back of the Ospreys, I think all of that will tie in.

But I'm really interested with this fixture because Swansea-Ebbervale has been some quite good fixtures.

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Welcome to Ospreys Eerie.

I'm here today joined with the boys, shall we say.

Josh is back, Dav is here, Nick is here as well.

We're here to talk rugby, we're here to talk kits, community

results

and looking at the wider Ospreys squad as well during this episode.

So how are we all doing? Good, thanks.

So, you know, we're taking this as a win.

We'll get into opinions on preseason pictures later on, but Zach, do you just want to quickly talk about how Ospreys did against that there Coventry? I mean,

we sort of battered them up front in a very Ospreys fashion where we didn't look like we could catch a ball and then just sort of walked over them in the second half consistently.

Yeah.

it was all in all it looked like a preseason game and it looked like a lot of these boys are just getting back into the rhythm of things lines not being run right you know it's not i wouldn't read too much into it i mean like i don't know if i knew boys school tries tommy rogers got a try on his first game they might kick god try six minutes into his first game which is very nice to see uh keelan giles scored a nice try where he stepped about eight players before finishing in the corner.

The snarkiest comments get brought to the group chat and we get to have a laugh and we might even respond to you.

Otherwise, if you want something a little bit more specific, we do have the individual regional pods.

So we've got the Sussmans and Sussbets for your Scarlets supporting things, Ospreys Eerie, Dragon's Lair and Card Essentials.