'Tuipulotu shows what Glasgow have been missing'
The Sione Tuipulotu effect is real.The Warriors have been disappointing of late, struggling to reach the levels of expectation, but Tuipulotu showed his worth on his return from a four-month injury absence.In his 40 minutes on the field against Leinster in Dublin he proved why not only he is integral to Glasgow and Scotland but will be a key piece in the British and Irish Lions team this summer.His individual class created one of the few moments of the first half Glasgow had. He offers so much, causes confusion for opponents, brings confidence to his team-mates and direction in attack.Both sides of course had already clinched a top-four spot but it felt like they were there to leave a mark.While the result did not go much-changed Warriors' way, the manner of defeat is weirdly one to be confident about. Seb Stephen, 19, at hooker put in a tremendous shift and is definitely one to be excited about for the future.A two-week break may now allow some players to return from injury before the home knockout game against the Stormers.The South African side finished fifth and were beaten on their own patch earlier in the season when Tuipulotu ran the show.
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Telegraph
10 minutes ago
- Telegraph
Where Premiership champions Bath rank in our top 10 title winners
The following list covers the period since the play-off system was introduced to decide the English top flight in 2002-03. It takes into consideration how teams fared in the regular season and Europe, their performance in the final and whether they backed up their title in the ensuing campaigns. Nevertheless, this is still a highly unscientific exercise, prone to my own biases and unreliable memory. 10. Northampton, 2024 Would have been ranked higher but for a slightly underwhelming performance in the final in which Beno Obano's red card swung the tide in Saints' favour and a disappointing follow-up league season in which they finished eighth, albeit slightly counterbalanced by a run to the Champions Cup final. However, Saints' triumph stands out both for the fact they had one of lowest wage bills in the Premiership and engineered a complete stylistic revolution that extended across the league and influenced how England approach their rugby. Also a brilliant sign-off to possibly my favourite English player of the modern era in Courtney Lawes. Key player: Courtney Lawes Underrated player: Fraser Dingwall Favourite player: Courtney Lawes 9. Exeter, 2017 Only Leicester City's 2015 Premier League title surpasses the Chiefs' rise to the top of the English rugby pyramid in terms of fairy-tale value in English sport. This was an epic final against a Wasps side that might just have featured the most loaded backline of all time – Wille Le Roux, Christian Wade, Elliot Daly, Jimmy Gopperth, Josh Bassett, Danny Cipriani and Dan Robson. Gareth Steenson kicked a penalty to take it to extra time and then another one three minutes from the end. Given that they lost three other finals to Saracens, it also featured a cathartic semi-final defeat of their great rivals, featuring the most ballsy kick to a corner I have ever seen live from Henry Slade. Incredible finish to the Exeter and Saracens game! What balls from Slade! The Chiefs are in the final! — RugbyLAD 🏉 (@RugbyLAD7) May 20, 2017 Key player: Don Armand Underrated player: Phil Dollman Favourite player: Thomas Waldron 8. Sale, 2006 A personal favourite team of mine, from a back row of Magnus Lund, Jason White and Sébastien Chabal – yes please – to the canny half-back duo of Richard Wigglesworth and Charlie Hodgson and a fabulously balanced back three of Jason Robinson, Mark Cueto and Oriol Ripol. Philippe Saint-André's side were up against an excellent Leicester team – see next entry – but mastered the rainy conditions and the occasion superbly. Stuart Barnes's commentary of 'drop goal, it has to be three points' only for Hodgson to pull off a sensational dummy for Ripol to score just before half-time is also rooted in my head. There are some classic moments in this 📼 Here's a throwback to 2006, when @SaleSharksRugby beat @LeicesterTigers 45-20 to become champions of England for the first time 😮💨 #GallagherPrem — Rugby on TNT Sports (@rugbyontnt) June 11, 2025 Key player: Charlie Hodgson Underrated player: Oriol Ripol Favourite player: Ignacio Fernández Lobbe 7. Leicester, 2007 Sometimes you just need to forget everything else and focus on the performance and this amounted to the most brutal beat-down ever witnessed in a Premiership final. Gloucester arrived at Twickenham as the darlings of the league, playing a dazzling brand of rugby. A bit like the famous fight scene in Game of Thrones between the Viper and the Mountain, for all Gloucester's razzle-dazzle Leicester just focused on crushing the Cherry & Whites' skull with a display of fearsome power. The image of various Gloucester backs being sent into a different postcode by the rampaging Alesana Tuilagi and the late great Seru Rabeni remains fixed in my mind. Geordan Murphy and Alesana Tuilagi let rip for @LeicesterTigers v Gloucester in the 2007 Premiership final. — Leicester Tigers History (@HistoryTigers) November 24, 2023 Key player: Alesana Tuilagi Underrated player: Leo Cullen Favourite player: Seru Rabeni 6. Bath, 2025 Recency bias? What recency bias? I strongly suspect, however, that this Bath side, which is going to be even stronger next season with the additions of Santi Carreras, Henry Arundell and Chris Harris, might end up climbing this list. They dominated the regular season and lost only two matches with their full-strength side, as well as winning the Challenge Cup and Premiership Cup. For Johann van Graan's team to take their place among the great teams, the next challenge will be to conquer the Champions Cup. Key player: Finn Russell Underrated player: Quinn Roux Favourite player: Ted Hill 5. Exeter, 2020 The high point of the Exeter project as Rob Baxter's side completed a Premiership and Champions Cup double. Such a shame that Covid restrictions prevented more people from witnessing the culmination of Exeter's remarkable rise. Their strength lay in blending a home-grown core of Henry Slade, Luke Cowan-Dickie and Jack Nowell with canny recruits such as Dave Ewers and Jacques Vermeulen. Everything about Exeter was about industry and work-rate. Their close-range pick-and-go tactics might not have always been the prettiest, but they were pretty much impossible to defend until the laws changed. Key player: Henry Slade Underrated player: Sam Skinner Favourite player: Olly Woodburn 4. Leicester, 2009-10 Definitely not the same calibre of Leicester side who dominated the Premiership before the introduction of the play-off system, but there is still something highly impressive about back-to-back titles after finishing the regular season top of the table twice. Both finals, however, were nail-biters, first overcoming London Irish 10-9 and then downing Saracens 33-27. In the tradition of all great Tigers teams, the side's great strength lay up front in the form of Marcos Ayerza, the underrated George Chuter, the monstrous Julian White and an emerging youngster in Dan Cole. Tom Croft was right in his pomp and Geordan Murphy might still be the classiest full-back to ever grace the Premiership. Key player: Marcos Ayerza Underrated player: George Chuter Favourite player: Tom Croft 3. Saracens, 2018-19 On paper, this Saracens side might feel slightly stronger than their predecessors in second place, thanks to the signings of Will Skelton, Liam Williams and Sean Maitland. Both won back-to-back titles and a European Cup. But in my eyes, getting over the line first time around after a couple of agonising play-off experiences was the greater achievement. Of course, everything would come crashing down to earth as the salary-cap malpractice was exposed, resulting in the club's relegation to the Championship. Key player: Maro Itoje Underrated player: Jackson Wray Favourite player: Alex Goode 2. Saracens, 2015-16 The start of a dynasty, albeit one that would come to be severely tainted by the salary-cap scandal. This should not diminish the scale of the players' achievement as they became the first side since the 2004 Wasps team above to pull off a domestic and European double. Driven by a relentless defence, they completely dismantled a beautiful Bath side in the 2015 final and then blew Exeter out of the water in the first half of the 2016 final. If Lawrence Dallaglio was Wasps' heartbeat then Owen Farrell set the tone for this Saracens team, while Brad Barritt and Jacques Burger provided titanium-plated steel. Key player: Owen Farrell Underrated player: Brad Barritt Favourite player: Will Fraser 1. Wasps, 2003-05 The only side to pull off a Premiership 'three-peat', Warren Gatland's team were the original mentality monsters long before Jürgen Klopp pitched up at Liverpool. At the dawn of the Premiership's play-off system, they mastered the art of peaking at the end of the season to administer the perfect knockout blow. This was not a side packed with superstars, but there was class everywhere, from the steady hand of Alex King at fly-half, the industry of Joe Worsley and the general chaos that Trevor Leota wrought. Driving everything was Dallaglio, the emotional heartbeat of the side, who seemed to take extra relish in spoiling Martin Johnson's final game as a professional in the 2005 final as Wasps thrashed their great rivals Leicester 39-14. Add in a 2004 Heineken Cup when the competition was truly elite and that makes them my No 1. Honourable mentions Wasps 2008, Harlequins 2012, Northampton 2014, Leicester 2022
Times
14 minutes ago
- Times
Dutch stadium could hold blueprint for Murrayfield's green ambitions
Later this year, as part of the Murrayfield centenary celebrations, the Scottish Rugby Union is expected to put forward wide-ranging plans aimed at transforming both the stadium and its surrounding footprint. The union will hope to harness a mix of private and public funding in an effort to not only bring Scotland's largest venue into the 21st century but also position it as a beacon of customer experience that can drive revenue on far more than a handful of international match days each year. For a shining example of the power of collaborative working, and how placing sustainability at the heart of its plans could aid the bottom line as well as the planet, the SRU might look to Amsterdam's Johan Cruyff ArenA, a venue constructed in the mid-1990s around the same time that Murrayfield last underwent serious redevelopment. Since then, the public-facing areas at the home of Scottish rugby have received minimal care and investment, whereas the ArenA has become a world-renowned cradle of innovation, most notably with regards to how the football matches, concerts and business events staged there are powered. The stadium, owned by a combination of the local authority, Ajax FC and other private companies, has invested in a state-of-the-art energy storage system that has dramatically reduced reliance on diesel generators for back-up power on event days. Some 4,200 solar panels are arranged on the roof of the stadium, and the green energy captured by these units, in addition to a nearby wind turbine and solar park, is transferred to two 'mega-batteries' located deep in the bowels of a facility that has a sliding capacity of between 56,000 (for football) and 71,000 (for concerts). The first of these mega-batteries was installed in 2018 using 148 new and second-life batteries from Nissan Leaf electric vehicles and remains the largest project of its kind in a European commercial building. Two thirds of the project was funded via a loan from the Amsterdam Climate and Energy Fund, with the remainder coming from private sources. The second battery arrived last year, giving the ArenA a total storage capacity of 8.6 megawatt hours. This is enough to charge 1.7 million phones or provide 20,000 households with electricity for an hour. Last August Ajax's Eredivisie season opener against Heerenveen made history as the first major football match to run entirely on green energy, from the floodlights and concourse lighting to beer taps and refreshment stalls. The ambition is for the ArenA to be putting on net-positive events by 2030. Already, excess energy in the batteries is sold back to the grid. Eaton, the power management giant, was a key player in the original battery project and Fabrice Roudet, its sustainability director, is adamant that the principles of what has been achieved in the Dutch capital are applicable on whatever scale elsewhere. 'A number of stadiums around Europe were built several decades ago and are now grappling with the same questions around how to make their facilities work for the customer, the environment and the business,' he said. 'A stadium can take five years to build, so from the very first day it opens, it's essentially already old from a technology standpoint. And then you have to maintain it over decades, during which you might increase the number of seats, add bars and restaurants and introduce more hospitality facilities. These kinds of changes can make your energy consumption go through the roof and then the conversation about how you power it becomes even more important. 'Not every stadium is going to have two massive batteries like we have in Amsterdam, but every stadium should definitely take into account these kinds of technologies as we all look to significantly reduce the reliance on diesel. 'When you're also able to help the grid, it is well-incentivised, which is a way to have payback on the [original] system. 'The ArenA management saw the value: if you take the example of solar panels, the price of electricity has gone down. But when you look at what happened at the start of the war in Ukraine, the cost to buy from an electricity distributor was much, much higher than the around eight [euro] cents that, over time, it typically costs to produce a kilowatt hour using a big solar system on the roof of a large building. 'At one point, the price of electricity from the grid was five, six, even seven times the cost of your own production. So if you had batteries, your cost of production was increased a little, but it was still really, really worth it financially overall.' The ArenA has also invested heavily in LED lighting, both to aid pitch growth and to improve the performance of the floodlights, which benefits both those in the stadium and, by eliminating flicker in slow-motion replays, the sharpness of the images served to the television audience and VAR. Every step of the way, sustainability meshes with innovation, quite literally in the case of the stadium escalators. The energy generated by people riding down is captured and used to offset the energy required to power the movement of those moving up. A giant biodigester transforms food waste from the stadium and local businesses into green energy, which is then fed back into the stadium itself, while water from the nearby Ouderkerkerplas lake is used to cool the dressing rooms and stadium offices. Rainwater from the stadium roof is collected and reused to water the pitch. Like Murrayfield, the ArenA has diversified into music — Robbie Williams is playing two nights next week, before Imagine Dragons, Stray Kids and Kendrick Lamar take the stage in July — and they report that concert promoters are increasingly using a venue's environmental credentials as a key criterion in their selection process. 'We are seeing that from the general consumer, in this case the match-going fan, as well,' Roudet says. 'People know more about sustainability, what is possible, and what others are doing and so they expect more from businesses and stadiums too.' Other venues are rising to the challenge. The Mercedes-Benz Stadium in Atlanta, Georgia, has also gone heavy on solar panels and LEDs, while a stormwater management system grants scope to store more than two million gallons on site and reduce flood risk in the surrounding area. These and other water-efficient features mean the stadium uses 47 per cent less water than baseline industry standards. Back in Europe, the Bluenergy Stadium in Udine, northern Italy, last year installed a smaller-scale version of the ArenA's solar panel/battery combination, while in September 2021 the Tottenham Hotspur Stadium staged the first net-zero football match at elite level, with emissions from a London derby against Chelsea offset into a reforestation project in east Africa and a local tree-planting initiative. This all sounds a far cry from some of the more fundamental challenges that visitors to Murrayfield experience, particularly if they are a woman who does not want to spend hours queueing for the loos or a parent looking to wash their child's hands with hot water after a half-time bathroom break. Nonetheless, they do underscore how customer expectation is changing, and how other venues are responding. The lesson, Roudet believes, is to think both big and longer-term. 'Sustainability can sometimes be a hard sell because with things like batteries and ventilation systems, it's not necessarily visible to the public. But then you think of something like the light show the French rugby federation is able to put on with LEDs at the Stade de France now — that's incredibly visible, it improves the fan experience and over time it consumes much less power. 'What [event] organisers and the public need and want from a venue is changing over time, and the most successful stadiums will be those which anticipate and respond to those changes.'
Daily Mail
24 minutes ago
- Daily Mail
Premier League star 'buys SIX flats in one day' - as the midfielder looks to expand his budding property empire
A Premier League footballer has expanded his property portfolio by buying six flats in a single day. The 30-year-old runs a successful buy-to-let business with more than a dozen homes and recently spent £1.6million to expand his budding empire. According to a report from The Sun, Bournemouth star Ryan Christie purchased the apartments in Glasgow back in April. The Scotland international runs Twenty Two Investment Properties Ltd alongside his partner, Georgina Bell, 30. The six properties - situated near the River Clyde in the Scottish city - represented a seven-figure outlay for the couple. Records note that the pair, who are reportedly set to marry this summer, purchased the flats at £275,000, £220,000, two at £215,000, and £175,000 and £160,000 on April 28. Christie missed much of the latter half of Bournemouth's campaign with a groin injury but was still named the Cherries' Player of the Season as Andoni Iraola's side recorded a top-half finish. 'Ryan's work rate is quite incredible. He was player of the season, has undergone surgery and it also looks like he is due to get married,' a source told The Sun. 'But he still found time to splash a fortune on half-a-dozen homes.' Christie joined Bournemouth from Celtic in 2021 and was instrumental in leading the club to the Premier League in his first season on the south coast. Since then the midfielder has racked up 98 top flight appearances for the club, scoring three goals.
