The Nations Championship 2026, Week Three

 Into the final week of the July window. This piece will look solely at this weekend's performances. I aim to write another piece about the overall Nations Championship opening three rounds and the concept overall from both a fans perspective and my take on the coach's perspective(s). 

1. Australia There were a lot of options here really, but Australia were low on confidence and could easily have lost this game. Instead they came out fired up and blew Italy off the park. Italy are not a great side, but they’re better than what we saw here, and that’s really due to what the Wallabies allowed them to do. Schmidt's farewell might not have been a great run, but it ended on a high. They fell off a bit in the second half, some of that was an improvement from Italy, some was a tiny loss of focus from the Wallabies - it’s hard to maintain that focus when you’re six tries to one ahead - but they remained the better side, if not as dominant. 
2. New Zealand Officially this was 2v3 in the world. However you want to describe the French team denuded of many of their stars who played the All Blacks a fortnight ago, they proved a much sterner test than basically the full strength Irish team. On both sides of the ball the All Blacks were in charge, pretty much throughout the game. There were periods where the Irish blunted their attack, moments where the Irish successfully got down and attacked and converted long periods of pressure into points. Rennie has things to work on still, but this was job done. Most notably, the All Blacks have been mediocre under the high ball, really for the last seven years, B-tier at best. Personally I put France and South Africa as the top two teams in the world at this aspect of the game, S-tier, but Ireland have been very good and solidly A-tier, probably at the top of it. Today, they beat the Irish at this part of the game, as they did at so many others. The Garden of Eden remains one of the All Blacks fortresses for another year. I think Jacobson was lucky to escape a red card, at least for the reason given. If the FPRO had given mitigation for Ryan affecting his approach to the ruck and that’s why he was off his feet, along with the Irish commentator on my half-time show, I’d have probably grumbled but accepted it. “Attempting to bind,” the actual reason for the mitigation, my arse. However, the referees and TMO overall were good, one poor decision, even though it was a big one, did not change how well the Kiwis did.
3. France It was a toss-up for me whether to put Les Bleus above or below the All Blacks. The French were expected to beat Japan, and did so pretty convincingly. But it’s still a weakened team, and they’ve traveled to New Zealand, Australia and then to Japan. I decided that the Kiwis just edged it for a convincing victory. The French looked good, particularly in the first half. A bit like the Aussies they looked a bit less focused in the second half, although I’d add to that the effect of heat, humidity and travel left them looking more tired than usual. None of SA, Australia or NZ have that excuse. Galthié will look at this as job done, and various young players have lifted their hands, as well as older players demonstrating additional strings to their bow. I’ll look at that in more detail in next piece, but this was the icing on the cake. 
4. Wales I know Wales were thoroughly beaten, but when it's first v twelfth, and there are 20 ranking points between you, that’s what is meant to happen. Unlike England, Wales made South Africa work for their tries, and keep working. Yes, they were helped in that by the conditions, which made handling tricky and helped with a lot of spilled ball. However, it also hampered them in attack, and they did mount attacks, but the Boks were always able to contain them, often until they made a handling error of their own. This feels not like job done, but decent end to an OK campaign for a team rebuilding. Testing yourself against the best in the world is always a challenge, Wales have improved from where they were in November and whilst they still have a long way to go, that improvement is a good thing. 
5. South Africa Despite winning, I think Rassie will be more disappointed than Steve Tandy. A lot of what South Africa did was a long way short of their normal standards. There are excuses for bits of that, the conditions were bad and the odd spilled pass was inevitable. But Wales disrupted the Bokke driving maul on multiple occasions. There were stupid offside penalties for not retreating when the player was about 30m in front of the kicker. The list goes on and on. They won the equivalent fixture 73-0 in Cardiff in November, and England 45-21. 43-0 against Wales is a moral victory for the visitors, or at least a sign of their improvements.
6. England Despite what you might read in the English media, this was not a glorious victory, it was a lucky escape with a hefty helping hand from the referee and TMO. Were England the better side? I’m not sure. At some crucial moments, they retained their composure better than Argentina, that’s to their credit. But there’s a strong argument that the TMO wrongly denied Argentina a try and the chance to convert to draw at the death, if it was correct, why did the referee not go back to the penalty, and consider a card - at least one person I know thinks the penalty that was ignored was worth a penalty try! Both teams seemed willing to play a physical game of rugby that wouldn’t look out of place in January in Newcastle, or Vannes, on a cold, wet and windy day. The referee wanted them to play a different game, U14 schoolboys I think, or tiddlywinks. There were plenty of cards shown in this match, seven in total, that’s what comes of playing rugby instead of tiddlywinks, but the English ended up being shown four of them. That’s four in one game, which is more than any team except Argentina have been shown across all three games, and Argentina got three in this game to bring their total up to four. Although this isn’t meant to be a match review per se, I think you can argue that Gus lost control of this match in the fourth minute and should have sent at least one, if not two players to the bin then. Add a bit more whistling and less talking and the game might well have gone with fewer cards overall. 
7. Fiji After last week's abject capitulation against England we were left wondering which Fiji would show up. This was a team full of Flying Fijians, full of courage, determination and running. Indeed, about halfway through the first half, Fiji took the lead, looked good value for it and kept it until about halfway through the second half, when the quality of the Scottish replacements started to come through. Fiji will be a little aggrieved to be coming away from this match with no competition points; at one stage it looked like they might get two, losing bp and four tries, but they were not quite precise enough. However, this was a performance, and an entertaining match. They need to start delivering more in the longer term, but after last week, this was good enough. 
8. Scotland For 60 minutes I was preparing to write a very different piece, and put Scotland much lower down. Now, I would have written excuses for them, really tough match against South Africa, long flight home and so on. All of those things remain true. But if Scotland are truly to establish themselves as a top four side, and their performance last week suggests they could, they need to back up the tough matches. You expect a top four team, draw permitting, to reach the semi-finals of the World Cup, and that means backing up week, after week, after week. Scotland didn’t manage that, and that’s dragged them down this list.
9. Argentina I thought long and hard about where to place Los Pumas. I think they’ll be too angry to be much higher than this, and whilst some of that will rightly be aimed at the referee and TMO, some should be aimed inwards. England spent a chunk of time down to 13 men and they scored no points. Argentina were blooding young players in the front row against one of the more fearsome scrums in world rugby. I would say that went better than many teams attempting the same thing. England generally had the upper hand at scrum time, but it wasn’t guaranteed, and the young prop definitely grew into the game. As I’ve mentioned in the England comments this was a hard match to watch and not helped by some poor refereeing decisions. Gus let this match get away from him, and had to try and stamp his authority later on when the players were already out of control. One of the French referees would probably have done a better job - they come up through Pro D2, and these sorts of games are relatively common there. 
10. Japan The Brave Blossoms were meant to lose this match, and lose they did. For about five minutes, early in the first half when no one believed it meant anything, they were in the lead. But of the teams that played, loosely speaking, around the Pacific Rim, they were the only losing team to ever have the lead. That alone puts them above Ireland and Italy. But Japan played some very nice rugby. Whenever France went to the power game, they suffered, Eddy's boasts about standing up to the big boys has been shown to be as good as his boasts about how the Wallabies would perform in 2023. But against their near peers they probably have the game to be far more dangerous. 
11. Italy The world rankings have Italy losing to Australia, particularly in Australia. Add the loss of Menoncello into the mix and the loss was poor, absolutely, but understandable. Italy will be rightly disappointed by this match, but there are some positives for the coaches to take from it. They went out and scored first in the second half. They crossed the line a couple more times in the second half and were called back for technical errors. They kept playing until the end, even when it wasn’t working for them. There are a lot of problems to address, absolutely, but it’s not completely terrible. 
12. Ireland In the last couple of years the top teams routinely score four tries, at least in good weather or covered stadia. That includes the losing teams. Winning teams often score six, seven or more. Even in bad conditions and looking out of sorts South Africa scored seven tries. Scoring more than the opposition is the name of the game these days, the days of restricting them to under 15 points, or even under 10 are long gone. For what it’s worth, back in 2018 Wales won a grand slam scoring 14 tries and conceding only 10 over those five matches. In just about every match the winner has got to 4.4 tries, the average of both teams in Wales' 2018 campaign, in most the loser has too. Ireland were held to three tries by New Zealand, and although they had moments in attack where they tried to score a fourth, they never really looked threatening - they didn’t get close to the 5m line for example. By contrast, they made errors on attack, in defence and most notably in transition, that just invited their opponents into good attacking positions, positions from which they scored fairly often. Ireland have positives to take, they defended close to the try line for long periods on a couple of occasions with good discipline but their level of errors was far, far too high for that to be much solace. 

There is now a break until November, with the final three weeks, so everyone has played against all six teams in the other pool, then finals week at Twickenham with the first placed south team v the first placed north team, second placed south team v second placed north team and so on down the groups.