I enjoy a paper newspaper most days, particularly Sunday and Monday. For the latter I'm told  The Telegraph has best coverage of most sports, including rugby.

I've always taken The Sunday Times, but have now had enough of the tedious rugby indulgences of Stephen Jones, so rather than splash out on each of the contenders for the next couple of weeks, is there a concensus about the best rugby coverage?

By 'best' I mean forward looking, objective and insightful, unlike Jones. TIA.

I've been a fan of FirstXV, which was the paid-for side of RugbyPass. It was skewed further to the SH side of things than I'd have liked (two weeks into the NH season and there was 1 article on the NH for every 9 on the Rugby Championship) but the quality of writing and balance of news and features was good.

A couple of weeks ago it merged back into the main RugbyPass site as RugbyPass+. The user experience is annoying (required an immediate password reset and then wants you to log in again far too often) and the number of articles had slowed to a trickle ahead of the change. We'll have to see if it gets back to an even keel, but it's worth keeping an eye on.

Other than that, I can't be bothered with stuff that's behind a paywall, so I tend to rely on the Guardian, which to be fair is usually pretty good. Their The Breakdown email is a good read every week. Probably not quite as incisive as the Telegraph were at their best, and I miss the annual bout of insanity where the Telegraph's Life section is trying to scare mothers into not letting their precious ickle ones play rugby ever again while the Sports section is celebrating the start of the new season, but it will do.

I subscribe to the telegraph and charge it to my business.

The rugby side of the Telegraph is very good, Charlie Morgan et al...

Mail Rugby is good.

Also, check out:



This is an aggregation of news from the Premiership, it picks up all stories written about the Premiership.

I miss the annual bout of insanity where the Telegraph's Life section is trying to scare mothers into not letting their precious ickle ones play rugby ever again while the Sports section is celebrating the start of the new season, but it will do.

I can imagine the scene, somewhere near Tonbridge/Reigate/Guildford/Farnham or Beaconsfield...

"Jeremy, do take care in the scrum, darling"

"Stop mollycoddling the lad - character building stuff: in my day we had to run to the school lake, wade in only wearing Y-fronts, bring back a pound of Hippuris vulgaris (that's Mare’s Tail to you) - not half a bl***y kilo mind - run back to the House courtyard and show it to the Master, who weighed it, before running back to the lake and plant it again, all before breakfast...[fill in public school fantasy to suit your taste]...