Hello everybody, welcome along to this week's La Putty Pod. This episode is brought to you

as always by our very good friends at Continental Tires. It's a roundup of the week that was

and a look ahead to the weekend that is. And we're going to start with a couple of stories

actually that have fallen out in the last, let's say, 24, 48 hours or so. The first one tins,

welcome along to you, Mike Rock in the Mike, is this story that's coming out around the RFU

and Prem Rugby looking at hybrid contracts, which will give England greater control of 20 core

players. The professional game partnership announcement, I think, is due November 128 million

pound deal. A two-tier system we're hearing with larger EPS group retainers. It was extraordinary

scenario, I think, while in the six nations in which Steve Balthock and he had 25 players

to play with, which, remember, he couldn't run any match situations in training.

Four-year deal worth 32 million, but this hybrid contract about time.

If you look at all the countries around the world, then obviously a majority of them bar

France are all working on a full-time sort of RFU-all national contract and then they get,

you know, they have contacts with their clubs to go and play, but they're sold on for the good

of the international game. You know, at a point where clearly the club game isn't the game that's

succeeding to put it mildly. So the international game we have to protect in some ways. So if I

look at it from that point of view, I would say it's about time. What's not what isn't working right

now? Our generator players is way too high in terms of getting going through internationals.

So let's put it in a positive way. It will find, you know, everything that we've said about

the World Cup so far in terms of, you know, I was listening to Jordy Murphy last night and he's

saying, look, England just don't really know what their first team is. They don't, you know,

they're a burn rate of players. Obviously, the burn rate of coaches over the years have been high.

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