Warburton on Welsh rugby's future & Freeman the centre
The Ruck
Reynolds Alfie
3.4 • 566 Ratings
🗓️ 27 October 2025
⏱️ 57 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
It's the start of the November internationals so Alfie and Will look ahead to the matches this weekend, including England's game against Australia. They discuss Steve Borthwick's bold selection of moving Tommy Freeman to outside centre, which means no Ollie Lawrence, as well as George Ford starting at fly-half.
Sam Warburton chats to Will about the WRU's plans to cut the number of regional sides from four to three and he also explains why despite their current poor form Wales should be capable of having a competitive national side again.
And, the boys round up the Prem rugby action by asking who has impressed them the most following the first block of fixtures? Plus, which countries will have a successful Autumn campaign and who will be left disappointed?
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome back to the Ruck, the journalist's rugby podcast from the Times and the Sunday Times. |
| 0:19.5 | Here we go again. |
| 0:20.9 | The clocks have changed. It's getting colder. It's getting darker. and the Sunday Times. Here we go again. The clocks have changed. |
| 0:21.8 | It's getting colder. |
| 0:22.8 | It's getting darker. |
| 0:24.0 | And the November internationals get underway this weekend. |
| 0:26.7 | Alfie here with Will at the start of another autumn campaign, Will. |
| 0:30.0 | We're back. |
| 0:31.0 | And one of our number has said that, so we're at Pennyhill Park, which is where England |
| 0:34.7 | base themselves and have done for 20 years or so. |
| 0:54.4 | And this is appearance of Pennyhill 2, which is where England base themselves and have done for 20 years or so. And this is appearance of Pennyhill two of 13 possible trips here. Have you worked them all out? Have you already? Adam Hathaway, who's been on the pod and years gone by, has worked out that yes, if you come to all of them, you do 13. So this is number two because we were here last week for the sort of squad before the squad, right? Yes. So last week was Steve Borthwick with the training squad, which is pretty much the squad, although we are going to go through it as a few changes there, injuries and whatnot. And then today, well, you've been having a chat with Luke Cowan Dickey and Alex Mitchell. I've been chatting to Alex Mitchell. So we have already been and we saw the wallabies earlier on today. We have been speaking to the |
| 1:10.8 | England camp as well. And also, let's start there. Coming up later, it's a busy week, actually, |
| 1:16.0 | it felt last week. Will has had a chat with Sam Warburton about the developments in the Welsh game. |
| 1:20.8 | Many of you would have seen about that and read about that online or in a copy of the paper. |
| 1:25.4 | And we'll chat about the Prem as well. |
| 1:29.3 | Starting off with England will. |
| 1:33.4 | So the England squad for the November series came out yesterday. |
| 1:37.2 | And already those that have read your piece online in the Times would have seen some of the team news ahead of the weekends game against Australia. |
| 1:40.8 | So we think we've got there with sort of half the team, the backline, particularly, |
| 1:45.2 | which is surprising. Yeah. So, headlines in there. And look, anyone in our job who's written a |
| 1:51.8 | new story trying to predict what the team is has to put in the usual caveats of they'll train a few |
| 1:55.7 | times more this week. We don't quite know exactly what day they're going to announce. Could be |
... |
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