Darius McNaughton

speaker

174 appearances 5 recordings 1 series first heard Jul 2026 last heard 8 Sep

Darius McNaughton’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 5 in all, peaking in Aug 2026 with 2.

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OTB Rugby · WOTS: Is There Such Thing As Too Much Rugby? | Fan fatigue vs player fatigue | Episode 58 · 16 Jul 2026 podcast

South Africa have the power to rotate, but they're not really losing much by rotating because it's something they practice throughout all their World Cup cycles.

But...

We're different in that we can't really do that.

Because there's one side of it that we don't have a huge pool of players, but then if we do rotate and we do lose games, you know, the reaction to it is very reactionary.

Yeah, well, because last week was a fairly rotated squad from the week prior, and a lot of guys got a chance, the two front rows from Connacht, Sean Jansen, obviously, who's in this week's squad, and Bryn Ward all got their first caps, but then there was a few players thrown in there as well, like Stockdale, who isn't starting this week, Robbie Henshaw, 13, Gary Ringrose is back, so kind of, yeah, half would have expected that, but...

And like that always happens when a team like Japan is in those run of fixtures, you do tend to see a bit of rotation there.

I think some people would have liked to see a bit more rotation.

I think that's just because that comes down to maybe preferential biases or whatever else.

And as an Ulster fan, I would have liked to see maybe Stockdale get another chance in the wing.

But sure, look, that's a conversation for another day, I think.

But yeah, I think Farrell...

has always been strong on the thing of, you know, we're not handing out caps here.

That's not what we do in Ireland.

We're going to, you know, you have to earn your caps.

Anyone that plays for Ireland has earned that opportunity.

So, and again, we don't really have the pool of players to be flipping the whole team up, play down like South Africa can, South Africa can and New Zealand can when these run of fixtures come around.

I think Otoja is an interesting case and quite a unique one in that he's had a very taxing run at it physically because he had the Lion's Tour and he captained the Lion's Tour as well which comes with its own duties and you're there involved with it long before the rest of the players are.

and then obviously he's captain of England so he has that on his plate and I think he is still captain of Saracens maybe Jamie George's but he's definitely a leader in that team so he's had so much on his plate he plays you know he generally does play 80 minutes as well in a game but then he had decided the emotional side where he lost his mum during the season last season as well so I think a lot of people were calling for him to just he stood down for a little while

Give him a bit of rest and give him a chance to recuperate.

Because not that his performances were dropping, but he probably wasn't playing to the level that we've come to expect of him.

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