Will Spain host the World Cup? Plus England’s European struggles and the Red Roses lose

Alfie Reynolds (0:15)

Hello, hello, welcome everyone. This is The Ruck, the rugby podcast from The Times and The Sunday Times. I'm Alfie Reynolds. Great to have you with us. Coming up today, the Champions Cup is up and running for another year. Some great matches, but not a great weekend for the English clubs. The Red Roses, and this isn't a drill, have finally lost a match. And Spain has launched its bid to host the 2035 Rugby World Cup. The Spanish Federation's president, Juan Carlos Martin Hansen, is going to join us. Looking forward to that in the company of Will Kelleher.

Will Kelleher (0:49)

Hello, mate. You all right?

Alfie Reynolds (0:50)

I'm very well. How are you doing?

Will Kelleher (0:51)

I'm good. Yeah, I had a weekend where I wasn't writing, but I did watch. I took my partner, who's a Bath fan, to the Bath Montpellier game, being like, we're locals now. That would be good fun. Nice day out. And then, oh, I didn't quite go to plan, did it?

Alfie Reynolds (1:05)

She was slightly disappointed then. I was where everyone else, or most people, were in the wreck as well. Well, not a great weekend, as we say generally, for a lot of the English clubs, but there we go. Also, alongside Will, Elgan Oldman. All right, Elgan?

Elgan Oldman (1:15)

Hello, yes. It's been quite a busy weekend for me. I've been keeping abreast of the Red Roses, as you mentioned, they're at the top from afar. Also a bit of the Rugby League World Cup, which kicked off in quite an exciting fashion on Thursday. And then Old Deer Park is a spectator on Saturday for London Welsh's 45-0 defeat by Andal. We won't talk about that. And then Northampton Saints yesterday in the final game of the Champions Cup, when an English team finally won a Champions Cup game on the weekend.

Will Kelleher (1:39)

I know this is a Rugby Union pod, but maybe you don't need to do it live, Elgan, but someone needs to explain to me the Rugby League system for the World Cup, because it's mad, isn't it? There's one group with some teams and there's two with others.

Elgan Oldman (1:52)

I think I've got it nailed now. There's one group of four which is a bog standard round robin pool. Then there's two pools of three that are combined into one table. You play the three teams from the other pool and the top two teams from that combined grouping go through.

Will Kelleher (2:06)

That's more complicated than the Champions Cup, isn't it? Which is saying a lot.

Alfie Reynolds (2:09)

I was going to say, we're probably going to moan about the Champions Cup today, but when you hear that, then maybe it's not too bad.

I've just outlined everything that we're going to try and get through on the pod today. We're going to get to emails as well. Plenty of people got in touch about our attendance discussion last week about some of the low attendances in the Prem. I wanted to tease this right at the top. We'll come back to it later, but you can get thinking. Russell Wright emailed theruckatthetimes.co.uk. He said, I enjoyed last week's discussion about attendance figures at the start of the Prem and the reasons behind them. Afterwards, I went down a few rabbit holes researching rugby stadiums in the UK. So here's a related rugby trivia question I thought you would enjoy. So here's the question, right? You two have to think about this over the next 45 minutes to an hour. Can you name the five largest rugby union club grounds by capacity in the United Kingdom? So only stadiums used by clubs in England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland as their primary stadiums. So like the big games and big summer kickoff, all that sort of thing.

Will Kelleher (3:06)

So no Tottenham.

Alfie Reynolds (3:07)

No Tottenham, no Principality, no Twickenham, just for the clubs. You reckon you've got it, top five?

Will Kelleher (3:13)

Is Aviva, is it Irish or just British?

Alfie Reynolds (3:16)

British, so UK, Northern Ireland, yeah.

Will Kelleher (3:18)

Okay. I bet you there's some rogues in there that we haven't thought of.

Alfie Reynolds (3:23)

There's one in particular that I think is really tricky to get. We'll see how you get on with the other four, but we'll come on to that later.

Juan Carlos Martin Hansen (3:29)

Can they play along at home as well? If you're watching on YouTube.

Alfie Reynolds (3:32)

Yeah, we're not in live real time, can they?

Will Kelleher (3:34)

It's like the House of Games or Pointless or something.

Alfie Reynolds (3:35)