The Lekker Rugby Pod!

The Bulls have now lost four URC finals in five seasons. Harry Jones was embedded on their bench at Croke Park when the latest chance slipped away. What he witnessed from three meters away tells a story the scoreboard does not. A stunned bench. A Leinster coaching staff burning calories delivering information in real time. Eight Springbok calibre players sitting in silence with no shared framework...

A year out from Australia 2027, Rassie Erasmus is fast-tracking players most coaches would wait on. Riley Norton at 21. Paul de Villiers stacking man-of-the-match awards at the Stormers. A bomb squad being rebuilt from scratch. The Nations Championship squad is not a holding pattern. It is a blueprint. Jon Cardinelli, one of SA rugby's sharpest analysts, joins Harry Jones on The Lekker Rugby P...

Can the Bulls pull off the upset of the year in Dublin on Friday? With the URC Final days away, MW Welman and Harry Jones go live to break down the Leinster and Bulls team announcements and make the case for why this final might not be the foregone conclusion many expect. The Bulls' front row is the story, and Leinster know it. In this episode:Why the Bulls' pack could be Leinster's wo...

Gráinne Seoige joins the Lekker Rugby Pod to discuss the cultural clash between South Africa and Ireland, Jacques Nienaber's move to Leinster, and the "fake news" targeting Canan Moodie. Back on the Lekker Rugby Pod by popular demand, Gráinne's here to make sense of the moment that exposed just how differently South Africa and Ireland see the same sport, and the same people. In t...

"We’re not coming here all the way to Dublin just to take part... we’re coming to win."From the streets of Somerset West to the peak of the world stage, Damian Willemse’s journey is defined by grit, community, and an unbreakable "blue-collar" work ethic. Ahead of the Stormers' URC semi-final clash with Leinster, we go behind the scenes with Damian and head physio Inga Croy...

Is Jacques Nienaber being set up to fail to save Leo Cullen's job? Harry Jones and MW Welman expose the Leinster Duplicity and the media witch hunt against the 2x World Cup-winning coach.🎂 IT'S OUR BIRTHDAY! To celebrate, we are diving deep into the Sacrificial Lamb narrative coming out of Dublin. Is the Irish press unfairly targeting Nienaber to protect the Leinster hierarchy? We break d...

The Stormers have the best defence in the URC this season. Fewer than 2.7 tries conceded per game, dominant entry denial into the 22, and a jackal game that suffocates teams before they build momentum. But Norman Laker will be the first to tell you the last three games leaked 15 tries, and Cardiff found the edge. In this Side-by-Side, Harry Jones sits down with Stormers wing Seabelo Senatla and de...

Four URC quarterfinals. Some of the best rugby minds in the game. One complete preview. MW Welman hosts Harry Jones and Huw Griffin for a full breakdown of every quarterfinal on the card this weekend: Bulls vs Munster, Stormers vs Cardiff, Glasgow vs Connacht, and Leinster vs Lions. MW brings inside knowledge from his time embedded at the Bulls, Harry brings his deep read on the Stormers, and Huw...

Leinster lost another Champions Cup final. The question now is whether Leo Cullen can survive it. Harry Jones, MW Welman and special guest Pat McCarry go back to basics after Bordeaux's win in Bilbao. They pick apart the 24 turnovers, the heat excuses, the predictable attack, and what it says about a coaching structure where Jacques Nienaber's blitz defence has pulled focus away from the a...

Stormers kicking coach Gareth Wright has three rules for playing without fear. He can't say the first one out loud. Wright and Stormers scrumhalf Imad Khan break down what it actually takes to execute under pressure: box kicks, hang time, the snap, getting charged down, and what to do in the seconds after you make a mistake. Khan, 22 and stepping into a starting role in a big season, talks abo...

There's smoke around the Stormers camp. Harry Jones, who knows the camp well, explains what the fire actually is. MW and Harry run through the full URC playoff picture ahead of the quarterfinals. What is John Dobson really navigating inside a squad carrying deep frustration after two gut-wrenching losses? Can Johan Ackermann's high-tempo Bulls survive a Munster side built to make games ugly? And f...

Three journalists were in the room with Dave Rennie and CEO Steve Lancaster at NZR HQ in Auckland. Martin Devlin was one of them. Rennie has a word for what he wants from this team. He has a number every player must hit. He already has a starting XV in mind for the first game in South Africa. What he said in that room has not been reported anywhere else. Martin Devlin is back on the Lekker Rugby P...

Brok Harris spent years scrumming in Wales. What he learnt there is why the Stormers generated 58 scrum penalties this season. On this episode, scrum coach Brok Harris and tight-head Sazi Sandi break down how the gap between Welsh and South African scrum philosophy shaped the most dominant set piece in the URC. The timings are different. The mindset is different. The risk appetite is completely di...

Harry Jones has one word for Leinster going into the URC knockouts: ominous. But is it by design, or did they just get hot at the right time? On this week's Lekker Rugby Pod, the Harry Index sizes up every team with a seat at the table. The Bulls are back from the dead and looking dangerous. The Stormers are quietly building toward something big. Glasgow are leaking. And Munster? There is a lo...

The Stormers are second on the URC log, and yet their attack coach sometimes has no idea what's coming next. That is not a gap in the system. That is the system. Dawie Snyman has spent many years building the Stormers attack around one idea: give the right players the freedom to express themselves and trust what follows. On this episode, he and captain Ruhan Nel break open how that philosophy...

The Bordeaux versus Bath Champions Cup semi-final ignited a very public clash between two of rugby's most prominent online voices over the standard of commentary, the integrity of the TMO process, and where the line sits between legitimate criticism and agenda-driven noise. MW and Harry work through what each side got right, where both overreached, and what the controversy reveals about the TM...

MW Welman started a sports channel. Harry Jones was writing about rugby from the other side of the world. One conversation changed everything. In this episode of The Long Way to the Game, Paul Avenant sits down with MW and Harry to tell the full origin story for the first time. How Megafoon Rugby found its footing, how a single phone call became Lekker Rugby Pod, and how a channel that began with...

Franco Smith has been calling himself a Dreamgiver for years. This conversation explains what that actually means. Jamie Lyall, who commentates for World Rugby and writes for RugbyPass, has watched Franco up close since 2022, when a teacher from the Free State arrived in Glasgow with no recruitment budget, inherited a staff, and started coaching scrum sessions he had never run before. Lyall unpack...

The DHL Stormers are top of the URC log. They also just lost one of their own. This conversation sits inside both of those realities. Rito Hlungwani has built one of the most dominant forwards packs in world rugby. The way he does it, the rituals, the methods, the connection he builds in the room before battle. You won't find it written down anywhere. Ben-Jason Dixon is the engineer inside tha...

Gráinne Seoige has watched Ireland and South Africa play each other from both sides of the fence. One of Ireland's most recognisable broadcasters, she now lives in Pretoria, was at Loftus when the Springboks settled the score in 2024, and has been inside SA rugby culture long enough to see the pattern clearly. On this episode she makes the case that the two nations share more than their rivalr...

This is what it looks like when MW and Harry get a room to themselves. No guest. No agenda. Just Harry Jones with a spreadsheet and MW with the questions to make sense of it. Harry has been running numbers on the URC's nine playoff contenders, not just the table, but the categories underneath it: how teams carry, how they defend, how they use the set piece, how they kick and get the ball back....

SA rugby and Scottish rugby have been quietly in love with each other for years. This episode is the proof. Jamie Lyle grew up in rural Scotland, 20 houses, one black classmate across six years of school, and a satellite dish that showed him Super Rugby. He went to South Africa for his 30th birthday and came home different. Not because of Table Mountain or the Garden Route, though both surpassed e...

The Stormers have three games left and a home semi-final to play for. John Dobson is not pretending otherwise. In a conversation that goes further than most, Dobson and World Cup winner Deon "Brannas" Fourie cover the Glasgow game at the top of the URC log, the jackal stats that have the Stormers leading the world in turnovers (and why dominant tackles are the real engine behind them), t...

South Africa and Ireland used to be a rare fixture. Tours separated by years, the odd November test, entire Springbok cycles without an Ireland series. That world is gone. The URC has put Irish provinces and South African franchises on the same fixture list for nine months of the year, and the two rugby cultures now read each other in real time from September to June. Pat McCarry joins Harry Jones...

The Lions aren’t just a team. They’re an experience. And if you support them, you know exactly what that means. In this episode of the Lekker Rugby Pod, we take a tongue-in-cheek look at what it really means to be a Lions fan. The ups, the frustrations, the false dawns, and why, somehow, people keep coming back for more. We see the Lions through the eyes of Riaan Louw, whose perspective gives real...