As usual, the Celts took the up-front hit: Ireland v Wales was cancelled postponed, followed by Treviso v Ulster and Zebre v Ospreys. Then came the news that Mako Vunipola was self-isolating from the England camp, although apparently it’s okay to infect the Saracens camp. (They’re relegated anyway: who cares?) Today’s shocking news is that Italy v England is also sacrificed to Covid-19.
But fear not, rugby fans! There is one person on our side, one person who knows that it’s all a big hoax. A person whose intimate involvement with Scottish golf courses has led to a love of rugby, inspired by Gavin Hastings.
“I think the 3.4% [death rate] is really a false number.
“Now, this is just my hunch, based on a lot of conversations with a lot of people that do this, because a lot of people will have this, and it’s very mild – they’ll get better very rapidly, they don’t even see a doctor, they don’t even call a doctor.
“You never hear about those people, so you can’t put them down in the category of the overall population, in terms of this corona flu, and/or virus. So you just can’t do that. So there is no reason for Six Nations matches to be deep-sixed. DBWR are just a bunch of wimps.”
This is of course very comforting, as everyone knows that Donald Trump’s hunches are enormously more accurate than the wild speculations of the World Health Organisation. While it’s true that a vast number of Americans won’t even call a doctor because they can’t afford to, deathly ill or not, the POTUS’s clarion call to laugh and snap our fingers at what the so-called experts are openly referring to as a pandemic will save our Six Nations and Pro-Woo.
The President is being undermined by snivelling lefties who are rejoicing at the thought of millions of people dying, economic Armageddon being unleashed, and – more importantly – rugby matches being cancelled, just to criticise The Donald. As the Guardian (itself a very dubious source) reports:
Peter Hegseth, a co-host of Fox & Friends Weekends, admonished Democrats’ criticism, saying: “They’re rooting for the coronavirus to spread. They’re rooting for it to grow. They’re rooting for the problem to get worse.”
“They’re probably jumping for joy,” Fox & Friends co-host Ainsley Earhardt said about the Democrats’ reaction to Six Nations matches being cancelled.
OvallyBalls can also reveal that Donald Trump is behind Vunipola’s decision to train with the Saracens:
“If we have thousands or hundreds of thousands of people that get better, just by, you know, sitting around and even going to work, some of them go to work, but they get better, and then when you do have a death, like you’ve had in the state of Washington, like you had one in California, I believe you had one in New York.”
While it turns out that no-one has yet died from coronavirus in New York (it’s only Trump’s home state, so why should he know?), the President’s message is clear: Get to work, you slackers, and you will be healed. Front up to the scrummage. Un-cancel the rugby matches. Work makes you free of coronavirus. Unless you’re dead.
Televisual rugby feasts not cancelled as yet:
Friday 6th March
| Sunwolves 14 – 47 Brumbies | 03:45 | Sky Sports Mix |
| Crusaders 24 – 20 Reds | 06:05 | Sky Sports Action |
| Waratahs 14 – 51 Chiefs | 08:15 | Sky Sports Action |
| Dragons 25 – 37 Treviso (really?) | 19:35 | Premier Sports 1 |
| England 22 – 23 Wales U20s | 19:45 | BT Sport Action |
| Worcester 10 – 16 Saints | 19:45 | BT Sport 1 |
Saturday 7th March
| Hurricanes 15 – 24 Blues | 06:0t | Sky Sports Action |
| Rebels 37 – 17 Lions | 08:15 | Sky Sports Action |
| England 66 – 7 Wales (women) | 12:05 | S4C / Sky Sports Action |
| Sharks v Los Jaguares | 13:05 | Sky Sports Arena |
| Bulls v Highlanders | 15:15 | Sky Sports Arena |
| England v Wales | 16:45 | ITV / S4C |
| Scotland v France (women) | 19:45 | BBC Alba / website/ button |
Sunday 8th March
| Bristol v Harlequins | 13:00 | BT Sport 1 |
| Scotland v France | 15:00 | BBC One / website / button |
Ovally Balls 
Iks – it’s a big relief that you aren’t! :-)
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The laddie playing in the 13 shirt?
I was just thinking that very thing, totally different sort of player
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ticht, when it comes to singing at South African schools games this one is the business:
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Aye, the 13.
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Proper good match, this one.
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That singing is great.
The size of these schools amazes me. Since Venter signed for Edinburgh I looked at his school’s facebook page. There are gazzillions of them.
We had just shy of 600 pupils in our school from aged 11 to 18. It was the only school for the town and surrounding villages and farms
The four other schools in the county were a wee bit bigger, but not hugely so.
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the dog is practically standing cross-legged at the front door with her lead in her mouth, but there are only seconds left on the clock
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It’s a big country. Big population and lots of space.
Boland Landbou’s really small, 300-350 pupils in 5 grades. They put out 12+ teams a weekend.
Some of the Pretoria schools were massive – Boys High was 1500 pupils – 300 a year. And the co-eds like Menlo Park, Waterkloof and Garsfontein around 2000 pupils.
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Ticht – Paul Roos has only about 1300 pupils (according to Wiki). That’s only a couple of hundred more than my ‘main’ school and about 300 more than my ‘other’ school. The biggest local authority school in Glasgow (Holyrood) has over 2000 pupils.
Although I suspect that the facilities in these rugby playing South African schools are just a touch better than here.
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BB, this is their first team pitch:
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That is a great facility in a spectacular setting.
We had four classes per year up to the leaving age of 16 – half and half so sixty boys per year or there abouts.
First year had two rugby teams then 2nd and 3rd years had one side each. The first XV was selected from years 4, 5&6 – fifth and sixth year boys were aged approx 16 to 18.
The pics I’ve seen of those schools look like they have a lot more that two thousand people in uniform, I must be miscounting.
The school my children went to here has over 2000 students
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Hell, Glasgow’s not long stopped playing sports on red blaes pitches….
(This link might not work)
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Ticht – the school next door to mine had around 2,000 pupils. None of them played rugby though.
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BB, I remember a Glasgow school team coming over to play us and them being amazed that we had grass football pitches.
Was the blaes because of the rain in the west?
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@ticht
Whenever I hear about schools having amazing facilities I’m reminded of the time Mark Steel went to see Surrey play cricket at Whitgift school
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You’ll find info about the red blaes here, Ticht (in between the bloody adverts).
https://www.glasgowlive.co.uk/sport/football/blaes-pitch-project-memory-pitches-15947441
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Lovely stuff, OT. I miss Jeremy Hardy, and I really like Mark Steel
There is city zoo reopening in the Gorgie/Dalry area of Edinburgh Dalry is pronounced Dal rye, so of course they have the Dalry Llama there.
I’m pretty sure Chimpie isn’t too far from that area
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My school didn’t have a zoo. But being a Catholic school it did, naturally, have a bar.
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A county cricket game on your school oval is posh.
Also posh (in southern England) – grass tennis courts and grass cricket nets. Although strangely, the school my mum taught at for many years was an girls secondary modern and they had grass tennis courts.
At my school we played 1st XI at the ground Hampshire used in Bournemouth. Homely even then but really good to play on.
We lived in Pretoria East and there were a few primary schools near us. The English-medium schools had cricket pitches as the focal point of the sports fields, the Afrikaans-medium had rugby pitches. Two of the Afrikaans-medium primary schools rugby fields had stands. That amazed me.
We were between three high schools – Pretoria Boys, astonishingly good, Affies, a little cramped but still great, and Menlo Park, really really impressive. Menlo Park has a 50-metre swimming pool,
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OT – mine had a pub in the field.
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My school had a firing range. 7 years I spent at the, never went in the firing range, never wanted to, and still don’t like the idea it was there.
There was a Combined Cadet Force – easy to identify the Tories and careerists as they all joined as soon as they could.
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My school had a farm. And it wasn’t called Old MacDonald. We learnt about all the different ways to castrate sheep, including the method that involved a knife and your teeth.
On a completely different subject, I have always believed that Wales’s chances of winning are directly proportional to the number of Joneses playing. When you had Jones the tighthead, Jones the lock, Jones the fly-half, Jones the back row and probably a few others I’m forgetting, they were unbeatable.
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We had two rugby pitches, two hockey pitches and a sand pit for long/triple jump in the summer. The rugby posts would be taken down and the field lined for a 400m track in the Spring – I hated seeing that done. Nothing really against athletics, but I loved rugby, it was my life then.
Nothing really out of the ordinary on the pitches themselves, unless you count the gasworks at the side of the appropriately named gasworks pitch.
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Joneses are over-rated, thaum. Peak Jones was probably 2008 – 6 in the squad for the Grand Slam game. 1970s was a pretty Jones free zone. 2019 Gatz just got all the Jones into Alun Wyn Jones and part-time Wyn Jones. AWJ is probably the Jonesiest Jones you can get.
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Frank Keating wrote an article about it way back when. Check out the comments below the line as well:
https://www.theguardian.com/sport/blog/2012/nov/03/wales-joneses-davieses-williamses
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On one side of my school we had the M62, and on another some fields on the other side of which was Bobby Ball’s house.
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This theory probably goes back about 2008. I don’t remember the 70s, at least not for rugby. But I look asquint at any mention of Welsh teams not featuring any Joneses.
But yeah – Adam, Stephen, AW, Ryan + whatever others I have now forgotten.
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Ha, well found, TomP!
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First comment on the article: I long for the day when Wales line up with 15 Joneses in the backline.
He means the line-out, shurely?
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Oh and yes, there are a fair few familiar names in the comments! Hello Avs, Ticht, etc.
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… Too many old names to mention, including Sag. *sniff*
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Blimey there are a lot of names there.
Some tosspot sets that btl off immediately on an off topic political direction, though.
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I’d just like to know that Sag isnae deid.
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Ticht – I don’t think he is. His AoD bank account is apparently still open, anyway.
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Well, I hope that is a good sign, Thaum.
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Me too.
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Onna nuther note
My daughter was due to go and visit her American friend in Italy, I phoned my daughter last night to say that probably wasn’t a great idea.
She told me not to worry, the visit is off, her friend is being air-lifted out by the US military.
I’ll call her Alice for the sake of this, but my daughter says that Alice always has to have a story to tell!
Presumably it’s not just Alice.
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Alice – I think she’ll know.
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I used the name Alice because I’ve had an earworm since the weekend
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Obviously I was thinking of a completely different Alice.
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Thaum, that is another Alice song I love.
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I do love Tom Waits, and that’s a great song I’ve never heard before. I should really spend more quality time listening to Waits.
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Oh no, now I’ve just thought of Smokie or whoever the arse they were.
Terrorvision had a decent Alice song, for the time
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Ticht – I prefer yer Waits by far.
There’s also A Town called (m)Alice.
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Alice’s Restaurant by Arlo Guthrie might be skating too close to country for you Thaum, it’s not really something I’d say was country but it is one guy and a guitar doing a ragtime type shuffle on the geetur.
Charlie Parker does a Blues for Alice
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“I always thought Cmw meant “help me””
I did.
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“Of course, you can’t get a cwm without some serious plucking in the bergschrund”
Was going to have Utna reported to the citing officer for this, but then I managed to read it properly.
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Ticht – I love Alice’s Restaurant.
They weren’t very environmentally-conscious at the time, though.
Didn’t have to take out the garbage for a loooong tiiiime.
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Tomp – my school had a firing range and a large rubber band powered glider that kids could actually fly over the field. Unfortunately it was before my time, otherwise I would have been up for that – like the prat I was.
We still had the armoury, and I did ccf to be able to put something on my UCAS form. We used the rifles too but I hated ccf. Bunch of synts the lot of them. Firing a gun was OK but ultimately not a big deal.
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I mean, you can just tell they weren’t separating their recyclables.
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