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 
Damn you, Craigs, for your intervening post.
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“We still had the armoury”
Well where else would you keep the large rubber band?
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It’s a great song, they even made a film about it.
Thaum, the Alice album was released with another, Blood Money, they were songs from stage plays Waits and Brennan were involved in, iirc.
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Sorry Thaum.
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CMW – apparently it was like a toy plane fired with a band. But bigger, with a seat for a child to sit in.
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The armoury had about 30 rifles in it. Naturally.
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Magic mushrooms on our school field, I never indulged at the time though.
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*Bagel update*
I had the remaining bagel and fish for my tea tonight. The bagel was understandably a bit stale*, but still better than the shite you get at the supermarket.
*Shortly before my ill-fated trip back home, in mid-December, when I broke my foot, I bought a loaf of rye bread from the corner shop. Had one sandwich off it. It tasted horrible. Put the rest in the fridge.
What with the broken foot, I stayed at the mister’s for the healing period, ie about 8 weeks. When I returned home and opened the fridge, the bread was there, and looked exactly the same as the day I’d bought it.
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“I like stories”
The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe has beavers in it.
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Marler’s new team-mate at Harlequins, England wing Chris Ashton, admitted he wouldn’t have taken it as well as Jones did.
And the 44-times capped England wing added he too had been a victim of having a ‘finger poked up his bum’ on more than one occasion out on the rugby pitch.
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When my daughters were in their early teens I used to play the Blood Money album at their Halloween parties,
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We haven’t reached them yet though. Edmund’s just had his first dose of turkish delight. The Middle One likes the witch for various rather Edmund-like reasons. Bit worried about her.
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Ticht – think I’ve seen the film too.
Dad Woody is a bit too country for me, but I can just stomach Arlo. He certainly has a dry wit.
And look – you lot are being a bad influence on me again. I should be in bed.
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I was in the supermarket today.
The people are stockpiling dogfood and canned lager, by the looks of things.
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CMW – my mother likes Turkish Delight. ‘Nuff said.
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I guess however long a ban he gets Marler will now mainly be remembered for fondling other players’ genitals and racially abusing people. I suppose he could have been remembered for a shorter time for being a good England prop. So it goes.
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CMW – how did you know they were magic mushrooms?
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When I read it myself as a child I didn’t have the first idea what turkish delight was. Didn’t find out for years.
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@Craigs – that would have been the giggling and probably hallucinating schoolchildren being sick after lunch.
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CMW – circumstantial evidence. I need proof!!
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The Middle One is also something of a literalist and doesn’t appreciate people endlessly talking nonsense which is even more concerning.
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I’m really pissed off about the panic buying, it just proves to me that people are basically selfish and stupid and that the government should actually step in and ration stuff because people cannot be trusted to act as individuals.
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@Craigs – If it helps there was the time a girl in the year above ate one. She shrank but her neck grew high into the trees where a pigeon mistook her for a serpent. Can’t remember her name.
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Ticht – I’ve been trying to finish a pizza oven in my patio whilst I have time off. Requires brick cutting and dust masks. On Saturday I went to 5 hardware shops and couldn’t find any.
Dust masks will not help in this situation Ffs.
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CMW – sounds like she also had cake in her system.
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Some blasts from the past on that Graun blog. I was just lurking at that point – didn’t make the final leap to commenting until AoD came into being.
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@BB – same here. Don’t remember reading that article though. I feel that mention of such wonders as “the 47th Evans” might have made me take the plunge if I had.
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@CMW – I was also looking back through some old photos and came across one I took of the pub where we had the Blog Meet in 2016. Realised that there’s only you, me, Thaum and Iks who still regularly post from that time out of the about 12 folk who were there.
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@Thaum – Mrs CMW tells me her mother also used to like the ‘Turkish Delight’ bars you could buy in all cornershops. Perhaps it’s a certain generation of Norn Irish thing.
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@BB – that sounds about right though I think a few of those there were either already not posting regularly or never really did. Think this may be fairly typical of the subsequent meets, but as I haven’t been to any of the others I don’t really believe in them.
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Whatever happened to Boa? And what’s happened to Brookter (I could just ask him now I think about it)?
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Ticht – yer man has a new video out.
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I’ve sailed around Inchkeith, Craigs, but never been on it. It looks like it is all ex MoD stuff there from war time and maybe afterwards.
That bike looks rather good.
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ticht, when it comes to singing at South African schools games this one is the business
TomP – that gave me goosebumps and a wee bit of moisture in the eye region. Ahem. Back in my day, we had all the originality of “When the Saints Go Marching In”. Times have changed so much here since then and that song encapsulates everything about why I live here: when I was at Saints it was almost entirely white and many of the parents were either British directly, or 1st generation Saffers, with all the trimmings of colonial wannabe-Brits. We even had kids with Afrikaans names like Botha who pronounced it Bow-thar ( a bit like Mrs Bucket). My family was no different to be fair. I love that the school – and presumably the pupils and their parents – have forged a proper South African identity.
The facilities at the school are outstanding too, from sports fields and facilities (cricket, rugby and hockey pitches) to tennis and squash courts, swimming pools, water polo pools, athletics tracks, a gym, rowing tanks (no idea what they’re actually called), to the science labs, computer training facilities, libraries etc. I can hear the chorus across Ovally Balls now: so what went wrong, Deebee? Piss off, the lotta ya!
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people cannot be trusted to act as individuals.
Still one of my favourite scenes:
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Deebee, the mix of race both on the pitch and in the stands at the games yesterday was something the really stood out. All these kids singing their school songs, just as kids… it was great
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Though presumably education in the township schools is rather different to the wonderful facilities these children have access to.
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Ticht – it should be for the price (£7,699).
https://www.hargrovescycles.co.uk/38103/products/2020-santa-cruz-heckler-carbon-cc-s-275-inch-electric-mountain-bike.aspx
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I always wanted a Santa Cruz growing up. For some reason it never happened.
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Though presumably education in the township schools is rather different to the wonderful facilities these children have access to.
World’s apart, sadly. In some rural provinces, kids don’t get textbooks until halfway through the academic year and are still being taught under trees or in collapsing classrooms of 50+ per teacher – many of whom are barely more qualified than those they teach. An article in our press yesterday (I think) focused on a school that has one pit latrine for 600 kids. Kids in rural Eastern Cape and KwaZulu-Natal still have to cross rivers on foot to get to school – and face the prospect of drowning or being attacked by crocodiles. It’s disgusting.
Now, it’s not that the money isn’t available – education is the largest part of our budget each year- it is just squandered by a vicious political elite and the teachers union, SADTU, that has turned this budget into their own get rich quick scheme. President Ramaphosa rightly said the other day (in response to FW de Klerk’s statement that apartheid wasn’t a crime against humanity) that it was and was accepted as such by the UN. 26 years on and huge swathes of the ANC are perpetuating apartheid by literally stealing the housing, water and sanitation, education and healthcare budgets from the poorest communities. For those of us more fortunate, we’ve simply outsourced education, safety, healthcare etc to the private sector, at great expense.
South Africa is fast approaching a crossroads between the reformists (nominally) under Ramaphosa, and the blatantly crooked and corrupt factions in his own party and others that simply want to keep plundering resources for their own lifestyles. If we’d used the vast resources our country has correctly over the decades (including under apartheid), pretty much every kid would have access to facilities not too far off those at my old school. Fuck politicians.
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https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2020/mar/10/i-feel-betrayed-the-british-army-veteran-stuck-in-fiji-because-of-immigration-rules
Grrrrrr.
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Ticht – I’ve referred mainly to schools in rural areas above, but in many townships the schools are dire too. There are always heartening stories of schools who achieve great final year results despite having no electricity or decent facilities, but these are generally outweighed by the number of schools where not one final year student gets a university pass. Government’s response to higher failure rates has been to drop the pass rate, which is now as low as 30% for STEM subjects. Abysmal. Fuck Politicians!
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There was a long twitter thing last week about apple and mars bar sandwiches handed out at Presbyterian funerals….
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Ah the best of AoD lives on, righteous indignation, Presbyterian daftness and dodgy 70s tv ads for shite chocolate.
It’s a wonderful thing.
Btw, I bet the lassie in the ad was from somewhere like Chichester, the guy is probably from Slough
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SBT, I saw that article, and another one elsewhere about the costs people who have served in the army are facing, it really is an outrage.
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My school had a smoking fence.
We used to meet the PE teacher down there at break.
There was a concrete patch and a field full of dog shit and needles.
We got banned from playing most sports against other local schools because of the violence.
But we were happy and glad of it. Obviously.
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I remember that advert. Turkish delight is rank.
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Fry’s Five Boys
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is that the Fry’s Chocolate Cream bar with a different flavour in each section?
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