I considered writing a proper Six Nations preview for this weekend’s match, but as it’s Ireland v Italy, decided not to bother. This means that I have probably jinxed Ireland. Italy by 5.
You can have the teams for the internationals, though.
Scotland v Georgia
Scotland: 15. Blair Kinghorn, 14. Darcy Graham, 13. Chris Harris, 12. James Lang, 11. Duhan van der Merwe, 10. Adam Hastings, 9. Ali Price, 1. Rory Sutherland, 2. Fraser Brown (capt), 3. Zander Fagerson, 4. Ben Toolis, 5. Scott Cummings, 6. Jamie Ritchie, 7. Hamish Watson, 8. Matt Fagerson.
Replacements: 16. Stuart McInally, 17. Oli Kebble, 18. Simon Berghan, 19. Rob Harley, 20. Nick Haining, 21. Cornell du Preez, 22. George Horne, 23. Finn Russell.
Georgia: 15. Soso Matiashvili, 14. Akaki Tabutsadze, 13. Deme Tapladze, 12. Merab Sharikadze (capt), 11. Sandro Todua, 10. Tedo Abzhandadze, 9. Vasil Lobzhanidze, 1. Mikheil Nariashvili, 2. Jaba Bregvadze, 3. Lexo Kaulashvili, 4. Nodar Cheishvili, 5. Grigol Kerdikoshvili, 6. Otar Giorgadze, 7. Beka Saghinadze, 8. Beka Gorgadze.
Replacements: 16. Shalva Mamukashvili, 17. Guram Gogichashvili, 18. Giorgi Melikidze, 19. Giorgi Javakhia, 20. Giorgi Tkhilaishvili, 21. Gela APrasidze, 22. Giorgi Kveseladze, 23. Tamaz Mchedlidze.
That’s a very Giorgi-heavy bench.
Ireland v Italy
Ireland: 15. Jacob Stockdale, 14. Andrew Conway, 13. Garry Ringrose, 12. Bundee Aki, 11. Hugo Keenan, 10. Jonathan Sexton (C), 9. Conor Murray; 1. Cian Healy, 2. Rob Herring, 3. Andrew Porter, 4. Tadhg Beirne, 5. James Ryan, 6. Caelan Doris, 7. Will Connors, 8. CJ Stander
Replacements: 16. Dave Heffernan, 17. Ed Byrne, 18. Finlay Bealham, 19. Ultan Dillane, 20. Peter O’Mahony, 21. Jamison Gibson-Park, 22. Ross Byrne, 23. Robbie Henshaw
Italy: 15. Jayden Hayward, 14. Edoardo Padovani, 13. Luca Morisi, 12. Carlo Canna, 11. Mattia Bellini, 10. Paolo Garbisi, 9. Marcello Violi; 1. Danilo Fischetti, 2. Luca Bigi (C), 3. Giosuè Zilocchi, 4. Marco Lazzaroni, 5. Niccolò Cannone, 6. Sebastian Negri, 7. Braam Steyn, 8. Jake Polledri
Replacements: 16. Gianmarco Lucchesi, 17. Simone Ferrari, 18. Pietro Ceccarelli, 19. David Sisi, 20. Johan Meyer, 21. Maxime Mbanda, 22. Callum Braley, 23. Federico Mori
France v Wales
France: Anthony Bouthier; Teddy Thomas, Vrimi Vakatawa, Gael Fickou, Vincent Rattez; Romain Ntamack, Antoine Dupont; Cyril Baille, Julien Marchand, Mohamed Haouas; Bernard Le Roux, Damien Willemse; François Cros, Charles Ollivon (capt), Gregory Aldritt.
Reps: Camille Chat, Jean-Baptiste Gros, Demba Bamba, Romain Taofifenua, Dylan Cretin, Baptiste Serin, Arthur Vincent, Thomas Ramos.
Wales: Leigh Halfpenny; George North, Jonathan Davies, Nick Tompkins, Josh Adams; Dan Biggar, Rhys Webb; Rhys Carre, Ryan Elias, Samson Lee, Cory Hill, Alun Wyn Jones (capt), Aaron Wainwright, Justin Tipuric, Taulupe Faletau.
Reps: Sam Parry, Nicky Smith, Dillon Lewis, Seb Davies, James Davies, Gareth Davies, Rhys Patchell, Louis Rees-Zammit.
On the telly
Friday 23rd October
| Pumas v Stormers | 17:55 | Sky Sports Mix |
| Scotland v Georgia | 19:30 | ITV4 |
| Leinster v Zebre | 19:35 | Premier Sports 1 |
| Treviso v Scarlets | 20:15 | S4C / Premier Sports 2 |
Saturday 24th October
| Lions v Cheetahs | 15:25 | Sky Sports Arena |
| Ireland v Italy | 15:30 | ITV / STV |
| Ospreys v Glasgow | 17:30 | Premier Sports 2 |
| Bulls v Sharks | 17:55 | Sky Sport Arena |
| Exeter v Wasps | 18:00 | BT Sport 1 |
| Ireland v Italy (women) | 18:30 | iPlayer |
| France v Wales | 20:00 | S4C / ITV4 |
Sunday 25th October
| Scotland v France (women) | 14:20 | BBC Sport website / BBC Alba |
| Ulster v Dragons | 15:00 | Premier Sports 1 |
| Edinburgh v Connacht | 19:35 | Premier Sports 1 |
Monday 26th October
| Munster v Cardiff | 20:15 | Premier Sports 1 |
Ovally Balls 
Go for it, Deebee!
Here we’re heading for another full lockdown, possibly starting Thursday, so we’ll have time to read.
In case rugby still goes ahead at the weekend, Leroux has been cleared during his citing but Teddy Thomas won’t play as he’s injured (yet again).
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We’re in heavier lockdown from today, which is a public holiday. We’ve even got a 9 pm to 5 am curfew.
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We already had the 9 pm to 6 am curfew. Inefficient apparently. Looks like déjà vu all over again.
But this time during the bleak days of winter. This is going to be very difficult for so many people.
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Am not sure how effective will be either. Restaurants and pubs have been closed for a couple of weeks now anyway, which would have been most of the traffic.
Shops are being closed on Sundays, which’ll push more people into shopping on other days so may be counter-productive. However, it makes the CR more like Germany and that’s a long-held ambition in terms of the economy.
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Leroux has been cleared during his citing
#Justice4Bernie! Was the presiding officer one J Marler by any chance?
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We’re in Level 1 here (the least restrictive) at the moment, but I have little doubt we’ll be back to a higher level quite soon. People here simply don’t take it seriously at all. We really are a bunch of gung-ho dickheads. And I’m confident there won’t be furious denials of that here!
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The glorious spring weather was an absolute lifesaver during the first lockdown here. As Flair says it will be an unhappy slog with winter closing in.
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Blue Bulls v Lions in the Under 21 final on Friday, Deebs. Your lads are coming together nicely after a shaky start. Snyman is a brilliant flanker and Mollenze is a handier player than I thought last year. We’re stacked with talent. Bernard van der Linde, the (reserve?) 9, is all class. Should be a good game.
For those who want to watch it, it’ll be streamed live here: https://www.youtube.com/c/supersport/videos
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Re the lockdowns does anyone know why there’s stuff on shelves in Wales that you can’t buy? Is it to stop people popping out for crisps or to help Geoff Bezos? Is booze a necessity? What about cigarettes and tampons (I normally do the shop so the last item is very concerning. No one wants to come home empty handed)?
So many questions today.
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Offies are open in Wales, craigs.
Why the stuff is on the shelves but you can’t but it? Possibly a warehousing problem?
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@craigs
The Wales thing is all about Labour showing off how tough they would be and much more effective than the effete Tories (Starmer kept banging on about a “firebreak”, Burnham kept complaining that the lockdown was lifted too early etc). Problem is like most politicians they’re too thick to realise that it just means more business for Amazon. It’s an absolute disgrace.
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Not sure that it’s an issue about the balance of the economy at the moment, OT. Or that Burnham’s complaints can be put down to wanting to show how tough he is.
Welsh government showing they’re as bad at messaging as the London government.
Starmer … where to start?
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Tbh I think it just makes Boris look a bit better and more sensible than he is.
Which is always the goal.
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The reasoning behind the stuff on the supermarket shelves that is not for sale (ie non-essential items) is that small independent shops were put at a disadvantage in having to close during the lockdown period.
The independent traders who were interviewed on the news were behind the decision
It might well be that Amazon will be the beneficiaries, but I do follow the reasoning by the Welsh leadership.
My wife has been saying for years that the high st as we know it only has a very limited lifespan left, this situation will only accelerate the demise.
I don’t like Amazon, but I can’t fault them for choice, price or customer service.
It stinks, but that is the case that the vast majority of their customers have found, too.
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The Wales thing is all about Labour showing off how tough they would be and much more effective than the effete Tories (Starmer kept banging on about a “firebreak”, Burnham kept complaining that the lockdown was lifted too early etc). Problem is like most politicians they’re too thick to realise that it just means more business for Amazon. It’s an absolute disgrace.
We had similar during our hard lockdown. You could buy a vest, but not a T-shirt. You could buy tinned food and fresh food in supermarkets, but not cooked food – which is something that many frontline workers relied on between exhausting shifts. Online sales were banned because it was reasoned it created unfair competition for small traders, but ignored the fact that deliveries to your home were a far safer and better way of keeping social distancing than forcing people to go to malls.
To me, the biggest problem is that the majority of politicians (certainly here, but I’d say in most countries) are career politicians who have never worked in, or run, a company, a small business, a utility or anything else and are abso-fucking-lutely cluess about the real world.
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I’m yet to be convinced that Google, Apple, Microsoft or any international conglomerate is any worse than Amazon tbh.
I try not to buy stuff that I don’t need, or to buy second hand, but ultimately that destroys manufacturing of any kind if taken to its logical conclusion
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I think they said that it was unfair on other shops that normally sold those items but where forced to close completely, no ? Actually seems to make sense, if you are looking at two weeks and then reopening, protects business of clothes shops, hardware stores etc .
Starmer, well, he’s right, isn’t he. should have locked down the whole country a week or so ago, its maybe too late now. As for here, figures well distorted. Heard yesterday of a care home locally that currently has 23 out of 36 residents infected, and 8 out of 11 staff. Town figures for current infections, 0.
Of course, the mask wearing thing is still causing disputes, altho most stores request a mask to enter, and there appears to be very little restrictions on anything, except for social distancing in bars and restaurants/diners.
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Deebee, politicians who have never “run a company”. Unke Donald Trump or Silvio Berlusconi or the Czech PM Andrej Babis?
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Thauma – something in your inbox!
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Ticht
I’m yet to be convinced that Google, Apple, Microsoft or any international conglomerate is any worse than Amazon tbh.
Well, I’m pretty sure Google, Apple and Microsoft treat their workers a lot better. They also haven’t undercut and put out of business thousands of small businesses – first independent bookshops, then all sorts of other industries.
That’s not to say they don’t have other nefarious practices, of course.
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Nottingham about to go into Tier 3 despite numbers of new daily cases falling.
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TomP, I was thinking more on the lines of the Korean cabinet from a few years back. There was a great comparison in one of our papers between their Cabinet and ours – most of ours were lawyers (this is before the semi-literate mob who arrived with Zuma), capable of good legislation, but not that good at implementation, whilst 80% of the Korean cabinet was comprised of engineers (lots), doctors, lawyers (yes) and financiers (yes, but not the Rees-Mogg variety), who had all had careers in actual companies (again, not the Rees-Mogg variety). I’ve only met a few career politicians and they’re uniformly out of touch with the reality of running a business successfully, large or small. I could come up with a list of far-left Presidents and rulers for life that are on a par with your selections, but that’s not the point I’m trying to make.
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Thaum, back inna day when I did a programming course, it was early days in the Java and OO world, Microsoft put many small software houses out of business, they were made to break up parts of their company because of their practice of bundling software – now you have to buy Office on subscription.
Google has dominated the search engine world, now they track your every move online and we are targeted with adverts according to our browsing histories.
Apple have got a bad rep for overseas production T&Cs
I put the argument to a small trader over Amazon destroying businesses, but he argued that it was business rates that did that, and they are nothing to do with Amazon – his argument was for more complicated than that, but that was one strand of it.
I’m not sticking up for Amazon btw, not in the slightest.
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Ticht, the whole market economy thing is a real headache. I always try to buy locally made stuff, whereever I am, and preferably from small independent producers. but it is not always easy, and usually over twice the price of a cheap Chinese import from Amazon. We have covered this before, I suspect. Like the Buy British campaigns of the seventies, most people will piss and moan about bloody foreigners taking our jobs, or rant about disgusting fascists repressing poor asylum seekers, and then buy the cheapest possible option, regardless of whether it is made in Bangladesh by slave children from byproducts of a nuclear facility or not. A nice drill set made in USA by union labour at 300 bucks, or one from Harbor Freight made in China for 60. Mind you, there are improvements. I can buy jeans made in the US from US made materials for less than a price of Levis. Better quality too. ( and if you are serious about your drills, the US made ones are better quality as well, but the Chinese ones are cheap enough to throw away after a couple of uses and sill be more economical for most people.)
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Ticht – yep, I agree with all that. And then there’s the tax-avoidance factor.
But at least their employees don’t have to clock out to go to the toilet (at least, not Google & Microsoft’s – as you say, overseas Apple workers are exploited).
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we are targeted with adverts according to our browsing histories
This concerns me as I’m currently getting a lot of ads for women’s summer dresses. I haven’t worn one since I was a student. Way before the Internets. Apropos the discussion above, all the big tech companies have put smaller and independent companies out of the market. Outsourcing offshore ditto. But hasn’t that been the case since the Industrial Revolution, just at a far faster pace today than before?
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“This concerns me as I’m currently getting a lot of ads for women’s summer dresses”
me too, and it’s coming up for November!
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One compromise for those who don’t want to fuck over amazon employees but are too cheap and lazy to make any real changes is to buy off amazon marketplace or ebay from a local company. Yeah the bad guys get a cut bit at least it’s a small business that gets your custom.
Or you could steal, but that means leaving the house generally.
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Scottish and a prop forward – obvious market for ladies summer dresses. Why, I coulda sworn I saw Schoemy the Dreamy wearing one whilst slicing biltong in his Edinburgh shop the other day!
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Didn’t David Cameron run a drinks company?
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Deebs – that was a kilt you neanderthal!!!
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I just had to share this. Tichtlet the elder was seriously ill a few years ago, to the point she was pulled out of doing A levels because they thought her heart was about to go phut at any moment, she is fully recovered, but faces a lifetime of vigilance.
Today she received an email telling her she’d achieved a distinction in her Masters degree to go along with the first class honours she got around 14 months ago.
I just shed a private tear.
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Chapeau Tichtlet!!!
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Has anyone actually seen OT and Brian Moore inna same room?
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@craigs
I think Cameron’s only job outside of politics was as Director of Comms/PR for Carlton TV. I can’t remember if it was that job or the bag carrier to Norman Lamont but certainly he got one of them because Prince Charles rang up and “suggested” it would be in their interest to employ him.
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@craigs
Too much fish for me, not enough pie. Ben Shaws is good though, that was the pop as delivered by the pop man when I were a lad.
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Looks like some scraps in there too, OT. You could throw the fish out and just nibble on them.
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OT – I think Blairmore holdings held shares in coca cola and others which is what I am mis remembering.
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Sbt – he could also eat the batter.
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There’s a big cultural gap in the chippies either side of the Pennines. I once went to a chippy in Huddersfield that didn’t sell pies but did have about 9 types of fish.
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That’s fantastic news Ticht, I’m sure you and your whole family are relieved and pleased
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Brilliant news about your daughter, Ticht. Is that the daughter that we did the questionnaire for last year I think it was?
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That’s the one, BB.
Thanks all, it’s been a good day.
There’s sod all work around for her, she can’t even give her time away, the internships that she would have been going to in order to get a foot on the first rung are being taken up by people with PhDs and work experience under their belts, Coz Covid.
Hey ho.
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@ticht
What does she want to do?
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Chippies in Kent do fish, pies, sausages, chicken, deep fried haloumi, you name it.
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Hi people!
In other news – Rugby!
Here’s a link to the new Heini draw for the coming season.
I don’t really understand how the playing pools work – but I see Exeter have been rewarded with Glasgow (again) and Toulouse (again)!
In the text it says that Glasgow have Exeter and Lyon for example
Anyone got a table of the fixtures?
https://www.epcrugby.com/2020/10/28/heineken-champions-cup-pool-draw-maps-out-first-steps-on-road-to-marseille-2021/?dm_i=4BJH,XWEH,5H5BBQ,47TEF,1
Enjoy………………………..
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Mmmm – fish, batter scraps and chips – + mayo of course!
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Such a great day for you Ticht! And Tichtlet! And the whole family. Now you’ve shed a tear, settle a dram or two.
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This will explain it, Slade….
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OT, her qualifications are in Psychology and for years she wanted to go into the clinical side of things, but now she is looking more into doing research, so she’s thinking of going on to do a PhD, but some experience wouldn’t hurt.
I’m advising my lot to stay in education as long as they can just now, try to ride all this out
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