I’ll try to keep this as short as possible.
Three games this week-end; that is, if France once again do not shrug their way out of the most porous bubble (called a sieve here, see below) ever seen since John Boyd Dunlop invented the flat tire.
The teams:
England: At the moment they look like a good example of someone’s definition of madness: do the same thing over and over and expect a different result.
Wales: Don’t call them fortunate; they hate it. Napoléon would have a word with Pivac though. A disastrous autumn followed by a welcome revival. Tedious at times, lethal sometimes. Will finish first unless France get a GS.
France: Will achieve a GS (see Wales).
Ireland: Stale but still mid-table. Reaching their tipping point on the declankidney-o-meter. That green jersey looks more and more like a corset, including to the meanies usually in blue.
Scotland: The perennial underachiever. Couldn’t even beat covided France by forfeit. Lovely to watch though. Definitely the colour of a dark horse.
Italy: they prove that the old adage “it’s easier to organise defence than attack” is plain rubbish. They produced lovely moves but they could not catch a slug on a Zimmer frame.
The games:
Italy vs Wales: makes me sad that a 6 Nations game is a foregone conclusion. Italy have unearthed some exciting new players but they lost what was their main strength, a solid if unimaginative pack. Their scrum is so wobbly they could hire Australians to improve them, the line-out is a mess and their defensive line look from above like a child’s drawing of a bolt of lightning. The only uncertainty is whether Wales will get the bonus point before or after the oranges. As for Wales, it’s a bit strange not to experiment a bit more, most of the team being a known quantity. Pivac probably wants battle hardened warriors for next week’s game, but it looks like a missed opportunity to blood new players. I’ll watch it, if only for AWJ and of course for Liam Williams: he may look like a horse rider but he’s a superb full back.
England vs France: both teams pick themselves but for different reasons. Eddie is so conservative he’d make Maggie look like a socialist. Apart from the obvious, he seems quite reluctant to change a formula that has shown its limitations. Scotland, who play a similar game to France, cruelly exposed them. And so did Wales in a different style. In both games England seemed incapable of changing gear and controlling their discipline. Of course, they’ll be more fit and the inclusion of Malins will bring more threat but Daly is still on the bench. Funny how a vibrant club game does not translate into a more fluid national squad.
France easily beat England in Paris last year and came close to winning the AI cup with a B team. It certainly helps in terms of confidence, but this is different. They might be as rusty as England, after the covid bubble burst. They also have the same problem as England in terms of discipline and the team that will remain on Andrew Brace’s side will take a big step ahead. But France have been rebuilding seriously for the past two years, they have a young but settled team, they know what to do and they’ll trust their ability to do it. A curiosity: France’s bench will be 6/2 whereas England’s will be 5/3.
I can see only one outcome. If the packs cancel one another, which I expect, then France have more threat in the backs. France by one score. With a bonus point, like Wales? Nah. A win would be good enough.
Scotland/Ireland: this should be a cracking game and it’s a hard one to call. Both teams lost to Wales, with one man down, but in different fashion. Both could’ve won (fine margins etc.) but I thought Scotland were the most enterprising of the three.
Ireland play a well-rehearsed game, easy to read, hard to stop. Sexton is a fading force but the way they play, he can still do the job for a couple of years. What’s that I hear? Deep sighs from the notablog showrunner? And where is Cooney, anyway?
I expect a lot of box-kicking, some good chases, some not so good and then beware Hogg and friends.
Just like France, Scotland might be a bit rusty for missing a game but I heard they played within their clubs. They should play a looser game than Ireland, with more unpredictability. Finn had a mediocre game last week with Racing. Was he keeping his powder dry? It does not really matter because Scotland have proven last year they can play without Finn, and well.
My money would be on a Scotland win but not by much.
I hope you all enjoy the week-end of rugby and I hope the refs will not be at centre stage like two weeks ago.
Oh, and before I go, a little recipe. No need for a sieve, but keep one handy, just in case you need to escape from Marcatraz (that’s what the French players nicknamed their rugby camp in Marcoussis, south of Paris).
The most famous omelette in France is served by La Mère Poulard restaurant (overrated and overpriced) in the Mont Saint Michel. It may not be the best omelette but it’s quite striking.
You’ll need 10 eggs.
2 table spoons of crème fraîche
40 g of butter
Salt, pepper
It will serve 4 people or a prop.
Save two eggs for the end.
Separate the yolks from the white. Whip the yolks lightly, but the whites ferociously with the salt. If by hand, at least several minutes, so they become almost solid.
Melt butter in a hot pan, add the yolks. When they begin to stick to the pan, add crème fraîche and the whipped whites. Do not stir. Make sure it does not stick too hard on the bottom. When ready, fold the omelet in two, so it looks like this:
Spray freshly ground pepper on top and serve immediately. Some in an upside down universe recommend Latour ‘82 with it, but it’s bollocks. I have yet to find a wine that goes well with eggs. Cider will be fine.
While you enjoy your first fluffed omelette, take the remaining eggs and throw them at my face when – if, he says tentatively? – my predictions, as usual, do not come true. As I said, I tried to keep this as short as possible.
As foretold by Flair99
Onna telly this week
Friday 12th March
| Zebre v Leinster | 17:45 | Premier Sports 2 |
| Bristol v Wasps | 19:45 | BT Sport 1 |
| Munster v Scarlets | 20:00 | S4C / Premier Sports 2 |
| Glasgow v Ospreys | 20:00 | Premier Sports 1 |
Saturday 13th March
| Newcastle v Bath | 12:30 | BT Sport Extra |
| Exeter v Harlequins | 12:30 | BT Sport Extra |
| Italy v Wales | 14:15 | ITV / S4C |
| Northampton v Sale | 14:45 | BT Sport Extra |
| Gloucester v Leicester | 15:00 | BT Sport Extra |
| England v France | 16:45 | ITV |
| Dragons v Ulster | 19:35 | Premier Sports 1 |
| Connacht v Edinburgh | 19:35 | Premier Sports 2 |
Sunday 14th March
| Treviso v Cardiff Not-Blues | 13:00 | Premier Sports 1 |
| London Irish v Worcester | 13:00 | BT Sport 1 |
| Scotland v Ireland | 15:00 | BBC1 |
Ovally Balls 
CJ Stander calls it quits as of July, moving back to South Africa (although not to play rugby):
https://rugby365.com/countries/ireland/why-cj-stander-is-returning-to-sa/
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What bothers me is that there appears to be a lot of misinformation around how covid spreads. As OT says there is little evidence to say that a crowd would cause a spike yet we are being told not to meet people outside until later in the year. Almost like a culture of staying indoors is trying to be normalised.
Again, this might be tin foil hattery.
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Deebs – somewhere Expro is laughing.
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I just got a call for a ‘Mr Craig’s Man’. Need to get better cover from the government.
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@Dab, is it okay if I give a sly wink to the unbloodied ones?
@Craigs – I was forced to listen to the entire repertoire of Linton Kwesi Johnson on a trip through the most barren and lifeless part of the Karoo Desert when i was at uni. Banning seems too good.
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@Craigs, I’m sure he is. But what about? Was always a bit of a lottery!
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@Craigs – He won’t be once they’ve also dropped Lowe and Gibson-Park and still beat Italy by 50 points.
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‘And stop fetishising bloody statues!!’
What’s craigs going to do with his CJ figurine?
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Actually, don’t answer that
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“What’s craigs going to do with his CJ figurine?”
Going, going, epigone.
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@craigs
A lot of knowledge that was previously uncontroversial has been rebadged as tin foil hattery. A year ago viruses couldn’t be transmitted asympomatically, but if you say that now you’re a covidiot or covid denier or something, despite there being no evidence that it can be transmitted like this. I used to teach measurement uncertainty to physics undergraduates, and now if I apply that knowledge to the covid case data I can see that the rise in cases that happened from late November to late December was an absolute work of fiction. Yet if I say that I’m a conspiracy theorist.
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Chimpie – it’s more of a shrine. In a temple. Which used to be my garage.
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Well if it can be boarded up from the inside then I’m sure it can be boarded up from the outside.
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OT
I can see that the rise in cases that happened from late November to late December was an absolute work of fiction
Due to more testing or were the levels already high? I think the most concerning thing (apart from the deaths) is the strain on the NHS so how does the rise of hospitalised patients factor in?
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CMW – not fully. Otherwise how would I conduct my sermons?
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Since you escaped it would be safest to board it up from the outside in case you end up in there listening to your sermons again. It won’t be the same without that statue anyway.
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@craigs
It’s complicated, but I couldn’t tell you what the levels were because I cannot believe the numbers.
There was more testing being rolled out in places like where I live, and everyone was going mad to get tested without having symptoms. Once you start doing mass testing of well people the false positives rates start to become a problem, so that’s one reason.
The weird one was around 21st November when the government changed the rules on the number of genes detected to constitute a positive PCR test. Originally you needed to detect all 3 genes to get a positive result, but towards the end of November the Government would accept just the detection of 1 of these genes. So you move from a positive result requiring the dection of A and B and C to a positive result requiring the detection of A or B or C. Just draw the Venn diagram and you’ll see that the probability of a positive result shoots up alarmingly. And so positive results shot up as you would expect, Christmas was cancelled etc.
What happened in January? Well they closed down most of the testing centres, and they stopped doing PCR tests on asymptomatic people and pointed them towards Lateral Flow Tests. PCR tests were just for the symptomatic people where it is much more reliable. And so cases have fallen massively.
All this is in the public domain so should be uncontroversial.
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Ulster’s Adam McBurney to Embra.
Scottish-qualified hooker, Willemse is leaving at the end of the season.
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Hard to disagree with this:
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I’m willing to believe that the government would like to crack down on protests, but I’m pretty sure they don’t want to keep everyone indoors – or keep businesses closed. Particularly Johnson. Quite the opposite.
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OT – there’s a graph the graun use which shows positive results vs total tests. It’s quite instructive given that so many more people are tested now.
It does make me wonder about how politicised this has become. It seems a lot of people are clamouring for a lockdown without understanding the stuff you just said purely to criticise the tories for not reacting fast enough (which they probably didn’t originally).
It also makes me laugh that you can have a pro rugby match but everyone in the stands needs to be seen to wear a mask. How is Gats going to get covid sitting on his own in the stands?
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Are you saying covid is massively overstated?
With any measurement technique less than 100% there’s going to be a degree of measurement uncertainty . Setting that aside aren’t the excess death figures a decent measure of the actual impact. these have certainly spiked above average according to the ONS. Difficult to gauge how that would have gone without lockdowns without having a handy control case.
There’s the flu issue; presumably there have been fewer flu deaths as it’s not being transmitted as easily due to covid restrictions.
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With mass testing there is also a problem with false negatives.
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“It also makes me laugh that you can have a pro rugby match but everyone in the stands needs to be seen to wear a mask. How is Gats going to get covid sitting on his own in the stands?”
People are deliberately stupid, though. Someone will see Gats without a mask in the stands and say, “well if it’s okay for him, I’m going down the unventilated pub with my mates and sit there getting pished for five hours”
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‘I’m willing to believe that the government would like to crack down on protests, but I’m pretty sure they don’t want to keep everyone indoors – or keep businesses closed. Particularly Johnson. Quite the opposite.’
Nah. It’s the first stage of the plan to turn us all into the the consuming hover chair blob-people from Wall-E.
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“I’m pretty sure they don’t want to keep everyone indoors… Particularly Johnson.”
I’ve got a plan to keep Johnson indoors that I can help them with if they change their minds.
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Nice to see the thievery going the other way for once, ticht.
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@chimpie
They’re the only reliable figure. I said that 12 months ago when the figures were under reported as you couldn’t get a test unless you were in hospital, and it applies when the cases were over stated.
I don’t know if we are reporting accurately now, but we are doing something daft like 1.5m tests a day. The quoted false positive rate for LFT is 0.34% which means there should be 5100 false positives daily. Guess how many cases there were reported yesterday? 5089.
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Chimpie – funny how those excess deaths came when the government wanted to do a lockdown. I wonder why they needed us off the street. What were they up to?
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“I wonder why they needed us off the street. What were they up to?”
They were trying to put up a statue of Maggie in Grantham, but they couldn’t even manage that, the useless bastards.
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The excess death figures are also a bit controversial. There is an Oxford prof, I forget his name but he has been pushing the false positives narrative for almost a year now, and he refuses to engage with anyone who points out that testing symptomatic people is extremely reliable and his false positive figures only work on paper, not with those who were being tested.
Anyway, he was the one that pushed for the 28 day limit for deaths to be recorded as due to Covid, which at first glance seems reasonable, the argument being that you can never recover from Covid, once you’ve had it you could die two years later and still be recorded as being a Covid victim.
However, we are seeing that Long Covid is a real problem and could indeed be a cause of death, basically we are still too close to this, we won’t be able to get a proper take on it for years, perhaps decades.
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I have a Covid jab booked for Saturday, unfortunately it means I’ll miss the first half of the Scotland Italy match.
I told my wife I might the give jab a miss and she actually took me seriously for a minute.
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You might to inject yourself with something a bit stronger watching this team at the moment….
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BB – as Sag would say it’s a bad week to give up heroin.
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we should be putting 40 on this iteration of Italy but I have no doubt there’ll be some kind cock-up. Players dropping like flies currently.
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Italy’re shot, Chimpie. Completely gone. You’ll have the bonus point by 50 minutes.
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Going back a bit:
‘And so positive results shot up as you would expect, Christmas was cancelled etc.’
Turned out there were a lot of cases & a large subsequent increase in deaths, trying to relax rules for Christmas was a really bad idea.
And going back to Autumn maybe an earlier lockdown wouldn’t have been such a bad idea. And before that getting an effective test , track & trace system would have been sensible.
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that would be nice, TomP, however, this is Scotland we’re talking about, When do us poor fans ever get an easy ride?
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In other news I’ve just bought the expansion pack for Bloodborne and will start playing it soon.
Cat will be pleased.
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Weapons include:
Amygdalen arm
Boom hammer
Church pick
Holy moonlight sword
Kos parasite.
Apparently you also get to fight the ‘Living Failures’ too. Is that where the game asks the player to punch themselves inna face?
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I’ve realised I don’t have the brainpower for such complicated games. I can just about manage pointing something and shooting stuff along with a bit of jumping about.
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No words.
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Really?
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@Chimpe, the promising Stormers lock, David Meihuizen, at 6’9″ and somewhere between 123kg and 127kg has opted to stay at the Stormers at least until the end of the 2022 season. I can’t link his Twitter feed, but he said (I may be paraphrasing) that “after seeing the shitshower that was Scotland’s lineout on Sunday, I thought ‘fuck me I’d rather be coached by Robbie Fleck’.”
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Fleck stopped coaching them in 2019, Deebs. John Dobson now.
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He’s a big boy, Deebee
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anyhoo, we went from winning 100% or our own lineout ball against England to 25% last weekend.
Ireland really did their homework, they seemed to know where it was going. I think this is the main reason we lost that game, totally unable to take advantage of penalties and keep possession.
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perhaps some notes got left in a taxi?
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my man Henry unlikely to play against Ireland – injured leg.
revised english bacline to tear ireland to shreds.
ireland by 10
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We’ve won the last 9 games we’ve played against Italy.
We’ve nilled them twice in that time (2020 and 2017).
We’ve won 24 of the 32 games we’ve played against Italy.
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