Little bitta English Premiership … women’s Six Nations.
Onna telly this week
Friday 16th April
| Northampton v London Irish | 19:45 | BT Sport 1 |
Saturday 17th April
| Sale v Gloucester | 12:30 | BT Sport Extra |
| Exeter v Wasps | 12:30 | BT Sport 3 |
| Ireland v France (women) | 14:15 | BBC iPlayer/Red Button; RTÉ Two |
| Scotland v Italy (women) | 17:00 | BBC iPlayer/Red Button |
| Newcastle v Bristol | 17:00 | Channel 5 / BT Sport 3 |
| Harlequins v Worcester | 17:00 | BT Sport Extra |
Sunday 18th April
| Bath v Leicester | 15:00 | BT Sport 3 |
Ovally Balls 
12:30!!!
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No it’s 8:30! Central African Time.
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From the last blog… Prince Edward / Duke of Wessex(?)
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Fun game between Saints and Irish. 5 tries in half an hour.
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Saints pulled away with 6 tries of their own. Last one a lovely kick through by Hutchison and a very nice kick on the run from Sleighthome to kill the ball then score the try. Irish now get one back! 10 tries in all (I think). 44-26.
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I needed to check on the spelling of someone’s name and have just come across this delectable sentence:
“In the early 1990s he was one of the prime movers in the worldwide mountain unicycling scene”
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It’s spelt avsfan, Tom
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Cheers, ticht.
It was in connection with a radio piece about penny farthing riding. A cool £1250 for your own pf if you want one.
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Our local cricket club matches are pausing for 90 minutes this afternoon to pay respect to Prince Philip. Luckily I’ll be watching the IPL on the box instead
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Glaws Sale looking fun, knock for knock and some great rugby, but Sale 10 just red carded for a straight red tip tackle. Shame for the game, maybe good for Glaws.
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Please take Hogg back to Glasgow – he is a crap full-back
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Insane passage of play with both sides playing festival rugby, end to end offloads both ends twice, with both teams intercepting try scoring passes. Lordy.
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Faf scked at scrum, ball flyhacked on for Zammos third attempt at dribble and pick up, hes missed two, this one he boots over the dead ball line.
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Fun first half, Sale down to 14 but still 12-8 up.
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Glaws have reason to be miffed at blocking lines and forward passes in the run up to Sales tries, but Sale playing well and go 22-8 up.
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Hoggy scores a lovely try. Not bad for a ‘crap’ full back. Maybe Baxter, Townsend, Cotter, Rennie and Gatland all know something about rugby when they pick him.
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Bring on BFB, he will sort it out.
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There you go, Ben Morgan on, Carreras scores.
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Glaws on a roll, Heinz levels it up.
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More crap play by hogg
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Another lovely try for the crap full back! n All his own work.
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I never denied that Hogg was a wonderful attacker but there are many better defensively.
He killed Wasps when the game was already won.
Love to watch him, though!
2nd half 33 – 0 to Exeter.
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More Royal funeral avoidance – you can watch Upminster CC vs Orsett & Thurrock play a preseason friendly
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Sale look like holding out, a penalty ahead an with the ball on Glaws line.
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His first try made it 17-13 – hardly when the game was won. The second one, yes, the game was won by then.
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BB – don’t ever believe that I think he is not a great player, just not a great defensive full-back.
Ever heard of a spectator’s fleeting exasperation!
Must be common in Scotland, surely!
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To be fair that charge down try he gave away in the first half was a crap bit of play. Needed a word with himself after that.
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Shades of the Pro Woo final against Leinster?
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After last week’s 45-0 win vs Wales, Ireland got a “bit of a land” vs France. 56-15. France were too powerful – Ireland didn’t play well but again France didn’t let them.
I guess the old (semi) professional vs amateur thing will come up again – but a lot of Ireland’s squad only took up rugby at uni or after school – paying a small squad is a sticking plaster…we need a pipeline of players. I think we can get there – for example my club fielded girls teams at U14 and U16 last autumn and we’ve the nucleus of an U18 team (mainly newbies). But that needs to be repeated across the country – none of our local rivals have much structure for girls.
One local club did have a good structure but invested so much in their one successful cohort as they went from U14 to U18 that everything else got neglected – seniors, other age groups – so they had no adult women’s team for them to move to and left no structures – so they had to re build from scratch.
It’s a long haul – and you can’t let initial success turn your head either
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Trisk, there’s a good pipeline of age group girls coming through at my club, with some of them doing really well and in the Ulster age group squads.
It was more difficult at adult level as there was a big group of women keen to play touch but not as interested in full contact training or competitive matches. In the end, three different clubs ended up coming together to play as one group in the league. It’s not been perfect as there’s tensions over where matches are played and clubs trying to tempt girls away from our club, but it’s definitely given a bit of a pathway for younger players until there’s a big enough cohort of players for an adults team in each club
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@MichaelW448
I recognise the story. We started an adult group but brought in contact too soon and lost about a third, and in truth the age profile meant it was never going to be more than a social team….
Locally, we had an initiative to band the clubs together for county team in AIL. Again, it’s a short term idea to have an adult team for players while clubs build their own structures. I think we agreed on 5 years. As it was 1 club contributing most of the players (and who had acted as am informal centre for women players across the county) we needed to tie them in.
Personally, I think ultimately it’s better not to detach adult teams from their under age pipeline (and vice versa – we’ve seen from Irish soccer it doesn’t look an effective model) but in order to offer adult rugby to those girls leaving U18s… it’s a good temporary option.
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And as for bigger clubs luring players away …. that’s an issue here too…. Cork/Limerick clubs enticing good U20s … less of a problem in Kerry as distance means players will stay with home club or move when they go to college.
But junior clubs do complain their promising players join AIL clubs and end up in the 2nds or on the bench – when they could be gradually introduced to adult rugby via the junior leagues.
Generally doesn’t add to good relations between senior and junior clubs.
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I recognise those stories too, Trisk and Mickey Numbers, in both the women’s and men’s games.
I remember an article by Willie John McBride in which he was saying the smaller clubs in Ulster are really struggling to keep going due to player numbers. The lads from Skerries said the same thing about the Dublin area when I last spoke to them and it’s certainly the same in Scotland.
As for players being lured away or poached, it’s almost part of the process, especially if you grow up in a tiny wee town like I did. You move on for college or work, so you try a new club, or if you’ve had a bit of success in playing representative rugby at school you might have ambitions to play further up the ladder and you know that your home town team are never going to be playing at the top level, as much as you’d want them to be.
It was fine when my wee town club were putting out a thirds as well as a Colts/U19s, you can cater for a few going away to play, but when your 2nds games are called off due to numbers as often as they are played and the first team sometimes suffers the same fate, it’s a different kettle of ball games.
My daughter played a wee bit at school, then took it up pretty seriously at Uni, but she said some of the other teams were brutal, not just in the play, but in their attitude during the game, punching, swearing, then walking off without a handshake at the end and absolutely no socialising afterwards. It wasn’t just one side either.
That really surprised me, tbh.
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@ticht
what do you think has bred that anti-social/selfish attitude?
For me, the perpetrators are missing a large part of what makes team sport so wonderful.
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This was on the 42 yesterday:
https://www.the42.ie/rosie-stewart-trailblazers-5412288-Apr2021/
With women’s rugby part of the problem is what you lads have noted – just not enough women play the game yet so it’s difficult to get to where players and administrators want the game to be.
One of the problems in English club rugby is the need to have a certain number of front-rowers on the bench for teams in league games, which has a knock-on effect lower down the club. Also, travel – a club at the 5th level in England such as Camborne in Cornwall will have league games in Bristol, Gloucester, Bournemouth, all of which are a long way from home.
West Cork is a booming area of rugby. I read this piece earlier this month. It’s taken a lot of effort but the work’s bearing fruit:
https://www.southernstar.ie/sport/long-read-rugby-boom-shows-it-has-put-down-firm-roots-in-west-cork-4220223
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Slade, I can’t be sure but I would guess that it must start with those that run the rugby clubs at the other Unis.
There is apparently an inverted snobbery against Bristol, but as you say rugby usually transcends that.
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@TomP
The Southern Star piece name checks Ray Gadsden who I know reasonably well…. he’s done terrific work all over Kerry and Cork to promote rugby in schools, clubs – especially in what were regarded as (and probably still are) solid GAA areas… getting it into schools – even as tag/touch – helps dispell the fear/mystery.
It’s a funny thing that although football can be quite tough – there’s a generalised fear of the physicality of rugby. Mainly I think because they only see top level rugby (6N or Heino) and not club games.
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I see Sweetnam made his debut for La Rochelle yesterday, trisk.
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And for Tony from the Bridge fans:
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mmm…stats and the real world:
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/apr/18/obscure-maths-bayes-theorem-reliability-covid-lateral-flow-tests-probability
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@slade
If Tom Chivers had written that article a few weeks ago he’d have been castigated as a “covidiot” on telly by media-friendly scientists.
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‘media-friendly scientists’ – sound like snake-oilers to me
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@slade
John Edmunds from London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine is one who is always on the telly trying to scare everyone.
Another who is always on the telly and said that the AZ vaccine doesn’t work against the SA variant (it quite obviously does) is Devi Shridar from Edinburgh University.
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pity – I thought Shridar seemed quite good, to my ignorant eye
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Art Garfunkel has just gone through to round 2 in the snooker. I wonder if he has a metal detector.
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OT, Devi Sridhar is seen in some quarters as being very much pro Scottish independence, her words have become highly politicised by unionists, and the politics are little to do with the pandemic and everything to do with the upcoming call for a second referendum.
I can’t find her actual quote, but it seems to be based on a study which found the AZ vaccine didn’t provide 100% protection against mild to moderate symptoms from the SA variant. However, those involved in the study were all fairly young (median age 30) which could account for the zero number of more severe cases.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/williamhaseltine/2021/03/17/astrazeneca-vaccine-fails-to-protect-against-the-south-african-variant/?sh=5867d2866526
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Sridhar got a bit of kicking last summer when she talked about Scotland having pretty much eradicated covid19* at one point, but her attackers (unionists mainly) were confusing eradication with elimination in public health terms, they are very different measures.
*my terms, she may have used slightly different words to mean nearing in on extremely low to zero transmission
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now this is what I call a snooker shot!:
https://www.theguardian.com/sport/video/2021/apr/13/louis-heathcote-produces-most-extraordinary-pocket-rebound-snooker-shot-video
……and he doesn’t bat an eyelid!
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That’s a helluva shot, Slade! I know from my days on the pool circuit, flukes like that required you to stroll nonchalantly to the next shot to try and con everyone into thinking you meant it. A quick quizzical glance at your cue tip and a bit of chalk completed the ruse. Usually followed by missing a sitter.
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I don’t suppose Sag ever looks in on these pages, but in my mind he does take the occasional look. I’m sure he’d love this, the brother of a friend of mine is attempting to recreate a very complicated synth from the 80s
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