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 
Your mate’s brother is a synth. Broke the blog.
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Pfft
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I’ve been Impffffft, Chimpie.
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Al Dickinson apparently moving from Bristol Bears to Glasgow as scrum coach.
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I think a 12 hour break in posting is enough….. classic example of burying bad news – Mourinho leaves Spurs got no headlines (or few) thanks to the furore over the Euro Super League in soccer.
Have to admit being strangely untouched by both stories.
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Trisk, Mourinho being SACKED by Spurs didn’t really do much for me either. This Super League malarky does piss me off though. There is already an elite competition in the form of the Champions League – which was expanded from the old European Cup to get more clubs involved and more money involved and in some ways entrench an elite few clubs in each country short of the new trend of bored billionaires buying prestige through clubs and trophies.
Now suddenly that’s not good enough for the elite? So a Super Elite is formed consisting of 12 ‘Untouchables’ so far and probably 16 ultimately. No doubt as more money pours into clubs, that will be expanded to 24 and then 32. And then a breakaway will form of the ‘Ultra Untouchables’ who don’t want to be seen with mere Untouchables. I’m glad that FIFA, UEFA and governments have reacted so strongly to this. I’m really happy as a Liverpool fan that both Klopp and Milner spoke out against last night. I hope sanity prevails and I hope that JP Morgan gets a kicking from clients and shareholders too.
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this super league business seems to have stirred up a disproportionate amount of outrage
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@deebee
When my local cricket club livestreams games on youtube then it is clear to me this Super League idea is destined for failure. The future lies in viewers from all over the world watching CMW playing Real Cricket for free.
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My plain chocolate digestives appear to have fused together. Going to need a knife or something to get them apart.
That’s something to get outraged about.
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@chimpie
I’ve got something to cheer you up. Apparently someone has unearthed a load of unused Victoria Wood’s scripts and is going to publish them. It will contain such gems as this:
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@Deebee – It does rather seem as though concentrating the flow of wealth to the top teams has made football less competitive and now those top teams are arguing that football isn’t competitive enough*. Hardly surprising that the obvious solution doesn’t occur to them. Of course the Premier League, Sky, UEFA etc are all either the main causes or at least massively complicit in this so their complaining sticks in the craw, but of course they’re right that things don’t need to change dramatically even further in the wrong direction. It is difficult not to note that since the PL was created only Leicester City, Arsene Wenger and I suppose latterly Liverpool have stopped the richest club in England from winning it without a rich owner massively outspending them in a huge splurge and/or becoming the richest side themselves. People can go on about Alex Ferguson’s genius or whatever all they like, but that’s the reality even though money of course was always important before that too. Regardless I’m all for moving them on so Norwich can finish 14th in the top division of what’s left of English football.
It’s kind of interesting to compare with rugby where weirdly the European Super League (or better a British/Irish/Italian(?) League with the French staying as they are) would probably be a far more sensible idea even though it would probably still end up dominated by stupidly rich arseholes. It could at least contain all the teams currently playing top level professional rugby. The shenanigans a few years ago to make the European Cup (and associated money) less accessible weren’t a good sign of course.
*The fact that it’s already too competitive for Spurs or Arsenal notwithstanding.
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*tries to stop sides splitting’
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successfully
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Anyhoo, in highly important matters the solidified pillar of digestives has been partially separated into a series of very thick biscuits via a slightly messy process which are not unpleasant to eat.
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“The future lies in viewers from all over the world watching CMW playing Real Cricket for free.”
I’ll have a match report for you later on, but I’m afraid that’s as good as it’s going to get. It wasn’t especially competitive, could easily be described as meaningless and was played somewhere very exclusive with nobody watching except rich people’s* horses so it did possibly have quite a lot in common with the European Super League I suppose.
*Swap the posh private school girls for Arab billionaires and we might be there…
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Yep further concentration of money into fewer and fewer teams is obviously the way to go. The end product will be 1 team endlessly playing itself and moaning about lack of competition.
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OT, When the Czech league was broadcasting live last summer – including my commentary debut when I was 5 beers down, the mate of mine who’s the Velky (Big) Syr (Cheese) of Czech cricket and I went for a walk around the field during a break between matches. I mentioned the number of spectators, saying I was surprised there’d be so many, although there were a few teams playing and maybe it was friends and family. It turned out there were 4 or 5 groups of spotters from bookies at the game because the gambling was big on these nothing games in the Czechlands.
CMW’s as honest as they come but are the other lads on his circuit?
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@Cimpie – several of the opposition also play (or have played) for us so again we’re well on the way!
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@TomP – The level of influence I have over how close most games turn out would put me in a great position and I definitely have a price. Spot fixing will be problematic though as there will be issues with bowlers having to not bowl wides or no-balls until they’re required.
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So I was going to ask why this football thing is a big deal but from a read back it seems it’s not. Basically it’s more games for a group of clubs and not others. And everyone else feels like people whose friends have bbqs with other friends but don’t invite them. Oh and money will be made. Surprise surprise.
I’m glad I don’t care about this.
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to be fair I’d be pissed off if I were a fitba fan by this nonsense. I’ve been peed off as a rugby fan over the years by various attempts to concentrate the wealth in a narrower pot.
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The whole money thing reminds me of when I was in Seattle and a teenage girl asked to sell me some biscuits for $8 for her local football club. Cos there’s not much money in football apparently.
I coughed up the pastry I was eating and gave her the cash anyway. Young people today know fuck all.
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Chimpie – the level of rage is quite amusing though. Surely, after all this time, no one would be surprised. And enough will give their cash so that this is worth it for gazzillionaires who thought it up.
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@Craigs – It pretty much changes fundamentally what it means to follow any football team that has any chance of being in the top two divisions (i.e. most of them) so it is a big deal as that is an awful lot of people. And similar with (I imagine) some differences in Spain and Italy.
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Was a knife that was used in the slightly messy process or was it ‘something’? That’s what I want to know.
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You might also see a parallel in English club rugby with talk of ring-fencing the top division.
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@TomP – Ring-fencing the top division with Bruce Craig’s Spurs scarf.
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Cmw – but as I understand it it’s just a kind of mini league. Surely there is no guarantee that these teams will be the best available or that the quality of the football is better?
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Was this a dream?
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I think she’d have got more than $8 if she’d sued Craig for the trauma of watching him cough up the pastry.
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Tomp – I’ve seen a lot of Championship rugby fans defend their league and point out that what they have is great and they don’t necessarily want to be in the prem. My point being that at some level supporting a club is just about whether they can make it to top. I agree that it is probably important but then I’d go back to my point about whether this new league really is the best anyway.
It reminds me of this paper which concludes that football makes people unhappy (it’s probably not replicable).
https://click.fireside.fm/e/Mzg5NDk
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It was a knife.
Just to set your mind at rest CMW
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Tomp – it happened. Oh it happened. It wasn’t a full pastry regurgitation. More a cough with pastry inna mouth.
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@Craigs – Even if they’re allowed to stay in the existing leagues (and yes, you’re right that they say they intend to) then they won’t be fielding their best teams so will make those leagues a nonsense. And there will be no meaningful European competition for the other teams in those leagues to qualify for. Essentially the rest will never get to play the top sides in a meaningful fixture again (be that league or cup) and there are I guess about 40-50 clubs with realistic ambitions to play in the Premier League some of the time, get a shot at turning over one or more of the big teams and have some sort of role to play in who wins the league etc even though they know they’d have no chance of actually winning the thing themselves.
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@Chimpie – I’m disappointed. I was hoping you’d found a banana slicer with the correct pitch.
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Or used a minimal amount of reflected heat to separate them.
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Putting biscuits in the grill would just be madness.
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Whereas the 2-in-1 banana slicer/biscuit separator could take over the world.
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Chimpie will like this from the G’s politics live blog:
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Cmw – are the fans of the super awesome clubs just as pissed?
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I’d quite like a chocolate digestive log right now.
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off.
I’m not pissed and won’t be until some time after I’ve painted the skirting boards, window sill and door frame in the Middle One’s room.
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The talk is that the clubs don’t think it matters if the older and/or local fans are up in arms as long as foreign and/or younger ones are OK with it. I guess that remains to be seen, my guess is that if it happens then enough people will still watch it here as well as abroad – I don’t (other than MOtD sometimes which I normally fall asleep in front of) and won’t.
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Craigs, I used to get pretty annoyed following games my old club Bournemouth played in 2019/20 season. And I was following on twitter. in 2018/19 they’d won their league by a street, 25 games out of 26, and got promoted. 2019/20 they lost 22 out of 25 with a couple of late late losses. If I’d been a proper English fan I could have just cancelled the whole season.
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I believe the, you know, actual fans who live locally and actually traditionally turn up to watch matches are referred to as ‘legacy fans’ by the people who own the clubs. They’re more interested in random people worldwide who are going to tune in to watch games on TV and buy loads of branded stuff.
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Can blame a combination of Big Marketing and Big Money.
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Ok, so final question. Why the fuck is the prime minister getting involved?
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@craigs
Same reason he went for a pint after Starmer and his goon had that alteraction in Bath.
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Legacy fans, innit.
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Tomp – you should have recorded your happiness on a scale after each tweet. Done a graph and published the results.
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