Pack your suitcases and prepare for Round Two of the European Cup.
Cardiff v Harlequins
Home advantage and Ellis Jenkins won’t do enough for Cardiff against in-form Quins. Quins by 10.
Castres v Munster
No-one will ever know the result of this match as anyone who attempts to watch it will die the most horrible of deaths from boredom, judging by the reverse fixture.
Wasps v Toulouse
Ooh. Toulouse by at least 35.
Ospreys v Racing 92
Surprisingly, Racing 92 are languishing even further down the Top 14 table than Ospreys are in the URC. I still think they’ll win, though – by about 12.
Connacht v Leicester
This could be the surprise of the weekend, possibly depending on the weather. Connacht by 3.
La Rochelle v Bath
Bath to take a Bath. La Rochelle by 20.
Exeter v Glasgow Warriors
Glasgow have been looking the business in their last couple of matches, and Exeter are not what they were last year. Weegies by 6.
Bristol v Stade Français
Neither side setting the world on fire this season, so home players by 4.
Leinster v Montpellier
Despite being toppled off the top of the URC, Leinster remain a team to be very scared of, and are at home. Blue Meanies by 17.
Bordeaux v Scarlets
Ooh là là, les Médocs par approximately neufty.
Northampton v Ulster
Will the return of Baloucoune and Hume mean an Ulster away win? Probably not, but I’m going for Ulster by 7 anyway. (This is why I never win the leagues.)
Clermont v Sale
Oh dear, Yellow Army by 30.
Onna telly this week
Friday 14th January
| Castres v Munster | 20:00 | BT Sport 3 |
| Cardiff v Harlequins | 20:00 | S4C / BT Sport 2 |
Saturday 15th January
| Wasps v Toulouse | 13:00 | Channel 4 / BT Sport 2 |
| Treviso v Dragons | 15:15 | S4C |
| Ospreys v Racing 92 | 15:15 | BT Sport 3 |
| Connacht v Leicester | 15:15 | BT Sport 2 |
| La Rochelle v Bath | 17:30 | BT Sport 3 |
| Exeter v Glasgow | 17:30 | BT Sport 2 |
| Bristol v Stade Français | 20:00 | BT Sport 2 |
Sunday 16th January
| Leinster v Montpellier | 13:00 | BT Sport 2 | ||
| Bordeaux v Scarlets | 15:15 | BT Sport 3 | ||
| Northampton v Ulster | 15:15 | BT Sport 2 | ||
| Clermont v Sale | 17:30 | BT Sport 2 |
Ovally Balls 
Oh no, it’s a yellow because apparently the player dipped. That’s just wrong.
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As TomP and Thaum have just said a lot better than I.
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I was watching Bath Quins to see how Cam Redpath was playing, he is all class in an awful team, to be fair Bath have hunners of injuries, the game is a bit meh.
I’ve switched over to the Norm Gibbons now
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out of interest, does anyone have a link to how Blair enriched himself during his time in government?
I know he did it afterwards, but it must have passed me by how he did it whilst in the hot seat
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Property I presume, ticht. Not only in terms of the number of buy-to-let flats he and Cherie bought but that his government’s policies saw a massive rise in property prices so his on paper wealth would have been higher. They were rich anyway. Cherie was very very well-paid.
He’s made a lot of money shilling for varios dictators around the world since leaving office.
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Here is a good place to start loking, Ticht.
https://www.thisismoney.co.uk/money/news/article-1585449/Arms-firm-pays-Blair-to-rent-flats.html
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I seem to remember some kerfuffle in the news about the Blairs buying a flat for their student son, is that right?
I know about the stuff after he left office, I’m just intrigued by OT’s comment that Blair was the most corrupt PM in his lifetime.
I’m not saying it’s untrue, I’d just like to see how it is so because I missed it at the time
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10 all at HT. I recognise hardly any of the Ulster players what with international duties.
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SBT, I’m not saying that is legit, it has a real pong about it, but friends of mine “earn” far more than £60K per year from their buy to let properties, by a factor of about ten in my guestimation
My mates aren’t doing anything illegal,
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Well, first up, there was a kerfuffle about them getting 70odd grand knocked off the asking price, then excused it by saying they were buying it for the kid. Then turns out they were rented out to a tax payer funded defence contractor, among others, including foreign diplomats on jollies at some point, all allegedly when administered by a supposedly blind trust, all funded by various departments of the British government, and all at excessive rents. For starters.
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Yeah, but Surestart.
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The thing with corrupt politicians is that it’s not always clear how it works at the time. Blair as PM bought a house in Connaught Square for £3.65m despite not having the income or means to afford it – it was that which made me sit up and wonder at the time. How did he afford it? SBT’s link suggests how this could happen.
Remember this was the guy whose actions contributed to the deaths of countless people in Afghanistan and Iraq and was then appointed “Middle East Peace Envoy”.
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You can bet that Johnson is desperately trying to work out how the Blairs made all their money.
This match is heating up!
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OT – yep, if Kissinger hadn’t already killed irony, that would have been the death blow.
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“Yeah, but Surestart.”
That’s probably the most numbskull thing to say on this subject.
I’m more that willing to accept that Blair was enriching himself, not skin off my nose etc, but I don’t really the see the culture of cronyism that we have now, where mates are getting multi-million pound contracts fast tracked and without scrutiny.
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Reminder of a previous Ulster v Scarlets match.
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Interesting the turn this convo has taken. The first comment that got quickly banned was a criticism of a review of the story in Last of Us (computer game) which the guy (and his daughter) got so fucking wrong I had to read some of twice. It was a long post and lasted a minute or two.
The next one was quite a long list of left wing people Joe Rogan has had on his podcast. Again, 2 minutes.
Re political corruption, it’s just a reflection on the type of person who goes into politics. Even those who really truly believe they are just going in to do good are deluding themselves. Always was, always will be.
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Ticht – in a rare moment, I disagree with you. Blair was just better at hiding it, being immeasurably more intelligent.
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Well, having said that, I don’t think even he would have spaffed billions of pounds of taxpayers’ money to cronies. Would probably have stuck to millions.
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There may be little to suggest that Thatcher or Major were personally corrupt themselves, but the massive sell off of the country’s assets with the attendant personal enrichment of their colleagues (plenty seemed to turn up on the boards of the new companies) and connections was clearly corrupt and as they were aware and in favour of it all then they can carry the can. Hard for even the current lot to rival it really as you can only sell/give stuff away once. I suppose it could happen if we were to elect a government that wants a stake for its investment and built up the nation’s assets again and then we voted the bastards back in to sell everything back to themselves again, but we just rejected the first bit and won’t see it offered again for a very long time.
Johnson is obviously our most personally despicable PM in my time (and I would suggest for a long time previously). Cameron probably the most disastrous.
I’m not the world’s biggest fan of Tony Blair or even Gordon Brown, but I can’t see that the Labour government
got anywhere close on any of these fronts.
I accept that OT may have a point about TB personally though.
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CMW – my problem with Blair is that I just can’t see past the body count. All the subsequent Tory PMs have been more disastrous domestically, but he aided and abetted Bush’s disastrous wars. Everything else pales in significance.
Brown may have been a grouchy bastard, but I think his heart was in the right place.
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‘Remember this was the guy whose actions contributed to the deaths of countless people in Afghanistan and Iraq and was then appointed “Middle East Peace Envoy”.’
This is a subject I always have difficulty with because as a member of Amnesty I used to get newsletters about the chemical warfare Saddam was waging in the Iraqi people before the first war.
Estimates of the deaths he is responsible for are well above a quarter of million people, he is in that super league of despots from the 20th century.
His was a fascist state, and I’m anti-fascist.
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Btw, I also think that while Trump and Johnson were/are obviously domestic disasters, neither of them actually started any wars. For Trump, it’s a first for an American president in a long time.
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Ticht – and the new (slimmed-down) Islamist state is a whole lot better?
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ticht, Blair had his Tony’s cronies at the time. And was selling the old seats in the Lords for funds for the party.
And let’s not forget his endless forgiving of Mandelson and appointing him to various positions, the becoming godfather to Rupert Murdoch’s kids.
The Surestart thing is not numbskullish. It was a GOOD THING but it got swept away pretty smartish by the Tories. Doing the other stuff doesn’t get swept away. Part of the reason Blair one in 97 was the sleazy nature of the Major government. Things could have changed, things were meant to change. That they didn’t is a great shame.
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Thaum, it’s not really about that, though.
Yes the west supported him whilst it was convenient etc, but the fact remains that in the 1990s and early 200s there was a fully fledged fascist state operating death squads, rape rooms, torture, mass public executions, secret police, chemical warfare, genocide of the Marsh Arabs etc etc.
It was done terribly, but I say his removal was wrong
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TomP – exactly. The Blair government had a huge majority (bigger than the current one, at first) and could have done anything they liked. They chose just to tinker around the edges. They inflated the property boom. Towards the end, they pursued a thoroughly nasty policy against those in receipt of benefits, spearheaded by Yvette Cooper who seems oh-so-popular with ‘centrists’.
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Ticht – you think none of that is going on now? It is a closed society. When’s the last time you heard something in the news?
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TomP, there was list of 100 GOOD THINGS that the Labour governments of 97 to 2010 did, the Tories got rid of pretty much all of it.
I read a report the other day that gave the numbers that died as a direct result of austerity at 57 000, but people don’t want to hear that, they want to rail at Blair
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Ticht, I’ve seen that list. A lot of those things were debatable. And they could have made it nearly impossible for the Tories to get rid of them, but didn’t.
The austerity policy was horrible, but frankly Labour were already going there (see previous post).
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Thaum, it’s nothing like it was before, of course it should be better
https://www.amnesty.org/en/location/middle-east-and-north-africa/iraq/report-iraq/
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Trump might not have actually started a war, but he did ramp up drone strikes and his actions in Afghanistan lead directly to a massive increase in civilian deaths.
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I think that in addition to the 57 000 who died as a direct result of austerity, you’d have to have a look at the number who died as a result of the Tories getting rid of PPE before the pandemic
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Ticht – am not trying to argue that Saddam was one of the good guys, because he was clearly a horrible tyrant. But at least he ran a relatively secular government, which means that women had a better shake of the dice.
Refit – yes, but I am fairly sure that if Hillary Clinton had been elected, she would have rapidly started a war with Iran.
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Ticht @21;17 – yes, you can blame Jeremy Hunt for that, who is now doing a passable imitation of the sanest remaining Tory.
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“And they could have made it nearly impossible for the Tories to get rid of them, but didn’t.”
How could they have done that?
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Ticht – because they didn’t reform any basic structures, just tinkered around the edges as I said. It’s no joke that Thatcher said that Blair was her proudest achievement.
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“which means that women had a better shake of the dice.”
on the face of it, the Baathist party made things better, but Saddam’s personal militia operated those rape rooms and made mothers and sisters stand in a public square and applaud the execution of a son/daughter/brother/sister who was accused of crimes against the state – no trial of course
If they didn’t stand and applaud their family members being murdered in public then they would suffer the same fate
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On really important matters, Ulster got a bonus point win.
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And it doesn’t look like Starmer has any intention of making any structural changes. He’s already said that any help for the NHS will involve private companies.
The centrist mindset is – all the current systems are fine, they’re just not being run properly. When it’s clear that everything is running exactly as intended and there need to be actual changes, for things to improve at all for the lower parts of society.
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Ticht – I’m not applauding any of that, of course. But women got an education, could have their own careers, didn’t have to cover their fucking faces, could vote and so on. Apart from those who fell foul of the state.
It’s probably currently worse for women in Afghanistan.
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Thaum, how could they have reformed the basic structures?
this was public spending
I’m not a Blair fan, but no leftist leader of the Labour Party has ever won an election and no Labour leader has won re-election iirc, though I have to check the 70s on that
The country or the electorate is at fault, imo, they don’t want a left wing government
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Refit – yes. *bangs head hard*
We’ve had loads of local party members – young, engaged, enthusiastic ones, mostly – who have been suspended or kicked out. The only reason I’m holding on to my membership is to kick Starmer out. If someone like Cooper gets elected in his place, I am gone.
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Party of the workers my arse.
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@Thaum – my final straw was the refusal to do anything about the transpobia in the party and the ongoing support of Rosie Duffield.
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Ticht – with legislation, of course!
The country or the electorate is at fault, imo, they don’t want a left wing government
Well, that’s debatable. There was a massive smear campaign against Corbyn, supported by the so-called centrists in Labour and all the mainstream press, including the Guardian. But his policies polled very well with the public. They’d just decided that Corbyn was the anti-christ.
Fine. So then Starmer comes along, promising to offer Corbyn’s policies without his ‘baggage’. I voted for the bastard on that basis. Then he proceeds to renege on every single promise.
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Caroline Lucas is my MP, I’m more than happy to vote for her but it almost feels like a cop out, as it doesn’t affect the government
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ticht, Attlee in 1950 and Wilson in 1966 both won re-election. Wilson won again in 1974. Not left-wingers mind.
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Bloody hell, Barf done a win. And against Quins.
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Thaum, legislation securing public spending could just be thrown out by the next government, couldn’t it?
Great scenes at Bath
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