And now, the end is near….
That sounds good. I should put it in a song.
That can wait, though. The real reason you’re reading this gibberish is to find out what the results are going to be on Saturday.
First up, Wales against Italy. Wales have scored 5 tries to Italy’s 4. That makes you think it might be close! Until you realise that Wales have conceded 7 to Italy’s 24. Which is a bit of a problem for Italy. (Nae shit, Sherlock). Italy played better against Scotland than they had in the other games, so is this the time they can back it up with another good performance? Probably not.
Wales have struggled a bit this year. Thumped by Ireland, scraped past Scotland, somehow losing to England despite scoring all the tries and never really looking like they would beat France. So, can Italy pull off a huge shock and get past Wales in Wales?
Let’s ask Predict-A-Bear!
Answer: Nah. Might be closer than expected, but probably Wales by 15.
Next up is Ireland against Scotland. (Sob). This was going to be The Year! The year to end (Way too many to count) Years Of Hurt! A brilliant start! And then everything turned Scottish. A disappointing – to say the least – defeat in Wales, thumped by France, then showing what we can do against Italy, before deciding that things were far too easy and that we should turn Scottish again.
Never mind, it’s only Ireland. The team that has been reinvigorated under Farrell The Elder. The team that beat the All Blacks. The team that thumped Wales, gave France their closest game so far and who managed to be disappointed in only scoring 57 points against 15, 14, 13, 12 man Italy. They have scored 20 tries to our 10, conceded 3 to our 11, Sexton’s on his Neverending Farewell Tour and have the might of Ulster (cheering them on from the sidelines).
So. Any hope for Scotland? Well … Ireland’s scrum looked strangely out of sorts against England. They also seemed a bit too rushed at times. And Finn bloody owes us one! So of course, Toonie sticks him on the bench. But probably none.
But let’s find out from Predict-A-Bear!
Answer: Nah. Much as I would love to be wrong, Ireland will win this fairly comfortably, by about 15 (at least). Can’t see us even getting any sort of bonus point. (Sobs again.)
Finally, the main event! France against England! France at home and going for a Grand Slam against a (fairly) average England team. (I mean, come on, WE beat them!) Eddie’s playing mind games again, although the only people he seems to confuse with these are his players. They have looked fairly toothless in attack (7 tries scored – and they’ve played Italy!), wonder boy Smith hasn’t quite lived up to the hype (but he will), the midfield has a Manu-sized hole (but then it frequently does) and Jack Nowell will probably end up hooking in the front row. And please (don’t) let Joe Marler take more throw ins. On the good side, Maro’s been a right annoying bastard on the pitch.
But France! They have everything: they can play tight; they can be expansive as (cliché alert) only France can. They have the best player in the world, and a few others who would probably be in a world XV, strength in depth and Shaun Edwards as defence coach. They haven’t perhaps scored quite as many tries as their play would suggest and had to tough it out against Wales.
So who will win?
Predict-A-Bear to the rescue!
Answer: A France win and Grand Slam!
Predict-A-Bear whispered sweet nothings into BorderBoy‘s ear.
Onna telly this week
Friday 18th March
| Bulls v Scarlets | 17:10 | BBC2 Wales / Premier Sports 2 |
| Glasgow v Edinburgh | 19:35 | Premier Sports 1 |
| Newcastle v Leicester | 19:45 | BT Sport 2 |
Saturday 19th March
| Lions v Munster | 12:00 | RTÉ2 / Premier Sports 2 |
| Wales v Italy | 14:15 | BBC1 / iPlayer |
| Sharks v Zebre | 16:30 | Premier Sports 2 |
| Ireland v Scotland | 16:45 | ITV |
| France v England | 20:00 | ITV |
Sunday 20th March
| Stormers v Cardiff | 12:00 | S4C / Premier Sports 1 | ||
| Wales v Italy (U20s) | 14:00 | BBC1 Wales / iPlayer / Website | ||
| Ireland v Scotland (U20s) | 17:00 | BBC1 iPlayer / Website | ||
| France v England (U20s) | 20:00 | BBC1 iPlayer / Website |
Ovally Balls 
Travelling into the UK on a valid UK passport, you should be ok as the 3-month/6-month rule shouldn’t apply. However, you’ll be dealing with an agency of the UK Home Office so there’s no knowing.
Use your SA passport to fly back to SA.
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Scottish Tories use a poster inspired by Trainspotting to get their message across.
Irvine Welsh responds
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Dan Leavy retired from long standing knee injury
https://www.irishtimes.com/sport/rugby/leinster-s-dan-leavy-retires-from-rugby-due-to-injury-1.4845087
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@Trisk – That’s sad, he was an absolute monster before his injury and for a while he often seemed to me to be the best player on the pitch.
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@Ticht – That’s a very odd one, the people who get the reference and with whom it resonates will almost universally share IW’s feelings about the Tories!
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On the other hand it’s good to see the Tories standing on the basis of not liking flags, their drugs policy over the last half century or so that has had such outstanding results especially in Scotland and their excellent record on ‘state secrecy’…
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Slade, I am going to do the online one. Takes 5 weeks apparently, but i have the time, so I’ll get it done.
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Thauma – I’ll be in the Birmingham area for a night, maybe two. I may stay in Birmingham for one night, because I have to for work and then head down to Leamington Spa for old times’ sake for a night on my way back to London. Is that anywhere near you?
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TomP – I always leave SA on my SA passport (you’re not allowed two here, so can’t go through SA immigration on the UK one) and then enter the UK on my British passport,
leaving Mrs Deebee in the lowly foreigners queuegetting through quickly to get Mrs Deebee coffee and collect our luggage, and the reverse on the way back. Only realised later on this morning that I have over two months to get the new passport so will be fine.LikeLike
CMW, I remember a couple of people who had the poster on the walls when we I was a student who’d likely vote Tory now.
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Deebs – I’m just outside Leam, so that’d be optimal!
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@Deebee – seems to be about 10 or 11 miles.
https://www.theaa.com/route-planner/route?from=Coventry,%20UK&to=Leamington%20Spa,%20UK
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Get stuffed, Clyde. ;-)
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@TomP – I knew a few who had it and will have voted Tory even then as students, can’t say any of them were Scots though. You’d think there would be some shame about either one or the other even from those types tough.
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@cmw
When I was a student in the mid 90s I was in a group of mates from St Helens, Warrington, various parts of Huddersfield, and Watford and I was the only one who didn’t vote Tory. I was also the least likely to have that poster on my wall.
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I’ll accept total wrongness then and that the 20% or so of Scots who vote Tory are all the biggest Irvine Welsh fans. We’ll be able to find out if this is true if the Tory vote goes down to 0%.
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Maybe they just like the music from the film, CMW.
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I’m sure it’s very big with retired Borderers.
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Weirdly positive article from Kitson about this season’s bizarre European Cup format in The Guardian.
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If I see a retired Borderer, I’ll make sure to ask them.
Not sure what the question is though…
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How into Underworld or Leftfield they are. And if they’re into IggyPop or Lou Reed did they get there through going to the cinema in 1996?
And if they are and did then do they also vote Tory?
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No.
Yes (sort of).
No.
No.
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Biggest selling record at the Woolworth’s in Galashiels in 1999 was Beaucoup Fish so there’s some evidence there for what it’s worth.
Louise Wener was planning to start a small boutique festival just outside Innerleithen in 2020, but of course Covid, the cursed Covid, put a stop to that.
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The wankers have got form for ripping off the speech:
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Anyway, Irvine Welsh buy-to-let landlord. John what’s-his-face seems all right, mind.
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“Irvine Welsh buy-to-let landlord. ”
His story has a bit more to it than that one descriptor, he spent a lot of his childhood and adolescence in London with family, after a pretty traumatic series of events he ended up with addictions. The property thing was one addiction being swapped for another.
He got some compo for being on a bus when it crashed, he put the cash down on a property in London and started form there. He said that if it had happened 18 months earlier he’d have bought coke, cut it and sold what he didn’t snort.
He was brought up in a council flat in a poor area of Edinburgh and saw property prices soaring around where part of his family lived in London.
iirc this was actually referenced in Trainspotting
Mates of mine went to London after they had finished their apprenticeships, they earned stupid money compared to what they could have made in the building trade back in Scotland, it was loadsamoney time
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Not sure if anyone is aware but the Grenfell Inquiry is still going strong and today is quite a big one as Eric Pickles is on the stand, plus
it’s all live on YouTube. I’ve been watching closely recently as a friend of mine was questioned for a couple of days a few weeks back and the process is quite brutal. They’ve moved on from civil servants onto the politicians now who have proved to be as weak and pathetic as you might expect.
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Thauma, I’ll let you know my movements once I’ve finalised everything. It all depends on when our business partners want to meet up.
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I see Faf and Lood de Jager are leaving Sale at the end of the season. Wonder if they’re heading to Japan or back to SA?
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I see we’ve covered steak bakes. What’s important when having those is to cover them in HP sauce. Then you get the correct balance of fruit, acidity and err alcohol and tannins.
Dan Leavey and Cubby retired. Do worry about the future of our game. Jack Willis is back but he’s very young and has already had a long time off recovering. It seems that rugby might become a factory line of broken people in their thirties who can’t remember their greatest achievements if nothing changes.
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Deebs – Faf leaving Sale is good for Raffi and England ultimately.
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Deebs – I don’t mind meeting your business partners btw.
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I haven’t followed RL over the years but because of his diagnosis and him meeting Doddie Weir I watched a fair number of Rob Burrow’s highlights videos.
Huge player in a small man’s body in a big man’s game.
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Deebs – I don’t mind meeting your business partners btw.
You wouldn’t like them. Not enough acidity or tannins.
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This guy is my nth cousin.
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Oh bugger. Such a shame and at such a young age.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/rugby-union/61014702
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Surely is a shame…..
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On lighter note…..some familiar (if you’re my generation) names here….
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RIP Tom Smith.
Brilliant prop and all-round rugby player
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Boris Starling writes –
Tom Smith was way too small to do what he did. He was 5’10’’ and 16 stone, which by the standards of international rugby props is somewhere between diminutive and Lilliputian. Putting him in the Scotland side to face England in 1997 was a surprise to many: taking him to South Africa with the Lions that summer was a bona fide shock. South Africa is the land of the scrum, of vast Afrikaner farmers who test their manhood by tackling wildebeest at full pelt. Half-pint Scottish props would be breakfast, lunch and dinner for these guys.
Except no-one told Tom that. In a world of bravado and tough talk, his waters ran silent and deep. One of the first things the Lions did, even before leaving the UK, was a team-building course, and one of the disciplines was to see how many crates you could stand on before falling off. Each man was roped and harnessed for safety, and then they’d have to build the stack beneath them as it, and they, rose higher. Some of these big, hard rugby players couldn’t make it beyond half a dozen. Tom managed 35. He didn’t say a word. Just did it.
He went to South Africa effectively as back-up for Jason Leonard. No-one picking that Lions side before they left Heathrow would have had Tom in the starting Test XV. Even the captain Martin Johnson said ‘I didn’t know him from a hole in the head before the tour.’ But coaches Ian McGeehan and Jim Telfer promised that everyone would be considered on form rather than reputation, and they were as good as their word. Tom was playing better than anyone else in his position, so he got the nod for the first Test – and Leonard, who understood the Lions ethos perfectly, did all he could to help Tom prepare.
There are few things in sport to compare with the first scrum of the first Test between the Lions and the Springboks. It is not so much contest as car crash: a primal clash of strength, of power, of dominance. Tom and his fellow front row men, Keith Wood and Paul Wallace, looked like schoolboys opposite Os du Randt, Naka Drotske and Adrian Garvey, behemoths in green and gold. ‘I’d never seen a bigger front row in my life,’ said Lawrence Dallaglio, playing on the flank for the Lions. ‘Monsters.’ The Boks hit hard and fast, sending the Lions up and back at a rate of knots. The Newlands crowd roared, approval shading into bloodlust. The Boks dominating where they always had and always would.
The only man in the stadium who wasn’t bothered was Tom. They’d got their angles wrong, he said. That was all it was. Nothing to worry about. Nae bother. The second scrum arrived, and the Boks eyed Tom, Keith and Paul as though they were prime pieces of boerewors on a braai. Again came the hit, but this time the Lions did have their angles right and they did not budge, not an inch.
That opening scrum was the first and last time the Boks got one over on Tom. He played all three Tests as the Lions won the series, and four years later he went to Australia with the Lions and played all three Tests there too, again alongside Wood. ‘As soon as we bound up for our first scrum together in four years, it was like settling down into a familiar armchair,’ Wood said. ‘It just felt comfortable and he would do anything to help make your job easier. You would tell him you needed something and he would barely acknowledge it: he would just accept it, no matter what you said, and he would do it. He was properly selfless. I would say, ‘I’m going to have to loosen my bind here,’ or something, and he wouldn’t even acknowledge it, but I’d go and do what I needed to do and he’d let me off with it, you know? His job was to do his job, and part of his job was to make my life a little bit easier and so that’s what he did. I thought he was magnificent.’ Magnificent indeed. Very few men play six straight Lions tests: very few men indeed.
In the years between those Lions tours, Tom was the first name on the teamsheet for every Scotland match. He could do everything. As McGeehan said: ‘he scrummed well, lifted well in the lineout, hit the rucks he needed to hit, was good in defence, but it was the way he handled the ball and the running lines he took and his work rate. That’s what really stood out.’ Telfer, one of the hardest taskmasters rugby has known, admired his temperament as much as his skills. ‘You didn’t need to roar at him, you knew you would always get 100 per cent. He was unfazed by whoever he was playing against. He was my kind of player, no fuss and no bother.’ Those who know Telfer will recognise the magnitude of that compliment.
Most of all, however, Tom was every bit as good a man as he was a player. Everyone who came across him, at international level and for his club Northampton alike, came away with the same impression: that here was one of life’s good guys. Quiet almost to a fault, but solid, decent, generous, loyal, a sense of humour that was bone dry, and uncompromising in the best sense of the word.
He bore first epilepsy and then colorectal cancer with grace, stoicism, fortitude – he volunteered to have the chemo at twice normal strength if it would help – and a rare ability to find roses growing from concrete. ‘The response has been overwhelming, utterly uplifting,’ he said after going public with a diagnosis of stage four disease. ‘The love out there has given me something very rare and special, something I wouldn’t have had. It has been life-affirming.’ Today the sands of that life ran their course. He was only 50. Five foot ten and 16 stone is no giant, not unless you were Tom Smith. RIP.
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Magnificent tribute to Tom Smith. Part of a Lions front row that no Bok supporter thought had a right to be on the pitch with us. What a player. And by the sounds of it, what a man.
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@refitman – whew! I’ve finally watched your nearly two hour long video on why JK Rowling is an evil bastard. Shaun makes a lot of valid points, mostly starting around the one-hour mark (THATCHA!).
He doesn’t mention (I don’t think) the transphobia though. Now that I’m an expert on HP fanfic, the first thing most of the authors do is disavow her views.
I like the way he goes for the anti-Semitism of the goblins when JKR was so vehemently anti-Corbyn, and supported all the slurs against him.
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@thaum – Shaun’s video was mainly centred on the JKR’s poor story-telling. If you want an analysis of her transphobia, I can offer you a 90min video by Contrapoints:
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Refit – you do spoil me. Think I might have a sleep or two first though!
Re the poor storytelling – yes, and no. Clearly there are flaws, but a gazillion copies sold and all the films and other additions, plus an immense fanfic community (many of them trying to fix the flaws, from what I’ve read) say that there is something that people find engaging.
I would say that the character development is far better in the TomP-provided fanfic (All the Young Dudes – horrible title, but there you are) than in the HP books. They are much more believable children / teenagers / young adults. But then the HP world is very, very middle-class, no matter what benefits she was temporarily on while she wrote the first one.
As Shaun points out, Harry is essentially a blank slate, with no opinions on anything. The least interesting character in the books.
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I can sort of see where JKR is coming from. She is the same age as me and in the early 90s there was a rise to prominence of the so-called “third wave of feminism”, albeit there was Marxist Feminism, Black Feminism, Socialist Feminism, Lipstick Feminism, Radical Feminism and on..
The Left does schisms really well.
There was a quote in a book by Radical Feminist Mary Daly that went along the lines of her idea of trans being “Farah Fawcett and John Travolta Scotch-taped together”, she has rightly been thrown in the bin regarding serious discussion now.
However that time in the 90s was seismic in terms of the Feminist movement and I can understand that the ground made in that time is precious to those who would have been poor and violently abused by a male partner.
I have no right to try to put myself in her shoes, and I am not trying to do that, I’m just going by what is in the public domain.
I’m trying to choose my words carefully here, I’ve had a dram because I spent today turning 57, but I would cut JKR a bit of slack because of her age means she is in that same cross-over time as I am in, that we fully support LGB rights, and the T part is the thing we don’t fully grasp or understand yet, and for a feminist it seems to gnaw away at hard-won rights , perhaps, maybe I’m way off course here.
I don’t particularly think like that myself, I’m just trying to understand where she is coming from, I don’t think she is an utter bastard.
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“the anti-Semitism of the goblins ”
Didn’t know there were any goblins in it. There was a marvellous incident at the dinner table here when the Middle One told us she was reading Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire and The Little One blew an enormous raspberry and announced that that was fire and she was the goblin. Much ranting and raving from TMO of the ‘It’s Goblet not Goblin’ variety, she just got silly faces pulled at her for her trouble.
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