‘Tis a cruel, cruel championship that makes you play the same very, very good side two weeks in a row.
Ulster somehow managed to pull off an away win against Toulouse, but nearly threw it away at the end.
What was so scary about the champions?
- Their seven-foot (or nearly) line-out stealer
- Their incredible counter-rucking
- Their loosey-goosey attack
- Their more than solid defence
- The World Player of the Year™
We face them this weekend at Ravenhill, but they are going to be revved up, I reckon. The score was 20-26, and that’s not a comfy cushion (‘No! Not the comfy cushion!’)
Read on for the other fixtures.
Onna telly this week
Friday 15th April
| Leinster v Connacht | 17:e0 | BT Sport 1 |
| Bristol v Sale | 20:00 | BT Sport 1 |
Saturday 16th April
| Chiefs v Moana Pasifika | 05:35 | Sky Sports Main Event |
| Highlanders v Hurricanes | 08:05 | Sky Sports Arena |
| Western Force v Waratahs | 12:30 | Channel 4 / BT Sport 2 |
| La Rochelle v Bordeaux | 15:00 | BT Sport 3 |
| Munster v Exeter | 15:00 | BT Sport 2 |
| Leicester v Clermont | 17:30 | BT Sport 2 |
| Scarlets v Dragons | 19:35 | S4C / Premier Sports 1 |
| Ulster v Toulouse | 20:00 | BT Sport 2 |
Sunday 17th April
| Saracens v Cardiff | 13:00 | BT Sport 2 | ||
| Racing 92 v Stade Français | 15:30 | BT Sport 2 |
Ovally Balls 
On the ay down front he plateau I lived on there was the rock face which was known as Louis Quatorze because of the resemblance to his profile, I can’t find a photo on t’internet as yet.
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ffs, the autocorrect on this is mental
on the way down from the plateau
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Embra 15-19 down to Bath, I thought we’d lose this one due to them having a lot of players back and us losing WP Nel to a ban and having a dozen other injuries
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on the ay
It’s just picking up on your natural speech patterns.
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Just got a ‘penalty five’ out of the dog.
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Interesting. Burns has gone off for an HIA, and Lowry filling in at fly-half. It’s his preferred position, but he hasn’t played a lot of it lately.
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Oh, that’s an awful collision.
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Oh hell, Lowry has just inadvertently run into a Toulouse player in the air. Could be bad.
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No foul play, but scrum to Toulouse.
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22-19 to Embra on 55 mins
Schoey skittling players to score by the sounds of things
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This looks bad for Ulster.
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Well, Tom O’Toole is looking at a card here. The question is what colour.
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It’s red. Stupid boy.
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Ulster could have seen two reds for that collision
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Ulster getting bloody lucky with Toulouse mistakes. It’s gone to complete insanity.
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Fuck.
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Embra 34-19 up with five minutes to go, down to 14 after a yellow card
oh what, Dupont
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‘And he [Dupont] didn’t even crack a smile.’
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Fucking hell. That seemed to be an early kick to the stands, but we did ourselves in.
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Bad luck, Thaum.
The two leg format has been brilliant, even in Ulster heartbreak
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Am gutted. Thought we might really be in with a chance to win the cup.
One point!
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Embra beat Barf 41 – 19 in the end
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On the up side, there are amorous hedgehogs outside.
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Well done Embra!
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The hedgehogs are still at it. I’ve known men who couldn’t last this long.
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There’s a joke from the dim and distant past – How do Hedgehogs shag?
Carefully
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Cracking game in Belfast. That was closer than I thought it’d be. Ulster forced a lot of errors out of Toulouse. Their backs, beyond Dupont and Ntamack, are not what they used to be.
As a foot note, I thought it could’ve been two RCs on that incident on Jelonch. Both Ulster players hit his head with their shoulders.
I really like this new – home and away- format and wish it could be extended to the QF and SF. Makes for compelling games. Both Montpellier and Toulouse qualified with just the one point difference. Yes I know, Clermont and Bordeaux (and probably Stade Français tomorrow) lost by more than 30 pts aggregate but generally, it is exciting, isnt it?
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In bad news for the Thaum household, Sarries beat Cardiff (Treacletoes getting two tries and looking sharp). NIce to see that BT Sport have remembered about the Challenge Cup…
BTW – can anybody tell me why Saracens were allowed to compete in this competition? It can’t be through last year’s Premiership placing.
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Oh Finn.
Makes a brilliant break, tries to kick through, misses the first one, gets the second – straight to a Stade player who runs all through the Racing side to score a try.
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Stade in for a second try! Racing just not got started yet (not just Finn).
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Georgian ref annoyed by props at scrum time, warns them to behave or they’ll get carded, the scrum goes down and props get carded. Strangely, next scrum stays up.
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Reckon that’s a red card.
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Racing score in the corner, but it could be a red for a high hit as the try was scored. Racing player looked out as he hit the ground.
Penalty try given, Naivalu already had a previous yellow, so getting a second yellow means a red.
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Healey sticking to the ‘game’s gone soft, back in my day, we could actually tackle people’ line.
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Yeah, no mention of the fact that the Racing player looked completely out when he landed.
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BB – we watched the match. Was closer than I thought it would be – Cardiff could actually have won!
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Good Finn – beautiful pass to Thomas, who does a couple of lovely sidesteps and over for a try.
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The Racing try, excellent as it was, shouldn’t have stood.
The penalty that lead to it should’ve been reversed. It was reviewed by the TMO, wrongly penalising the Stade player for pushing T. Thomas in the air. He did, but what caused it was that he was cheekily tripped by Le Garrec and lost his balance. Funny the 3 refs missed it.
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Meh. Scrappy game, low in quality. Should’ve taken a walk.
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“BTW – can anybody tell me why Saracens were allowed to compete in this competition? It can’t be through last year’s Premiership placing”
Promoted so playing in this year’s English Premiership. It always happens like that. Perpignan and Biarritz played in this year’s competition despite not playing Top14 last season.
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Everyone should play today’s Wordle.
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I’d be surprised if this is more than a tiny few…. and I think our outhalf issues are emphasised by playing in a way that suits 1 out-half over others. Carbery needs minutes, and some decision needs to be made among the others – vying for 3rd slot.
TRK has a discord channel – there’s only 3 rules in discussions and #1 is no mention of he who is not to be mentioned….
before Rowntree’s appointment there was a lot of trepidation that Kidney might be named DoR and get Munster associated even second hand with this. I’d hope this is widespread in Irish Rugby.
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On the Munster game – caught it on catch up as we’re away. O’Mahony shipped a lot of criticism for a flat display* vs Leinster but he was great on Saturday.
Lot of criticism going around for having to move the QF vs Toulouse to Lansdowne because Ed Sheeran is booked into Thomond.
Not as easy as telling Ed to sling his hook … Heino QFs last year were much earlier and bottom line is that Munster generates about 60-70% of revenue from match days (tickets, bars, food etc ) – and we had very few of them in 2020-21.
So, revenue from 2 guaranteed full houses is hard to turn down against the hope that we’d reach QFs. IRFU supported Munster through Covid but there’s no more money coming from that source, and basically Munster need to be less dependent on match day revenue full stop.
* not alone in that – too many flat performances from senior players in that game.
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Thaum, I did. Got it in 5 attempts. Should have been fewer!
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For those of you who understand French, there was a very interesting broadcast on France Culture radio this morning mostly about Joyce but also about DeValera’s Ireland . These two were born the same year and yet were so far apart.
The Irish guests implied Bloomsday was becoming as big as St-Patrick’s day, as the C. church was losing its iron grip on Ireland .
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flair, I don’t think Bloomsday is anything like as big as St Patrick’s Day. The parade on the 17th of March had 400,000 people attending this year in Dublin. There’re events on June 16th but nowhere near a similar number would be attending.
Ulysses is above all else a Dublin book. Not sure if there’d be the level of popularity in, say, Killarney that there’d be in the capital. Joyce pretty much had the Nationalist thing pegged in Portrait of the Artist but there’s that funny scene in Ulysses with the Citizen.
The Church has lost its iron grip on Ireland through a combo of money, time and being a nasty horrible hypocritical institution willing to perpetrate and cover up loads of shite.
Something you might like is Strumpet City by James Plunkett, which I read last year.It’s another fine novel but over a much longer time scale than Joyce, and not as good good as Joyce. It was a work I hadn’t known before but is very well-known in Ireland.
Also in Karl Whitney’s really enticing book about Dublin Hidden City he does a nice homage when he tries to visit every place James Joyce lived in Dublin – and the family moved a lot – in a day.
One final thing, the two areas of the city I like the most are The Liberties and Inner Northside – both rookeries in the 19th and 20th Centuries. The Inner Northside part that I’ve met best is around Talbot Street and up to Mountjoy Square, which was Monto which was Nightown. That red-light district was closed down by an organisation that started on Francis Street in The Liberties. And The Liberties runs sort of west of Clanbrassil Street. Down by the canal at the bottom of Clanbrassil Street is both my barber and a house (number 56?) that has a plaque on it marking it as the birthplace of Leopold Bloom, who, of course, wasn’t born there.
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trisk, we’re down your way at the moment on Beara. It’s a striking place. Civilisation seems a long way away from the cottage we’re in on a sheep farm but the good news is we’re only 5 or so kilometres from County Cork.
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Thanks for the recommandations, Tomp. I’ll look up for that Plunkett book.
Regarding Joyce, the Irish guests this morning said that although Ulysses is very much a Dublin thing, it is more and more embraced by the entire country, unlike in the 50s. They thought the rapid transformation of Ireland, basically from rural to cosmopolitan over barely a generation, was pivotal in this regard.
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Lot of criticism going around for having to move the QF vs Toulouse to Lansdowne because Ed Sheeran is booked into Thomond.
Do we know whose music he’ll be singing yet?
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I thought Ed Sheeran was banned from Ireland since he released Galway Girl.
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