Close readers of this notablog will know that I am not Owen Farrell’s biggest fan. This is almost entirely down to his observed on-pitch behaviour: the shoulder barges punished and – more often – unpunished, the truculence, the disrespect of referees, etc. Saracens and England supporters will have much, much more to say about whether he is the best selection at either 10 or 12.
But I have found him more likeable in interviews, and can indeed recall the first time that I felt sympathy for him, which was during an interview with a rather vicious Sonja McLaughlan, who to my mind is too willing to twist the knife in post-match interviews, and who I felt at the time would have been delighted to see him cry. While the interview doesn’t seem too OTT in retrospect, in the immediate aftermath of a tense match, it seemed very tabloidy.
At the same time, McLaughlan herself was apparently the recipient of despicable abuse after the interview, and that is also wrong. You can feel – as I did, as a non-England, non-Farrell fan – that she went beyond the Pale, while not feeling the need to send her abusive messages. Perhaps a strongly-worded letter to the BBC with a return address of Tunbridge Wells would do the trick.
There is a sickness in our society. Watching the Covid-19 Inquiry this week, I was shocked by Professor Jonathan Van-Tam’s evidence regarding the threats to not only himself, but his family too:
Who in their right mind would threaten one of the most important people trying tirelessly to stop people from dying of a horrible disease? He had great Wendyball analogies and all.
Getting back to Owen Farrell, today we find out that he has made himself unavailable for the 2024 Six Nations “in order to prioritise his and his family’s mental wellbeing”. It’s not made clear whether this decision is due to on-line abuse, despair at England’s defeat, other factors, or some combination of the above, but it’s heartening to see that there is support from his club and country. Let’s hope that the ‘fans’ are equally supportive.
There’s also a soupçon or scintilla of suspicion that some of the abuse hurled in Farrell’s direction is because he’s got a not-posh northern accent. I think this is a disease particular to English, and perhaps also Dublinish, rugby, but feel free to correct me in the comments.
Without, obviously, threatening to cut my family’s* or hound’s throats, if you please.
*Although if you feel moved this way, I could give you a prioritised list. But lay off the hound.
Onna telly this week
Showing matches that are televised in the UK and Ireland or on popular subscription services. Bold indicates free-to-view. Times are in the UK zone, so adjust as necessary.
Friday 1st December
| Munster v Glasgow | 19:35 | Viaplay Sports 1 |
| Harlequins v Sale | 19:45 | TNT Sports 1 |
Saturday 2nd December
| Bulls v Sharks | 13:00 | Viaplay Xtra |
| Bristol v Gloucester | 14:00 | TNT Sports 1 |
| Toulon v Pau | 14:00 | Viaplay |
| Cardiff v Scarlets | 15:00 | Viaplay Sports 2 |
| Bath v Exeter | 15:00 | TNT Spots Extra |
| Lions v Dragons | 15:05 | BBC2 Wales / iPlayer / Viaplay Xtra |
| Saracens v Northampton | 16:30 | TNT Sports 1 |
| Stormers v Zebre | 17:15 | Viaplay Xtra |
| Ulster v Edinburgh | 17:15 | BBC2 NI / TG4 / iPlayer / Viaplay 1 |
| Connacht v Leinster | 19:35 | RTÉ2 / Viaplay Sports 1 |
| Treviso v Ospreys | 19:35 | S4C / iPlayer / Viaplay Sports 2 |
Sunday 3rd December
| Leicester v Newcastle | 15:00 | TNT Sports 2 |
| Stade Français v Toulouse | 20:00 | Viaplay Sports 2 |
Ovally Balls 
I think this is a disease particular to English, and perhaps also Dublinish, rugby, but feel free to correct me
I wouldn’t let the English take the blame here alone – every group has a negative, sour group who can’t accept that they lost fairly, or that ref X wasn’t bribed.
On the accent thing – well I’m guessing only English and (some) Irish would read from Farrell’s accent his northern, industrial “roots” (Irish people on the whole aren’t – in my experience – that well attuned the “nuances” of English accents – and for sure vice versa).
I’m guessing we like to think rugby is above and beyond all that “soccer-type” behaviour – and generally it is, so it seems worse when it crops up. Mainly because we’re used to the pedestal….
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Deebee – Angel Heart is one of the few fillums I have actually seen. There were a whole load of art-house zombie/voodoo films that came out around the same time; it was a popular theme for a while!
Trisk – thanks!
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Trisk
“Didn’t see the Ulster match, but vague recollection of the Ritchie one (vs Munster maybe) – seemed to be some interpretation that it wasn’t a knock on in terms of failing to gather a pass first time but fell under the “deliberate throw forward” even though you regather it.”
Yeah it was almost identical to the Ritchie one, I think you are correct that it was against Munster last season.
It was explained by the ref, I caught it when I rewatched the Uls/Ed game, but not at the time.
If you juggle the ball and it goes forward you have to regather and then pass, you can’t just, as Ritchie and Baloucoune both did, juggle it forward and then bat it backwards to a team mate.
It’s not a part of the Laws that I was aware of, in fact you rarely see it happen, so fair play to the refs in question, the fact they both ruled the same way for the same incident at the very least suggest consistency which is what we want to see.
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Sorry Thaum, I’ve been pretty much fucked for attention span as I have Long Covid, so I’ve only just read the all just now. Reading or writing anything is difficult for me at the moment.
I see referee Tom Foley has also stepped back from international duty due to death threats and other online abuse.
I got as one-eyed as almost anyone during a game but afterwards I like to think I’m a lot fairer, certainly when you look at a match the second time you can see the officials are pretty much right most of the time and when they are not it’s almost always a close 50/50
Almost
Now I’ve forgotten what I was going to say after looking up that tackle… oh aye, the online abuse is pathetic and I don’t think we in rugby have any grounds to look down our noses at football, since I started playing club rugby at 14 I’ve been aware of the racism and particularly the misogyny and sexism prevalent in the game.
On the accents, in a peculiarly Scottish twist on it, there is an inverse snobbery at play, one the reasons rugby doesn’t get the publicity it deserves in Scotland is that its seen by the BBC sport and print media people in Glasgow as being a posh boy game, mainly played at the fee -paying schools.
Scotland’s men’s football team are ranked 36th in the world, they’ve been much lower in the recent past. They don’t even qualify for the FIFA World Cup oftentimes now, but they still get all the headlines and pages.
Scotland men’s rugby team had recently dropped to 6th in the world after England’s draw got them a path to the RWC semi final.
Glasgow and Edinburgh combined get around 12 thousand supporters a week at home, they’re the only two professional rugby teams in the country and they each get a bit more of a crowd than the teams at the bottom half of the premier league in Scotland do (then there’s on Celtic 58.5K ave home crowd, Rangers 49K)
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Sorry to hear that, Ticht – how long has it been going on?
Yes, I remember that tackle! It was bad.
Re footie v rugby in Scotland, is it maybe also the case that there are a lot more football fans than rugby ones? Of course, that state of affairs might also be influenced by the media.
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Sorry to hear that Ticht.
Scotland’s football team are on the up at the moment, qualified for our second Euros in succession, directly this time, won our first five qualifiers in a row, which we’ve never done before, beat Spain at home, so I’m happy with the coverage the national team gets.
My problem is with the likes of the BBC Scotland channel showing First Division (or Championship or whatever its called) on a Friday night when it could (and probably should) use that time for Glasgow and/or Edinburgh. As Ticht says, the crowds at either Scotstoun or ‘The Hive’ would be larger than most in the Championship, except perhaps the likes of Dundee United or any other large-ish team that’s been relegated, and I can’t imagine the viewing figures would be much more than they’d get for the rugby either.
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It’s definitely the case in NI that Ulster out-perform the footie teams, and probably get larger crowds too. But when it comes down to which sport most people play on a Saturday, or watch on the telly, footie probably wins hands down. They’ll be watching the English teams, mostly, though.
Rugby in NI isn’t exactly a fee-paying school sport, but it is definitely more of a grammar-school sport. (The 11+ and grammar schools are still very much alive in NI.) So in its own way geared to middle-classness, as a disproportionate amount of middle-class kids end up in grammar schools for a whole host of reasons that you’ll all be aware of.
Although one anecdotal note is that it seems to me that most of those reasons play out in city/town kids rather than country kids, for some reason. Maybe why we have a fair few farmers on Irish sides?
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There’s always been the Borders part of the Scottish team which is similar to what you were saying about NI. Teams like Glasgow are trying to take rugby into local schools, but it depends a lot on teachers being keen on it. In one of my schools, there was a PE teacher who was very into rugby and I think had a school team going, but he retired a few years ago and the rugby side of things just fell away. A state/local authority school just doesn’t have the finances of the private schools. I often pass the High School of Glasgow’s pitches near Anniesland – they have space there for 3 or 4 rugby pitches, plus hockey pitches.
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Ticht, strength mate, hope you recover fully and quickly. I recently travelled with a client who has been suffering from long Covid and he would get very frustrated at the sudden ‘brain fog’ as he called it, when in the middle of a conversation he’d forget what he was talking about. Not nice at all.
On the subject of posh versus not in rugby, in SA we’ve got a relatively small number of elite rugby schools – but they’re not the expensive private ones, for the most part, but state schools with a rich tradition of sporting excellence. The likes of Paarl Gimnasium and Paarl Boys, Grey College, Affies, Paul Roos, Monument, and a few others produce Boks year in and out, and you’ve got another probably 20 or 25 schools that regularly produce top club and national players, but not as prolifically as those above. That being said, schools rugby in SA has become very commercial and sponsors compete for top schools and vice versa – not sure I really like that, but no going back on it. A lot of the top school derbies attract bigger crowds than some of the URC or Currie Cup sides too!
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There’s a good discussion on the Farrell and Tom Foley situations, in the first half of the Blood & Mud podcast this week
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Thanks peeps.
Deebee, the brain fog and lack of concentration span is
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Trust someone from Gala to turn the NFL into rugby…..
(Sort of)
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-scotland-south-scotland-67613873
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Real Rugby Bulletin
Dunbar Grammar School won the U16 Plate competition at Edinburgh’s ground this afternoon. It’s a national schools cup competition where you apply to go into the tier that suits your standard. The fee paying schools are generally in the top tiers, Dunbar were in the third of four.
They officially won their final 50-0. The competition rules state that the record keeping stops at 50, but they played the rest of the second half as a friendly and ran out 72-0 winners against Lomond and Helensburgh U16.
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BB, I’ve often wondered why that particular Ritchie Gray isn’t contracted full time to the SRU and the Scotland team.
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In other news
Boan Venter signs a two year extension to his deal at Edinburgh. He’ll be 28 and Scottish-Qualified by the end of it.
He is very good. Schoeman grabs the headlines, but Venter is nearly at his level at three years younger
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Jock Wallace would be proud…
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Mention of obscure Scottish fitba’ manager baffles rugby blog….
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Bill Shankly and Bob Paisley are the only Scots managers you need to reminisce about. King Kenny at a push. Everyone else in the modern game is irrelevant.
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That would be fine only Bob Paisley wasn’t Scottish, he was from the North-East of England. I’d add Matt Busby (who did play for Liverpool) and Jock Stein, plus (even though he was an extremely cantankerous bugger), I’ll add Fergie too.
Although I did notice that your (strangely Liverpudlian) list doesn’t include Graeme Souness…
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Alex Ferguson is, I think, the most successful club manager of all time.
BB, I’ve run up the dunes at Gullane in preseason as per Jock Wallace, although we did it for rugby obviously.
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Sad to see that Benjamin Zephaniah died, pretty inspiring person.
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BB, you got the gist of it (and I always did think Paisley was Scots, not sure why), but that other bloke can do one. Souness wasn’t much cop as a Liverpool manager. Great player, lousy manager (even if he claims the squad was in terminal decline when he took over).
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I quite liked George Graham’s Arsenal. Largely because it was nice to see someone beating Liverpool at the time though they also had some character(s).
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GG didn’t always come across as particularly likeable himself mind though the same could be said at times for some of the others.
Gordon Strachan was an entertaining interview (I’m a sort of Coventry City fan at least to an extent). Worst for interviews was Paul Lambert and his fine art of impenetrable Weegie mumbling (I really am a Norwich supporter) – he didn’t seem very likeable either when you could make it out, but we did do very well with him especially considering we didn’t really have many good players.
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You must have been chuffed when he went on to manage Ipswich then. And probably even more chuffed when he got sacked.
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Like most Norfolk-Welsh people I have no particular animosity towards Ipswich with it being a town on the other side of the country that I have never had cause to visit.
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I even cheered them on a bit the season they did really well under George Burley (another Scottish manager).
The only time I really think about the rivalry is when I remember checking the Norwich result (didn’t even know who we were playing) after Wales had just had 60 points stuck on them by England in the Five Nations (Bateman got a couple of tries right at the start and then it went a wee bit wrong) only to find out that we’d lost 5-0 to Ipswich while the rugby disaster was on.
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The second try must be one of the better ones seen at Twickenham. I paid dearly for enjoying it as some twat of a Leeds RL supporter noticed and gave me such a load of shit for the next hour or so that I left the pub before the end. Which was great as it meant I ended up in the University Common Room in time to catch the football resul
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Try again – please delete if it doesn’t work.
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Don’t know what it is about Leeds, both their football team and their RL team seem to have a disproportionate number of horrible supporters. I would be a fan of the football team myself and I suppose I was at one point (my dad supported them and saw them a lot when he did his degree there in the late 60s), but David O’Leary wittering on about his ‘babies’ and the Bowyer-Woodgate racist violence along with some of their supporters’ attitude to that really put me off.
More importantly I’ve got to go to the place next week for The Eldest to have a heart operation. Can’t say that fills me (or her) with a great deal of enthusiasm either though it will be good to get it behind us.
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Hope the operation for The Eldest goes OK, Clyde.
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Thanks BB. She’s having a hole in her heart closed up – hopefully next week by keyhole surgery, but there’s a significant chance they’re going to find out that they won’t be able to do it that way. Fingers are very much crossed that it turns out they can as otherwise it will be back next year for open heart surgery which is something we’d really like to pass on if at all possible.
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Of course it’s all routine to the doctors either way, it’s just hard to feel that way for us!
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Fingers crossed the keyhole surgery works, CMW. Can imagine you are just a tiny bit stressed about the whole thing!
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Jeez, CMW, crossing fingers that all goes well next week – sending SH good luck vibes!
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Hello everyone,
Long covid for Ticht, heart op with CMW’s eldest, hope it all goes better soon for you two. We often think rugby is the most important thing but it isn’t, is it?
Didn’t someone set a pool in the superbru thing for the H and non H cups? I did my picks but I can’t remember the name of it.
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There is a new post coming up.
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Read it and weep.
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