Pink Floyd said it best when they penned the mighty ‘Breathe’ on the Dark Side of the Moon and clearly had this rugby season in mind:
Breathe, breathe in the air
Don’t be afraid to care
Leave, but don’t leave me
Look around and choose your own ground
For long you live and high you fly
And smiles you’ll give and tears you’ll cry
And all you touch and all you see
Is all your life will ever be
They then went on to something about run rabbit run, shamelessly appropriated by Tom Hanks in one of the most boring movies of all time, but the essence of the song could just about sum up the last couple of weeks of rugby and the next few to come. A quick disclaimer, I have no idea what the status of the Top 14 is, or even if they’ve finished last season yet, so in the interests of idle speculation, I’ll stick to the other two leagues, English first.
I’ve got home wins for both in the English semis, for no other reason than winning away is hard. Sale may have something to say about that, but I don’t think Sarries will. Northampton and Sarries have both been a bit iffy recently, with the Saints losing to Bath and Quins in the last month, but crucially, having the better of Sarries in their last meeting in late March. Sarries lost to Bath last weekend, pushing them below Sale into fourth, ending a three-match winning streak, with two of those on the road, at Bristol and Bath. So much for difficulty in winning away. Still, Saints’ only loss at home this season was in the second week, a narrow reverse to the Bears.
Bath versus Sale could go either way – Sale have emerged as the form side of the last few weeks, on a six-match winning streak, including the last match at Sarries, so they’re in a very good spot. Bath, though, have only lost twice at home this season, three- and one-point reverses, suggesting nobody bosses them at The Rec. Sale can do it, may well do it, but I had a fabulous high tea at the hotel adjacent to the Roman Baths, so I’m backing Bath to win a nailbiter!
Last round of league matches in the URC and it’s tight, very tight, almost – almost too tight. At the top of the pile, the Bulls will looking for five points in Durban to finish in the top two – or even top, if Ulster are able to beat current log leaders and form side Munster. That should be a terrific match, with Munster obviously wanting to finish in pole position, but Ulster similarly wanting to move above the Stormers and avoid a possible trip to South Africa if the Bulls falter in Durban. Which Leinster will pitch up this weekend? Can Cullen pick them up from the heartbreak of last weekend’s loss? I can’t see them losing to Connacht at home, but the bonus point comes into play, because Glasgow will surely get the full house against Zebre.
So, by my estimation, Glasgow will sit on 65 points come Saturday, with Leinster on 65 or 64, meaning Munster and the Bulls both need to win to regain those top two spots (I know, Munster could do it with a draw and try BP, but let’s not get too pedantic about this). I fancy Munster to stay on a roll (sorry boss), and the Bulls to win in Durban, but possibly without the BP. That may leave 3 sides on 65 trailing Munster. Wins would be the same (13 each), so then down to points difference. At the moment, the Bulls are best (+194), with Leinster 16 behind (+178) and Glasgow, courtesy of their mauling in the Lion’s Den, 40 behind (+154).
Will Glasgow be able to beat Zebre by more than 40 points to put the pressure back on the Bulls? Possibly, if they can get back on track after two bruising losses in South Africa. Leinster to win by at least 18 to put the pressure on the Bulls? Don’t think so – the Irish derbies are generally pretty tight affairs. The Bulls could, if the mood takes them, paste the Sharks, but equally the Sharks are likely to throw everything into it as a last hurrah in a spotty season in front of their home fans. Or not. If the Lions win in Cape Town (huge if, but not impossible), then one of Benneton or Edinburgh are out of the comp and I’d favour the Italians to prevail at home.
Then it’s a question of bonus points – who will finish 7th and get the last Big Cup Berth for next season? Ulster could go to 58 and fifth with a BP win, but more realistically, desperately need a bonus point to avoid the seventh/eighth place lottery and hope that neither of Benneton nor Edinburgh manage the full five pointer. That’ll keep them in 6th place. An Edinburgh win with a BP could lift them to fifth – if the Stormers get nothing from their home match with the Lions and Ulster likewise don’t win (or draw with BP etc). Benneton need a BP win to get a top six finish, but would rely on Ulster getting nothing (and possibly getting hammered in the process). Finally, the Lions could theoretically finish sixth, if they win with a BP and those above them don’t (Edinburgh and Benneton, one of whom is potentially out after their clash). With eight try bonus points, they have every chance, even if the Stormers are hot favourites at home. And then, of course, a win for Connacht and neither the Lions nor Benneton getting a point, would see them pip those two to eight place and the last QF spot.
All of which is a very long-winded way of saying hold onto your seats this weekend, the ride could be bumpy or a helluva lot of fun, depending on where the ball bounces and the dust settles. Bring it on!
Breathing exercises by Deebee7
Onna telly this weekend
Showing matches that are televised in the UK and Ireland or on popular subscription services. Bold indicates that it’s on a free to view channel. Times are in the UK zone, so adjust as necessary.
Friday 31st May
| Glasgow v Zebre | 19:35 | Premier Sports 2 |
| Leinster v Connacht | 19:35 | TG4 / Premier Sports 1 |
| Northampton v Saracens | 19:45 | TNT Sports 1 |
Saturday 1st June
| Stormers v Lions | 12:45 | Premier Sports 1 |
| Treviso v Edinburgh | 13:00 | Premier Sports 2 |
| Scarlets v Dragons | 15:00 | S4C / iPlayer / PremierPlayer |
| Sharks v Bulls | 15:10 | Premier Sports 2 |
| Bath v Sale | 15:30 | TNT Sports 2 |
| Munster v Ulster | 17:15 | RTÉ2 / Premier Sports 1 |
| Cardiff v Ospreys | 17:30 | BBC2 Wales / PremierPlayer |
Sunday 2nd June
| Toulon v Clermont | 17:00 | Premier Sports 1 |
| Toulouse v La Rochelle | 20:00 | Premier Sports 1 |
Ovally Balls 
Thauma, I don’t think The Doors were ever intentionally proggie, just had to allow for Jim Morrison to gather his thoughts through the haze of drugs and booze to get to the next line/verse on most occasions!
On your note about an ATL on South Africa’s elections, I’m happy to write one, assuming there is interest in it, but it’ll have to wait a few days to see where we’re headed – it could be anything from marginally good to absolutely disastrous depending on how it goes.
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Cheers, Deebee! The segment I saw on the news last night made it sound as though there were three bad options.
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There are more than three! There are two truly frightening scenarios and a couple of very bad ones. The positive scenarios are a curate’s egg nestled in a poisoned chalice, inside the silver lining of a double-edged sword. So business as usual, then.
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Lot of general comment that Munster played poorly in 1st half vs Ulster. The on-ball/keep ball alive style means that it can look pretty disorganised if a few key passes are delayed or premature. Munster made several good breaks but a poor or disrupted pass meant moves broke down (credit to Ulster)
2nd half was much improved (esp Crowley who moved to 12 and linked well with Carbery at 10) (might have been different with McCloskey)
Key was adding power to the pack with Coombes, Hodnett, Ahern, Jager and Ryan. Started to get scrum pens and dominate mauls.
Nice to top the regular season table – even if no awards given.
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Trisk – I don’t approve of the playoffs. Munster have done the hard work all season, and it doesn’t seem right that someone could rob them of the title.
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For those who knew Ephemerid, from the Graun days – https://ephemerid213andfriends.wordpress.com/2024/06/03/monday-3rd-june/comment-page-1/#comment-183482
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England versus Scotland today! Not quite the 6N (England fans will be happy to hear), but the T20 World Cup. At least you’re playing in a proper cricket country. Our match against Sri Lanka was in New York yesterday, on a crap pitch with vast, empty stands.
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Oh hell, Refit, I’d hoped she’d make it to see the Tories kicked out.
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Kitson writing about the dire state of pro and non pro English rugby today.
What a difference with France. On Sunday there was an access game between Montauban and Narbonne attented by more than 10000 people. That was not between a ProD2 and a T14 teams. It was between the third division (Nationale) and ProD2. Incidentally it was an excellent game, Montauban won by one point and stay in ProD2.
Oz, England, Wales, even SA and NZ have domestic issues. Worrying future.
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Just had a quick look at the URC attendances for this season. Not complete – for some reason the last few weeks are not all there, which probably, on balance, lowers the figures slightly. But anyway, average attendances in SA are 15,776, in Ireland 12,898, Scotland 8,613, Wales, 6,611 and Italy 3,617. If you take the Lions out of the SA numbers (well documented issues with Ellis Park – location, crime in the area, access etc), then the average rises to 19,173 a game in SA. The stadia often look empty because they’re on average 50,000+ grounds, which I don’t suppose helps with the atmosphere either.
So still pretty well supported here for the most part, although matches against some of the Italian and Welsh sides don’t generate much interest at the moment to be fair. The comp is still relatively new here and fans are still getting to grips with it, but I think you’ll see growing interest as we play it more and (hopefully) as more of our sides win or are in the mix.
Irish numbers are probably slightly inflated by a couple of massive games at the AVIVA, but good for them! Italy’s figures probably inflated too – most of the Benneton ones are a round 5,000 on the dot!
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Interesting, Deebee – I wouldn’t have guessed that the Saffer matches were so well-attended, because as you say the crowds look sparse in the huge stadia.
Other countries’ attendances are of course bolstered by travelling Irish fans!
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And also perhaps by the fact that Irish teams play each other as opposed to Scots fans ahving to travel to Italy, as they’re the teams in our ‘group’?
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It’s an affront to democracy that a candidate standing for election to His Majesty’s Government in the Houses of Parliament should be constantly humiliated by people throwing milkshakes over him.
(gnaws inside of cheek to stop from laughing)
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Deebee, the URC games are basically international games for the most part. They raise some curiosity.
I was talking about domestic competition which for me is the alpha and omega of the entire pyramid. I seriously doubt the game is in a place as great as your figures would evoke.
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Flair, the domestic game here gets curiouser and curiouser each year: we have URC, with Currie Cup below that, Varsity Cup and Club rugby below that, and schools at the base of pyramid. As you go down the pyramid, you get healthy to big crowds for these matches.
The Currie Cup, once the pinnacle of domestic rugby, is now secondary to the URC and Heinie etc, but is still a very important competition. The URC sides tend to miss quite a bit of it, with key players generally available only for the later rounds. Crowds are similar (probably slightly smaller) to the URC ones at that stage (35K for the final last year between the Free State Cheetahs and Griquas, two ‘second tier’ sides), but smaller for the earlier matches.
Varsity Cup matches, played between the university sides in two tiers on a Monday night, generally attract very large, predominantly student crowds – exactly the audience you want getting into the game as fans. Some sites (can’t find official stats) reckon between 2,000 and 16,000 fans a match depending on the size of the stadium and teams involved. Maties (Stellenbosch University) has an 8K stadium capacity and there is never an empty seat. Other big universities like Pretoria, Free State, Potch, UCT have similarly large crowds in their smaller capacity grounds.
Schools matches too can attract crowds in their thousands and often get bigger crowds than some provincial games on the same day. The Paarl derby between Paarl Gim and Paarl Boys attracted 25,000 this year, and does so pretty much every year. The big matches between the big schools (top 20 to 30 schools) are always bursting with spectators, so I think at grassroots level, we’re still okay.
I think a final point on the SA scene is that our economy is in the toilet and most families simply don’t have money to attend expensive sports matches on a regular basis. It’s not only rugby, but football as well, and cricket is even worse, outside of T20 hit and giggle pyjama cricket.
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Ticht, I don’t know what’s more embarrassing: actually going into McDonald’s to buy something or getting those contents chucked at you! Apparently she’s an ‘adult content creator’ so good old Nige is one step closer to walking in the shoes of his hero across the pond.
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I missed this from a couple of days ago,
“Nice to top the regular season table – even if no awards given.”
Munster deserve their position, and even if there is no award, there is reward – home games for the remainder of the season. I assume Thomond would be deemed suitable for the final, if it turns out to be Munster v Leinster and it gets played in Dublin that would be awful, even given the fact that Munster have a terrific travelling support – their number in South Africa were amazing – it would not be a good look for the URC. However, that is looking for problems before they occur.
On the subject of attendances etc, I was always very impressed by the numbers that would turn up for village rugby across the Pyrenees, and the clubs there do have competition from the 13 aside game and also from football as well as individual participation sports. There was always a great buy-in from the community be it from sponsorship by local businesses and also help from the municipality in terms of grounds etc. That does seem to go all the way up in France and the higher you go the more competition there is from football.
Here in Scotland only two sports teams get properly big crowds, Rangers and Celtic, and they come with so much baggage I stopped watching any football for a long time.
Some of the footage I’ve seen of schools rugby in South Africa almost brings a tear to my eye, the size of the crowds and the passion on and off the field is incredible and something this rugby nut finds very moving. On other rugby boards where that are a lot of South Africans there is a lot of to and fro about the Currie Cup, its popularity hasn’t waned.
Incidentally, Currie is a Scottish name and I’ve never thought about it before, but I’ve just looked it up and right enough the competition is named for Sir Donald Currie, born in Greenock and educated in Belfast.
If I had the time to look further into his biography I’d no doubt find some awful colonial stuff that led to the premier sports competition between the whites being named for him
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Good posts Deebee and Ticht. Glad to hear the rugby is going better in SA than I thought, especially school rugby which does not really exist here.
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@Ticht – there was also a cricket Currie Cup (as well as others for football, swimming and water polo, I’m led to believe). To the best of my knowledge, the rugby Currie Cup is the only still called that and played for. Cricket’s version is now called the Sunfoil Cup or Supersport Cup or something dreadful. During the 80’s the old Transvaal were dominant and had Cook, Kourie and Rice in their side, which made for some dad-joke puns, especially when Allan Lamb was batting for Western Province.
@Flair – rugby here is doing okay in terms of support, the one big loss being the traditional clubs, which were the feeder sides for the provinces. These have largely been relegated to non-professional, social rugby sides (albeit with scouts still snatching decent players from them), as schoolboys get snapped up by the franchises before they’re out of nappies these days. They then go into the U21 sides at the province/franchises. I actually can’t remember when I last went to a local club match.
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Dupont doing Dupont things
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@Ticht
There was always a great buy-in from the community
We took a party of U14s and U16s to Toulouse before Easter….
one evening a long crocodile of lads was passing the road (heading to the local 10-pin bowling) As we passed a hairdresser’s the woman inside put down the scissors and comb and waved for me to stop as she ran to the door ….. I thought “christ, was my last haircut that bad…..?”
Anyway, she just wanted to ask who were, where we were from etc ? (it was obvious we were a rugby group). We got a fair bit of that in Toulouse – not sure there’d be as much interest in us back here
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Deebee, what I miss most is the Tri ( and later the Four) Nations, when SA, NZ, OZ were all competitive and gave us those wonderful games when most of the NH teams were crap.
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Zebo over in 1m 30s.
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Oh, but Ospreys return the favour.
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Quite looking forward to this. Obviously, with the Scottish connection, I’d like Bath to win, but also like the way Saints play. Just hope we get a worthwhile game that will suit the occasion.
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Oof, that was close. Lucky bobble saving Saints.
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This is a lot of fun so far. Both teams are really going for it.
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Oh dear, Obano goes high in the tackle on Saints 8, Augustus, and catches him right on the chin. No mitigation and it’s a red card on 21 minutes.
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Red for Obano.
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Two quick tries for Saints, and I think this might be over already.
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OK, maybe not.
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What a cross-kick by Spencer. The Saints defender knocks it back and Muir drops on the ball to score. Finn pulls the conversion wide and it’s all square. 52mins 18-18.
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Bulls have beaten Treviso, but not by a lot. Treviso player got MotM.
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Honestly thought Saints would be out of sight by now, playing against 14 for most of the game. Bath have stayed in the game well.
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Could that be the winning try from Mitchell? The one time Saints have played the ball wide into space and they get through.
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Pre-match interview with Jacob Stockdale, who is asked if he is looking forward to playing against some of his Irish team mates like James Lowe:
Yeah, look, it’s always fun playing against them, slabbering at the bottom of a ruck and so on….
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Saints win! In the end a brilliant run from Hendy was the difference, when it could have been his mistake for the Bath try that was the difference. Not end to end rugby, but bloody tense in the end. Well done Saints!
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Ulster win a penalty on the kick-off with a player tackled in the air.
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But the Blue Meanies steal it back.
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Lots going on, too much to document! Still nil all: that’s the important thing. And Ulster have a scrum. Oo er.
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Breathless stuff! Leinster looked like mullering the scrum, but then Timoney comes away with the ball, and with some good carries from McCloskey and Izichukwu it looked on, but we lost the ball, grr.
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Ulster may have scored! TMO to check.
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On the replay, it looks short, but you can see Timoney getting socked in the jaw.
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NOOOO! Izichukwu going for an HIA. Hope to fuck he passes, as we’re already very light in the second row.
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Bastard! Henshaw scores after it looked like they’d butchered the try.
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Leinster get a penalty. 10-0. Doesn’t really reflect the game.
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Disaster! Lowe scores.
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Now Dave McCann’s down and play is stopped. We are losing several of our best players!
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Surprisingly, he’s playing on.
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