In the exciting battle for the wooden spoon between Ireland, Wales, Italy and England, coaches have not learninged much from their previous selection errors. To be fair to Italy, they don’t have a huge range of players from which to select, and they have played brilliantly; they could and possibly should have beaten Ireland, so we’ll let Quesada off.
As for Ireland, it seems that Farrell has at least learninged that the Prendergast experiment has woefully failed after watching him splash around in the shallow part of the pitch in the first match, and create his own wadi in the second. While Crowley, like his other possible replacements, is dubious with the kicking tee (and by the way, kicking points is only HALF YOUR FUCKING JOB as a fly-half), he’s clearly much more effective on the pitch.
The inclusion of more Ulster players made a clear difference in the second match with Player of the Match being narrowed down to a choice between McCloskey, Baloucoune, Fischetti and Zuliani: two Ulstermen, and two Italians. So of course Farrell drops Izuchukwu, who also performed well, and Timoney remains on the bench.
As for England, the inclusion of Stewart continues to please ABE supporters, and Genge is always on a hair trigger for a card. Maro is looking less saint-like these days. Boris Johnson’s illegitimate son, the Pillock, provides a figure one loves to hate, sadly also because, like most super-villains, he’s pretty effective.
On to Wales. Well. Their set-pieces are functioning well, and I reckon they can beat Ireland. Also first-week Scotland, but not brilliant second-week Scotland. Probably not Italy either, especially if they keep kicking possession away, although possession is often coughed up anyway.
France obviously don’t need any learnings*.
*Have I mentioned how much I hate this horrendous evisceration of the English language?
Ovally Balls 
@Thaum – “What’s that coming over the hill?” etc
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Does the Middle One still retain her aversion to Finn Russell? I mean, everyone knew exactly what she meant about him not being serious / smirking too much, but he has perhaps matured a bit now.
My opinion is that he’s currently the world’s best 10.
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Interesting to hear Warbs and Barclay talk about Finn after both the England and Welsh games. Barclay saying that Finn is the guy who will be going over stuff on the laptop, looking at plays and so on. Also his post game interviews for both the Lions and Scotland showed that he was very sharp in looking at the ways the game is played. The same goes for Dan Biggar and even Jonny Sexton. Sexton even said that he’d been wrong about Finn when he spoke during the Lions. “He’s still flash though, he’d be annoyed if I didn’t say that him”
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A commentator during the match made a reference to Itoje speaking out about singing ‘Swing Low…’ (and the fans singing it anyway), so I looked it up.
https://rugby365.com/countries/england/why-itoje-wont-be-swinging-low-on-the-sweet-chariot-anymore/
I’ve always been a bit bemused about how that particular song came to be England’s rugby anthem, having nothing to do with either the English* or rugby, but I suppose anything is better than GSTQ/K. And let’s face it: most of the best music is created or at least highly influenced by African or African-heritage musicians. Imagine a world without rock’n’roll or jazz or blues or Caribbean rhythms: hardly worth living in!
*Well okay, slavery in the American South was heavily invested in by English and, sadly, Scottish interests.
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One of the loveliest things that happened during Covid was the worldwide musical collaborations featuring a few famous musicians, and lots of not-so-famous ones, such as this:
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Deebs, there are some Kinshashans in that vid.
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@Thaum – The Middle One won’t watch rugby any more, don’t know why. She disapproved of Marcus Smith too and I don’t think that would have changed this weekend if she was still interested. I think Russell is right up there, but it’s hard to judge when his rivals mostly play for the very best teams.
On ‘Swing Low’ I find it strange when any ‘controversy’ only refers to the song’s origins which are not controversial in themselves (they just are what they are) rather than putting that in the context of how it then came to be used by England i.e. they started it up when a black player (Chris Oti) got a hat-trick against Ireland in the late 80s. Definitely a dodgy start in terms of its use, but it is a long time ago and a more rousing thing than anything else we’re likely to get from them. I don’t really have a strong opinion on them using it at this point, it wouldn’t be for me, but not really my concern.
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Oh, well that’s interesting; I didn’t know the origins as I said. Could be interpreted as a somewhat clumsy compliment to Oti in a way, at least in intention?
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@Thaum – I would say yes – in a very much ‘of its time’ sort of way.
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I dunno, Englishpersons have made lots of good music. Sympathy for the Devil could be a good one.
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Or, sticking with the Rolling Stones theme and given the current performance as well as historical allusions, Gimme Shelter might work.
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You could also do any number of Bowie songs: Big Brother, We Are the Dead, ‘Heroes’*, Life On Mars?, Always Crashing in the Same Car, etc.
*Bowie deliberately put inverted commas around the song and album title to denote a bit of irony.
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More seriously, Wish You Were Here is a very singable song or Time has Hanging on in quiet desperation is the English way, although it’s perhaps less singable.
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There is probably also an element of the best winger in English rugby at the time also being a black player and that being Martin Offiah in rugby league. And he was known (I think by that point) as ‘chariots’ as in ‘of fire’. So perhaps something along the lines of ‘now we’ve got our own one’. And we know a good song with a chariot in it*. Own great winger (it didn’t turn out that way) or own great black winger? Feels more like the latter.
Ultimately it’s the right sort of tune to work at the times they mostly use it. Part of everyone else feeling they need to have their own ‘Bread of Heaven’ (see also Fields of Athenry, Flower of Scotland etc) so who are we Welsh to complain about them wanting to emulate our thing.
*Now obviously they could have used ‘Jerusalem’. We don’t have The Cat here for that one though I do have views…
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Am thinking this would be an excellent subject for an ATL on a rest weekend, with a vote. Who’s got other suggestions?
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*Bowie’s Time is actually a bit more singable than Pink Floyd’s.
Time
He flexes like a whore
Falls wanking to the floor
His gift is you and me
Boy
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Very funny line, definitely a ‘Sorry David, did you say ‘wanking’?’ moment when you first hear it.
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I have a story about the first time I heard a Bowie song, although this one was a Jacques Brel cover.
I was in my teens, had just recently discovered Bowie, and was visiting my grandparents in Belfast. Went out by myself into Belfast, and into the iconic Caroline Records, where I found the Bowie Rare album. Couldn’t wait to get back and listen to it.
When I did get home, neither grandparent appeared to be home, so I put the album on at full volume. Was loving it, and then we got to Amsterdam (a translated Jacques Brel song).
Shortly after the point where Bowie belts out the whores of Amsterdam, my granny came raging into the room and told me to turn it off; turns out she’d been hiding in the posh room, entertaining the minister.
He might have got a bit more entertainment than he bargained for, but under normal circs my granny actually loved dirty songs about sailors (my grandfather had been in the Merchant Navy). She was displeased under those circs, though.
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“under normal circs my granny actually loved dirty songs about sailors”
Best line we’ve had on here for some time.
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It’s true! She got dementia later on, and in church, instead of singing hymns (she was half Welsh, so obviously had a lovely singing voice), she sang dirty sailor songs.
She was a legend.
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Land of Hope and Glory played while my uncle’s coffin disappeared. Me and my brother thought it was just because of him being such a Tory, but then my cousin told me it was because he would belt it out to keep the nurses away from him when he was in a home with his dementia near the end. Terrible politics that side of the family, but great sense of humour.
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Dementia is a completely horrible thing, and it is the reason that I keep smoking, because I’d far rather die of lung cancer or some other smoking-related illness than get it.
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Also, there is apparently some medical evidence that smoking staves off dementia!
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Well said uncle was a heavy smoker and a massive alcoholic and still got dementia so there may be no hope. That said I’m not sure what actually killed him and he didn’t have dementia for anything like as long as his mother (my nanna) who didn’t smoke (at least while I knew her) and only became an alcoholic once she had dementia and no longer knew when she’d last had a sherry. She got at least 15 years that weren’t worth having, arguably a good bit more.
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Mmm, I’d rather have quality than quantity.
The mister’s mum liked her daily sherry too! That started when she was about nine years old and miraculously survived septicaemia from a burst appendix before antibiotics, and the doctors prescribed her a daily raw-egg-and-sherry mixture after she came out of the iron lung.
She cut out the raw egg at some point.
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The idea of consuming a raw egg fills me with horror. Then again two bottles of Croft in a day (which is where the old girl was up to) would also be a challenge though it might render the egg thing possible. Remarkably her mind only fully went when they took her off it though some would say offering 12 year olds sherry at 8am was a bit of a sign before that.
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Remarkably her mind only fully went when they took her off it
Well, there you are, then.
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Thaum, as a kid I went on an easter rugby tour with my parents every year with a club my dad had played for in the 40s, and one of the most abiding memories was the Easter Sunday drinking session outside a seaside pub, involving a supersized games of draughts involving half pints and pints, and an outside sing song. Was quite a local tourist attraction. Swing Low was a staple of rugby club song repertoire even then, in the early seventies, my take on it was that it a nice ditty that could have lots of harmonies, and amusing actions to accompany the words. Really doubt there was much more to it than that. If you dug into it, probably been sung by the general public lot longer than that. Other remembered songs were Ilkley Moor bar t’at, ( disgraceful cultural appropriation/abuse of northerners), and lots of first world war songs, ( a long way to Tipperary, pack up your troubles, my girls a corker, etc etc. ) You could argue that this was a tip of the hat to colonialism, empire, and the glorification of war but i think that is stretching it a bit far, and if any Welsh people were offended by the ending rendition of Bread of Heaven, I now apologise profusely for the miners strike and the repression of Welsh culture in the middle ages. Much the same repertoire on a Saturday night in the Fox and Firkin in Catford in the late eighties round the old joanna, so if anything, it would be hard to pin it on upper class public school rugby types being offensive, just English people enjoying themselves while having a beer.
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In fact, further in depth research ( wiki ) tells me that the song was added to a list of harmful and undesired musical works by the Reich Music Examination Office in 1939, so extrapolating from there, the Twickenham crowd is in fact probably socialist leaning, and performing the song as a direct protest against extreme right wing ideology.
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Other important news:- for any English rugby fans with nothing to watch at the moment, the 2026 NRL premiership kicks off in Las Vegas this weekend, the show opening with a Super League taster, Hull KR vs Leeds Rhinos, with the Newcastle Knights taking on the North Queensland Cowboys next, and the later game at the Las Vegas Raiders Allegiant Stadium is the Canterbury Bulldogs vs St.George/Illawarra Dragons. Full round back in Aus the weekend after, to take your mind off the upcoming England Italy debacle.
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I think lyrically at least ‘Swing Low’ is closer than other teams’ fans have managed to get to having a ‘Bread of Heaven’ so it has that in its favour. I quite like the appropriation of hymns as a suggestion that the rugby your team is playing is ‘sent from heaven’, ‘taking you to heaven’ etc. It has something more wonderful about it than just singing a national anthem or nationalist song. I think I probably just like some hymns anyway though.
Don’t get me wrong, I enjoy the crowd belting out Fields of Athenry/Flower of Scotland/La Marseillaise/Hen Wlad fy Nghadau or whatever too, just not quite as much.
I suppose everyone could have gone down a different road and got their own animals to release in the in-goal area in imitation of the French. Probably for the best that didn’t happen…
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Sitting at the bar in Ndjili Airport in Kinshasa. Whirlwind trip around parts of the country, including the southern mining cities of Lubumbashi and Kolwezi, about 2000km from Kin. Amazing going to Kamoa, the largest copper mine in Africa, producing around 500,000 tons of copper cathode a year. They’re installing 400MW of their own hydro and solar/BESS power to mitigate the lack of decent grid power.
Kinshasa, on the other hand, depressed me no end. 20 million people and absolutely fuck all works outside of Gombe, where the rich and political elite (sometimes the same thing) live. From my hotel to the airport was around 30km. First 16km took 3.5 hours, the last 14 took 35 minutes. Why? The highway has become little more than an informal trading strip and taxi rank. It’s filthy, there is no attempt to provide the people of Kin with anything resembling actual services and the elite barge through the gridlock with military escorts.
Still, I love this place. Ordinary Congolese, when treated with respect are great people (most are, I suppose – except for those damned Albanians*) and with rumba blaring in the car it isn’t the worst traffic jam to sit in.
*you’ll need to watch Peter Falk in Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter if you don’t pick up the reference.
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Loved the debate around SLSC and other hymns and songs. Before vuvuzelas, singing was an integral part of local football here and it was magical. One of my best sporting memories was watching Bafana play Ghana at Loftus Versveld. A shit match, with nary a shot in anger, but the crowd sang from 30 minutes before the match until well after it was done – beautiful choral music, with the different stands in absolute harmony with one another. Still gives me goosebumps, and as a concert, would rank up with U2, ZZ Top and the 3 Tenors for great concerts I’ve seen.
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@Deebee – What does a Saffa rugby fan sing when a Saffa rugby fan sings? Or do they not? I can’t really imagine many of the limited number of South Africans I’ve met being up for a sing-song, same goes for the New Zealanders.
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Thaum, there is an trad song called Craigie Hill, it has the following lyrics in it
She said, “My dear, don’t leave me for another season.
Though fortune may be pleasing I’ll go along with you.
I’ll forsake friends and relations
And quit this Irish nation
Unto the bonnie Bann banks forever I’ll bid adieu.”
He said, “My dear, don’t grieve me or yet annoy my patience.
You know I love you dearly the more I’m going away.
I’m going to a foreign nation
To purchase a plantation
To comfort us hereafter all in America.
There is mention of Doorin later too.
I don’t think any of our individual nations come out of the slavery story very well, we were all part of the British colonial apparatus.
It’s painfully ironic that it’s a song of exile from Ulster, the subjects of the song being forced from their native lands, just as they were during the clearances in Scotland,
The landlords and their agents, the bailiffs and their beagles –
The land of our forefathers we’re forced for to give o’er.
Now we’re sailing on the ocean
For honour and promotion
And parting with our sweethearts ’tis them we do adore.
Some of them became those landlords and bailiffs themselves in the new country.
I first heard that song from Dick Gaughan, fearless Communist and agitator, he once wrote on the liner notes for his rendition of World Turned Upsides down “Sometimes we (Scots and Irish) forget that the first colony of the British Empire was in fact England.”
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I’ve said this before, but one of my favourite things in rugby just now is watching Siya Kolisi leading the singing in the tunnel before leading his team out – standing hairs on the back of my neck and arms stuff
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Plenty of plantations in Ulster, but they weren’t owned by the Irish!
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Same in England and Wales, the Inclosure Acts starting in 1604 and going on for three hundred years saw land previously held in common being taken over by private landlords.
Working class people from Scotland (and Ireland and Wales) have got more in common with working class people in England than we do the Scottish landlords.
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James Connolly, born just up the road in “Little Ireland” in Edinburgh
If you remove the English army tomorrow and hoist the green flag over Dublin Castle, unless you set about the organization of the Socialist Republic your efforts would be in vain. England would still rule you. She would rule you through her capitalists, through her landlords, through her financiers, through the whole array of commercial and individualist institutions she has planted in this country and watered with the tears of our mothers and the blood of our martyrs.
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I meant to mention the other day, some news that may be of passing interest to Trisk – Ben Healy is off to La Rochelle at the end of the season.
He looked to have good potential when he came to Edinburgh, but ours is the club where fly half talent comes to die, unfortunately.
I hear he is a really decent guy and I wish him all the best, hopefully Rog will build his confidence back and he can be the player we hoped he’d be.
Embra are having a much-needed mass clear out of the coaching staff, not Everitt though. He was re-signed because of his skill in bringing on young talent. We’ve yet to see that, there is a pool of players at the club who are either current or very recent Scotland U20s graduates. Some of them look to be very good prospects, however they’ve only made the Edinburgh team when older players have been injured, so the jury is out on Everitt, still.
I expect some of those older players will be moved on, I hope so, Edinburgh need to start from scratch.
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CMW – not much singing down this side. Baying for blood, yip, but possibly not through the medium of song.
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@Deebee – That feels right so I’m happy with them staying that way!
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I think I’m ultimately pleased about the non-singing blood-baying South Africans and happy for the English to have their questionable song. A vital part of enjoying international sport (or even sport against local rivals) is the supporters and players of the different teams at least to some extent living up to their stereotypes. Obviously once you see more of them outside of the game or spend time with them watching it it becomes apparent that people are just people, but it’s so much more fun when we can believe they are what we think of them while it feels like it matters to do so.
Aussie cricketers and their supporters are a great example of this for me, but it applies in rugby just as much. If we can’t accuse our rivals of things that deep down we know they are only very tenuously guilty of (if at all) then what would we be left with?
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I’ve seen lots of instances where ‘the backs join in a maul’ and hardly any of them are behind the ball carrier
@bb
I can recall Wayne Barnes pinging Ireland v Wales in (around 2019??) for Henshaw joining ahead of the last player – about 10 mins left – converted try would have out us ahead
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Have to question whether Smith has the pace for fullback – obviously he has it over a short distance
@cmw
Yeah, there’s pace and speed and whatever you’re having yourself – some lads have quick acceleration – enough to break away but probably a lower top speed or tail off after 30-40 metres. Smith has a good step to find gaps. McCloskey probably isn’t as quick off the mark but clearly is faster over a straight line 70-80 metres
I recall a game our U16s lost by a single and the coach saying afterwards – “we have won if Cathal (#2 son) had any gas – or any support…” He made two line breaks in the last 15 mins but like Smith got chased down.
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CMW, we’re not really bloodthirsty, we’re adorable, fluffy and cuddly folk who wish nothing more than a fair contest and all strength to our opponents. Well, when our opponents play anyone else. Unless they’re English, Irish, Australian, Kiwi, French and the other Home Nations during a Lions tour. Then we hate the fuckers anyway. Everyone else is pretty cool though. Just for clarity.
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I’ve always been a bit bemused about how that particular song came to be England’s rugby anthem
I can recall seeing it sung at after match drinks as a group “game” accompanied by a lot of actions (much like “head, shoulders, knees and toes”)
So, I get how that “game” could/would spread as a bit of drunken – and seemingly harmless – fun
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Ben Healy is off to La Rochelle at the end of the season
@ticht
I think we were kind of surprised he’s going to LaR but it hasn’t worked out at Edinburgh for him (albeit he did play at RWC23)
Like Prendergast in some ways – good boot, good long pass. Not really physical or quick – though he did score a last min winning try for Munster vs Ulster (sorry, Thaum) when he crashed over for 5-10 metres which showed he could start using his size as well.
La Rochelle is a nice place to live and work for a couple of years. As you say, there seems to be something there to work with – so hopefully he comes through. When Munster won the URC, he started the semi vs Leinster with Crowley at 12, and was the closer in the final.
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Deebs, soon-to-be Lions loosehead Boan Venter makes his 100th appearance for Edinburgh tonight.
He’s the best scrummager on either side currently plying their trade in Scotland, he will be a real asset for your lads and a hefty loss for Edinburgh. He also has a knack for the cheeky try – he has touched down 19 times for Embra.
He still young for a prop, 28.
However Edinburgh have a couple of lads coming up and playing for the current Scotland U20s, tighthead Ollie Blyth Lafferty is 19 and much bigger than Zander Fagerson, he is very good in the tight. The other lad Jamie Stewart is also 19, also a tighthead but he’s been deployed on the left hand side of the scrum in the U20s this season, he’s also much bigger than Zander Fagerson.
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@Trisk – “I can recall Wayne Barnes pinging Ireland v Wales in (around 2019??)”
2019 was the slam game when we scored at the start and then Anscombe kicked you to death, we were boring bastards that year but very effective, think you were within a whisker of getting nilled.
I remember it happening and think it was 2017 (when we were also fairly boring culminating in the very long and tedious game with France), we seem to have won that game three tries to nil but it was close until the end.
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