Today I got up at 8.30 and watched a rugby match. That ended with me writing this at 9, having watched sport all day. Here is my recap.
Tri-Nations Series: All Blacks - Springboks
The first match was a pretty poor affair, with the Blacks winning comfortably 40-7 and running in 6 tries. It was good to see them play well, because when they do there's nothing like it, but they won't take too much from it. Bokke were missing pretty much everyone from their pack and have an idiot for a coach in Peter De Villiers. De Villiers is, infamously, the first black African to manage the team, a team, remember, where black players were actually not allowed until 1995, and were so racist nobody was allowed to play them until apartheid ended that same year. Fuckin hell. Anyway, the guy is an idiot, picking Jon Smit as captain and hooker, when he should be neither. This means he actually bumps Bismark Du Plessis to the bench, despite the fact that the guy is an actual beast. He's enormous. Bizarrely, Smit's club does the same, and nobody seems to understand why. I know he's a world-cup winning captain but coaches, like their players, need to have a ruthless streak, an edge to them. And cutting the captain because he's past it might be a difficult decision, but it's not one Pete would have difficulty defending.
Anyway, despite how bad Bokke were, the Blacks were pretty impressive, particularly Dan Carter, a man who has now scored 1200 international points. More virtuously, one time when he was taking a kick and the camera came up close into his face and my mother said, "what? a handsome rugby player?". Thanks mum (Carlow rugby 1998-2004, Portlaoise League 2005). They also showed off their new kit. Surprise! it's all black. No, it's actually not, it's got a shit white bit on the back of the neck, like they all lay down on some shaving foam. The new world cup jerseys are rubbish all around though. Anyway, all that is of course arbitrary, because they won't win the world cup. The Blacks are always favourites. Anyone who has ever spoken to a kiwi will know the closed-mind arrogance and contempt of the average All Black fan on the subject of rugby. But fuck them all, because the Blacks always blow it. The reason why Bokke and Australia have won two world cups (against the Blacks 1, in the first world cup back in 1987 in New Zealand, with England the other winner) is because they know how to get it done. The Blacks are the Kildare of rugby (although that's grossly unfair to the Blacks ((see below))). Bokke have a plan B, and generally will run over you to win. Blacks will throw it around all day, play suicidal, error strewn rugby that can come off and look beautiful sure, but when they play a disciplined, structured, physical team, they can be beaten, and in the world cup, they only have to lose once. And usually they do. Still, they won this fairly handy.
Moment of the match: has to be Cory Jane's first try which was just ridiculous. It's very rare for a team to score off back-to-back possessions, i.e. score and then score again with the other team only kicking-off in between. But that's what happened. I'd say that the rarity of it was what caught Bokke out, only it was really the genius of Dan Carter, who was involved twice, and the pace of Cory Jane.
NRL Round 20: North Queensland Cowboys - Penrith Panthers
To Australian rugby league** next, with the Cowboys, who play in Diary Farmer's Stadium (seriously) in Townesville (even more seriously), taking on Penrith. I say I watch a lot of NRL, but really I only watch the teams that I like or that are entertaining, so it tends to be Dragons or Rabbitohs (which I like) or Broncos or Tigers (which I kind of hate but enjoy on an appreciative basis). So verily I did watch two teams I've only ever seen as opponents previously. It was an odd match too, taking forever to get going before the 33rd minute when Luke Walsh decided to ruin the match for everyone by getting sin-binned. Whatever about the effect of losing a man in rugby, it's multiplied in league by about 20. A team with 12 men will generally concede a few tries in the 10 minutes they're down a man. Oddly enough, Penrith came out only 12-6 down from this period, scoring their best try of the game too. So, I thought, this is pretty good stuff.
The second half was even better, in the balance the whole way through, until the Cowboys finally finished Penrith off. It was odd to see two teams, one just outside the top 4 but definitely going to the 8-team play-offs, and the other just outside that 8, with no personal interest in the outcome. It made for a very entertaining game. Few big names on show, but still some good players. Neither team appear to have anyone to kick goals, and there was nobody who made the crowd come alight either, so it was very much so a weird game for a neutral to come into. The difference between the teams was a tiny aboriginal man too, which was neat.
Moment of the match: Luke Lewis knocking himself the fuck out (khtfo). Luke, who is one of the three Panthers players I had heard off before the game, is a tremendous athlete. As a kick went through the in-goal (the try scoring area), he chased after it, leaping on it just as it crossed the end-line into touch with both hands. It's a ball, so he naturally kind of rolled off it, and then landed face-first on the turf, sliding ignominiously into a padded advertisement with his arms at his side. It wasn't as impressive as when Sam Tomkins somehow scored a try while unconscious against Bradford (video here is highly recommended, although he lies on the ground with his eyes open for a while. When I saw it, live, I thought he might actually have died. If he had scored a try while dead maybe people might like him, but he was only unconscious so everyone, including the England fans continue to boo him, the cheating shit), but it was supremely athletic and really unlucky. And highly ignominious, which makes my schadenfreude acceptable.
Currie Cup: Natal Sharks - Free State Cheetahs
Currie Cup rugby is by far the most enjoyable rugby after the Heineken cup. It is the provincial cup competition of South Africa. Rugby in South Africa is like nowhere else, and that's probably a good thing. The HSE wouldn't be able for it anyway. Saffirs are impossibly large and athletic specimens, and rugby is something of a way of life there. I mean, they were forced to play with themselves for years, with tours not allowed until apartheid ended as I mentioned above. Once apartheid ended, if I remember correctly, Morgan Freeman told a short Bostonian to wen thuh wirld kep, which he did and everyone immediately forgot about the last 100 years of South African history. South Africa play rugby like they hate the game, their opponents, their team-mates, themselves. They just smash into one another, throw hundreds of bodies into rucks, compete for everything by being the biggest, the strongest and if necessary the fastest. Their teams are populated by Gordon D'Arcy figures who are so busy running though you that they miss big gaps they could run into. And by gods is it nearly the best rugby there is.
So this game was pretty explosive, even for Currie Cup, with more than a point a minute scored. Natal, who wear an awesome black and white jersey with red trim that seems to sum up South Africa pretty well, play in Durban, in a stadium call The Shark Tank (th' shaak t'ank' in Afrikaans) which is like no other I've ever seen. There is no depth to the stands in the way that there are in other stadia, so each tier comes out to pitch-side (this photo gives a good idea), so the stadium is kind of like a box rather than a bowl. It just looks ridiculous, and I find it strangely intimidating. It's called the Shark Tank because Natal are the sharks, you see. Until 1995, when the game went professional and Super Rugby began (and apartheid ended), they were call the Banana Boys, but they rebranded to stop the school-girlish giggling. Free State used to be call The Cats, but they changed to Cheetahs too. I don't really know why, because I wouldn't fuck with a cat. That's a weird thing about team names, there's loads of Wildcats (Wakefield, Kentucky, every peewee team in Springfield) and Tigers (Western suburbs, Leicester, Detroit, Missouri, Auburn, Clemson) and even some made-up cat creatures (Cincinatti Bearcats?) nobody just goes with the house cat. Cats are all bananas, boy. Free State used to be called the Orange Free State, until the central govenment, based in one of those horrible bureaucratic new towns, Pretoria, decided to distance the area from the Orange bit of its history. What that meant was that it became illegal to wave the Orange Free State flag, bizarrely resulting in the barely comprehensible incident where a black man was thrown out of a Bokke game for doing just that. In 2010! The guy was black, waving a flag that was supposed to be a sign of oppression against his own people, at a sport that black people were banned from playing for 100 years in support of a team, the very symbol of which is a byword for apartheid. And they kick him out. Welcome to Political Correctness.
Anyway, the game was pretty great, with Natal running off to a 31 -17 lead at half time after some amazing long-distance tries, and plenty of invention from mercurial French git Freddie Michalak. Michalak clearly enjoys Currie Cup because, firstly it shows, but he also asked to be released from Toulouse before the semi-final of the Top 14 to go and play in it. I guess he still got a medal, but guys who want to be there are invaluable to any team. Natal are hugely impressive, especially Freddie, Stefan Terblanche, Craig Burden and Keegan Daniel. Just look at those names! Even guys with boring first names get amazing surnames (Ross Skeate, Trevor Nyakane) and vice-versa (Ryno Benjamin). Even boring names are made better by spelling (Riaan Smit). Cheetahs might have lost but they win best name for Sias Ebersohn.
Despite going in behind, Cheetahs really chased hard in the second stanza as the Sharks went a bit limp. Cheetahs were lucky to be in it, being awarded a try by the video-ref despite the fact that Boom Prinsloo clearly dropped it. That lifted them, and they came out all guns blazing in the second half. Sharks were probably happy with 5 tries in the first half, so they had nothing to play for, but Cheetahs got back to just 6 points with 5 minutes to go and the score at 40-34. Freddie scored a penalty to push it back to two scores but Cheetahs could have won a bonus point by losing by less than 8. Naturally, having chased so hard to get back, the last kick of the game would have done just that but Ebersohn missed. Typical. Best game of the weekend.
Moment of the match: This is a tie, between Sibusiso Sithole's try and Boom Prinsloo's concussion. Sithole's try was ridiculous. Cheetahs had the ball in the Natal 22, but a big-bopper had the ball, some fat scrum-capped guy so I guess it was WP Nel, had the ball which is bad news for everyone. His offload was so easy to read that I spotted it from my stool in Dublin. Turn over, the sharks spread it wide and it comes to Sithole off a pop-pass, still inside the 22. He explodes through a tiny gap, fending one and beating another with the happy feet and just goes away, going 80 metres in a blink. The guy has serious pace, and there's no substitute for that as Johnathan "Jiffy" Davies would say. Oddly, Cheetahs full-back Hennie Daniller wasn't far behind and never gave up although there isn't a man alive who would have questioned him if he did. Sithole gets bonus points, as does Freddie, for wearing his socks around his ankles.
Boom Prinsloo's knock out was kind of innocuous, he took a big hit despite being the defender. I think it was Keegan Daniel, who is one hell of a player, who just went over him. Don't let Boom's name fool you, he's actually a giant of a man. He was probably too big to fit on a stretcher, although I'd imagine Saffir stretchers are pretty big, so he was walked off by two physios. He nearly collapsed about 5 times and was dragging his feet. It was a pretty bad one. Luckily for Cheetahs they just brought an equally impressively named replacement, Herkie Liebenburg, from the bench.
GAA Quarter-Final: Kildare - Donegal
Don't let any of the reaction, including my own, fool you, this was a terrible game of football. Too many wides, too many aimless passes, too many soft frees. What it was, however, was enormously exciting. Drawn games usually are but this one was because extra-time was great for once. Kildare did have a goal controversially ruled out, but FUCK KILDARE. They weren't too pushed when Meath had an identically controversial goal disallowed. In both instances the media decided that it was "clearly" a goal, and should have been allowed despite the fact that you need to be able to tell whether a player has arrived into "the square", an abstract 3-dimensional space marked by a 2d line on the ground, after a ball traveling at pace through the air enters into that same abstract concept. It's often easy, but O'Connor's disallowed goal was as clear as mud. Kevin McStay, who is the sole black-spot in the entire world of GAA analysis, claims he stopped running before the square, but he CLEARLY didn't! No way did he. Then McStay decided that usually when the ball hits the post it kind of resets the square ball rule. Well, maybe in Crazyton. This is the same madness that caused him to, rather embarrassingly, declare that Bernard Brogan's controversial free at the end of the Leinster semi-final should only be given if it was "a hell of a foul". No Kevin, it should just have been some kind of foul. The fact that Kevin McStay has no Celtic Crosses means he wasn't the footballer that some of his colleagues were, but this kind of subjectivity has no place in the game, because legislation has to be concrete. But I digress. I dislike McStay is the point.
Kildare tend to lose in a bleeding-heart fashion every year. They conceded a controversial goal in the All-Ireland semi last year against Down. They lost to Dublin on that Brogan free. But the thing is that these things are largely arbitrary. You see, Kerry, Cork, Tyrone never lose controversially. That's because they don't care about things they can't control, such as poor refereeing decisions, they keep their mind on the task. Kildare had a goal disallowed early in the second half, when there was plenty of time to go, and immediately conceded three points, allowing Donegal to capitalise and equalise in that order. They then scored again and went ahead, and after Kildare leveled, scored a goal of their own though sub Karl Lacey, with his first touch. This all happened in the 10 minutes after the goal. Kildare just fell to bits. It looked like they dropped their heads and said, "here we go again". Donegal didn't score in the last 12 minutes and Kildare barely scraped a draw off the back of two very soft frees and a fluked point from James Kavanagh. Hardly the stuff of champions.
In extra-time, Kildare, who had fought back to draw were in the perfect position to push on and win, and we had heard all year about how fit they are. And of course they went three points ahead, usually a winning lead in ET. But then they went three points behind in the second half of extra time, as Donegal, who have to run their socks off to carry the ball all the way from their defence to their two-man half forward line, came storming back. Ok, Kildare did level again, and most people would say a draw would be fair, but the point from Kevin Cassidy that won it for Donegal was from the left sideline, on the 45 metre line, a full 65 metres from the goal, and he kicked it with the outside of his left foot! It might be the single greatest point I've ever seen, and I include Gerathy's miracle against Dublin, Maurice Fitzgerald's sideline ball against Dublin and Padraig Clancy's Leinster winner for Laois from a full 70 metres. It was just fucking incredible. And Donegal didn't deserve it any less. I know their blanket defence is like the jab in boxing, but still it's up to the other team to figure out a way by it and they haven't managed it yet.
The other thing is, that at the end of the day, all the whinging done about Kildare is moot. In every situation, against Down, Dublin or Donegal, at best Kildare deserved a draw. I don't think most teams talk about being robbed when they were never ahead (against Down or Dublin), or when they could have won the game three times but couldn't stop the opposition getting back into it (against Donegal). You know? I mean they had a goal disallowed when they were winning by 3 points. 6 points is easier to defend, sure, but they still let Donegal get 3 points ahead from that position. Why would anyone call that being "robbed"? I think Donegal punished that wastefulness, and that's the sign of a team with an edge. Kildare are too self-absorbed, I imagine due to an odd media idiosyncrasy that includes them as aristocrats of the game when they have won 2 Leinster championships and 0 All-Irelands in the last 80 years. They aren't owed anything, they have to earn it. Donegal did that.
Moment of the match: Emmet Bolton's dive. He ran into Ryan Bradley and went down like he had either been shot in the face or seen too many movies. It was ridiculous. When they showed the replay there was an audible groan from the crowd (replays are shown on the big screen at the game). It was, in a word, pathetic and I'm glad at how it was ignored by the officials and then dismissed by the crowd, because that shite has no place in any sport much less gaelic games. This isn't tennis, it's a physical contact sport. It was however indicative of the shite Kildare were pulling all day, as if you needed another example. In the commentary, Kevin McStay chimed in with, "ballet lessons". What has ballet got to do with falling down? Marty brought sanity to proceedings with his follow-up, "Hollywood beckons".
*I didn't just watch rugby
**League is a different "code" of rugby, with its own set of rules. What happened is that rugby was an upper-class sport in England when it was first associated, much as it still is to a certain degree everywhere that plays it today, and as such there was no need for players to be professional. They could afford to spend time playing rugby recreationally. When the first clubs began to spring up, the physical nature of the game, which up until the 90s was largely a posh form of fist-fight (it remains a largely provincial eye-gouging academy in France today), clubs were formed in coal-mining and industrial towns where manual labour was the order of the day. The thing is that the players for these clubs couldn't afford to take a day off from the pit to play rugby. Thusly did begin a rift in the original rugby union as the chairmen of working-class clubs pushed for professionalism. The posh twats in the union denied this, and in 1870 in Huddersfield the rugby league was formed, simply as a professional version of the union (rugby union, the other code and most commonly known code of rugby didn't become a professional game until 1996). Over the years however, as the league clubs tried to attract crowds sufficient to sustain the clubs as professional bodies, league slowly began changing the rules. Now. This was not done arbitrarily: League needed to evolve as a more entertaining form of rugby. League today plays with no set-pieces. This means no line-outs or competitive scrums. In rugby, the scrum is a mess, often taking more than 10 minutes in total over the course of the game, meaning that one eighth of a rugby match is spent watching a training drill. The fans don't like it, but when you show them the opposite, the league scrum where 6 players engage in a scrum, most barely even bend over, for all of 5 seconds and they're off playing rugby again, rugby fans don't like that, call it "a betrayal". But do you want to see rugby or not? The set-pieces are also a hiding area for poor teams, as referees often don't seem to know the rules (look at Wales try against Ireland in the 2011 6 Nations where Wales got away with breaking pretty much every rule in the book about line-outs) and despite the presence of video-referees they never use them in the scrum, where the referee often is standing on the wrong side to see what's wrong. I mean, look at the 2011 ERC Heineken Cup final, where Northampton scored 3 tries and 22 points all off the back of their scrum. In the second half, Leinster fixed their scrum and Northampton didn't even score. Now, I know it says a lot about Leinster that their coaches are so smart and concise that they changed the entire match in 10 minutes at half-time, and also about how good their front row is to not only stem the tide but go on to dominate the scrum in the second-half, including winning the penalty that put Leinster ahead for the first time in the game off the demolition of Northampton's scrum. But it also shows that a very limited team can achieve total dominance from having a good set-piece. I know that the number of scrums in the first-half of that match was extraordinary, but still, when it was taken away, Northampton had nothing. More interestingly, however, is that the means by which Northampton achieve their dominance in the scrum is to break two fundamental laws of the scrum: firstly by "popping-up" or coming out of the scrum, which is illegal for every other team on the planet but not them for some reason; and secondly for pushing the scrum upwards, in effect trying to force a pop-up. They don't actually win scrums legally is what I'm saying. How Leinster indeed turned the scrum around was by not pushing. Anyway, basicially, what I'm saying is that league removed the set-piece to make the game about which team is better on the field. The other major change is that in league the play is broken into "sets of six", which is a similar mechanic to basketball's 24 second shot-clock, whereby the team in possession can only be tackled a maximum of 6 times before handing over possession. This creates more urgency and means more running rugby, removing the kick-tennis that can happen in rugby, and also interestingly means more tries. There is an average of 5 tries per league match in England, against 3 in rugby in England. As I said, it has to entertain. Also, the sets of six dynamic removes the ability of a team to just keep possession all day and win by "anti-rugby". Munster were the best anti-rugby team of all time, winning two Heineken Cups by just not letting the other team play. It worked, but I absolutely hated it, because it wasn't about which team is best, it's about having the ball and continuously diving on the ground and leaving the ball in the ruck forever. It was like that in league until only the 1960s, where the famous St.George club in Australia, winners of 11 consecutive premierships, were so good at keeping possession that they were the only team to touch the ball in an entire half, the opposition only kicking the ball to them after they scored. It was then the League brought in sets of 4, then 5, then 6, and it really works. Anyway, what happens in rugby? One team will run around for a while and eventually run out of ideas or make a mistake giving the ball back to the opposition, it's actually rare for a team to reach 6 phases or more. Just because league is more structured, doesn't mean it's all that different at the end of the day. Also, having the tackles clean means that the "ruck" is clean, the act of recycling the ball when a tackle is complete. In rugby the ruck is the primary area where penalties are conceded, because there are about 50 rules and referees and players only vaguely seem to know what they are. In league, the guy who is tackled gets up and rolls the ball behind him while the defending team retreats 10 metres. Clean as a whistle, Homer. So there you go. League is the Professor Xavier of rugby, the misunderstood and feared evolved relative. And I thoroughly, despite the dismissive tone of this footnote, love them both. I just think that rugby needs to evolve too.
Tri-Nations Series: All Blacks - Springboks
The first match was a pretty poor affair, with the Blacks winning comfortably 40-7 and running in 6 tries. It was good to see them play well, because when they do there's nothing like it, but they won't take too much from it. Bokke were missing pretty much everyone from their pack and have an idiot for a coach in Peter De Villiers. De Villiers is, infamously, the first black African to manage the team, a team, remember, where black players were actually not allowed until 1995, and were so racist nobody was allowed to play them until apartheid ended that same year. Fuckin hell. Anyway, the guy is an idiot, picking Jon Smit as captain and hooker, when he should be neither. This means he actually bumps Bismark Du Plessis to the bench, despite the fact that the guy is an actual beast. He's enormous. Bizarrely, Smit's club does the same, and nobody seems to understand why. I know he's a world-cup winning captain but coaches, like their players, need to have a ruthless streak, an edge to them. And cutting the captain because he's past it might be a difficult decision, but it's not one Pete would have difficulty defending.
Anyway, despite how bad Bokke were, the Blacks were pretty impressive, particularly Dan Carter, a man who has now scored 1200 international points. More virtuously, one time when he was taking a kick and the camera came up close into his face and my mother said, "what? a handsome rugby player?". Thanks mum (Carlow rugby 1998-2004, Portlaoise League 2005). They also showed off their new kit. Surprise! it's all black. No, it's actually not, it's got a shit white bit on the back of the neck, like they all lay down on some shaving foam. The new world cup jerseys are rubbish all around though. Anyway, all that is of course arbitrary, because they won't win the world cup. The Blacks are always favourites. Anyone who has ever spoken to a kiwi will know the closed-mind arrogance and contempt of the average All Black fan on the subject of rugby. But fuck them all, because the Blacks always blow it. The reason why Bokke and Australia have won two world cups (against the Blacks 1, in the first world cup back in 1987 in New Zealand, with England the other winner) is because they know how to get it done. The Blacks are the Kildare of rugby (although that's grossly unfair to the Blacks ((see below))). Bokke have a plan B, and generally will run over you to win. Blacks will throw it around all day, play suicidal, error strewn rugby that can come off and look beautiful sure, but when they play a disciplined, structured, physical team, they can be beaten, and in the world cup, they only have to lose once. And usually they do. Still, they won this fairly handy.
Moment of the match: has to be Cory Jane's first try which was just ridiculous. It's very rare for a team to score off back-to-back possessions, i.e. score and then score again with the other team only kicking-off in between. But that's what happened. I'd say that the rarity of it was what caught Bokke out, only it was really the genius of Dan Carter, who was involved twice, and the pace of Cory Jane.
NRL Round 20: North Queensland Cowboys - Penrith Panthers
To Australian rugby league** next, with the Cowboys, who play in Diary Farmer's Stadium (seriously) in Townesville (even more seriously), taking on Penrith. I say I watch a lot of NRL, but really I only watch the teams that I like or that are entertaining, so it tends to be Dragons or Rabbitohs (which I like) or Broncos or Tigers (which I kind of hate but enjoy on an appreciative basis). So verily I did watch two teams I've only ever seen as opponents previously. It was an odd match too, taking forever to get going before the 33rd minute when Luke Walsh decided to ruin the match for everyone by getting sin-binned. Whatever about the effect of losing a man in rugby, it's multiplied in league by about 20. A team with 12 men will generally concede a few tries in the 10 minutes they're down a man. Oddly enough, Penrith came out only 12-6 down from this period, scoring their best try of the game too. So, I thought, this is pretty good stuff.
The second half was even better, in the balance the whole way through, until the Cowboys finally finished Penrith off. It was odd to see two teams, one just outside the top 4 but definitely going to the 8-team play-offs, and the other just outside that 8, with no personal interest in the outcome. It made for a very entertaining game. Few big names on show, but still some good players. Neither team appear to have anyone to kick goals, and there was nobody who made the crowd come alight either, so it was very much so a weird game for a neutral to come into. The difference between the teams was a tiny aboriginal man too, which was neat.
Moment of the match: Luke Lewis knocking himself the fuck out (khtfo). Luke, who is one of the three Panthers players I had heard off before the game, is a tremendous athlete. As a kick went through the in-goal (the try scoring area), he chased after it, leaping on it just as it crossed the end-line into touch with both hands. It's a ball, so he naturally kind of rolled off it, and then landed face-first on the turf, sliding ignominiously into a padded advertisement with his arms at his side. It wasn't as impressive as when Sam Tomkins somehow scored a try while unconscious against Bradford (video here is highly recommended, although he lies on the ground with his eyes open for a while. When I saw it, live, I thought he might actually have died. If he had scored a try while dead maybe people might like him, but he was only unconscious so everyone, including the England fans continue to boo him, the cheating shit), but it was supremely athletic and really unlucky. And highly ignominious, which makes my schadenfreude acceptable.
Currie Cup: Natal Sharks - Free State Cheetahs
Currie Cup rugby is by far the most enjoyable rugby after the Heineken cup. It is the provincial cup competition of South Africa. Rugby in South Africa is like nowhere else, and that's probably a good thing. The HSE wouldn't be able for it anyway. Saffirs are impossibly large and athletic specimens, and rugby is something of a way of life there. I mean, they were forced to play with themselves for years, with tours not allowed until apartheid ended as I mentioned above. Once apartheid ended, if I remember correctly, Morgan Freeman told a short Bostonian to wen thuh wirld kep, which he did and everyone immediately forgot about the last 100 years of South African history. South Africa play rugby like they hate the game, their opponents, their team-mates, themselves. They just smash into one another, throw hundreds of bodies into rucks, compete for everything by being the biggest, the strongest and if necessary the fastest. Their teams are populated by Gordon D'Arcy figures who are so busy running though you that they miss big gaps they could run into. And by gods is it nearly the best rugby there is.
So this game was pretty explosive, even for Currie Cup, with more than a point a minute scored. Natal, who wear an awesome black and white jersey with red trim that seems to sum up South Africa pretty well, play in Durban, in a stadium call The Shark Tank (th' shaak t'ank' in Afrikaans) which is like no other I've ever seen. There is no depth to the stands in the way that there are in other stadia, so each tier comes out to pitch-side (this photo gives a good idea), so the stadium is kind of like a box rather than a bowl. It just looks ridiculous, and I find it strangely intimidating. It's called the Shark Tank because Natal are the sharks, you see. Until 1995, when the game went professional and Super Rugby began (and apartheid ended), they were call the Banana Boys, but they rebranded to stop the school-girlish giggling. Free State used to be call The Cats, but they changed to Cheetahs too. I don't really know why, because I wouldn't fuck with a cat. That's a weird thing about team names, there's loads of Wildcats (Wakefield, Kentucky, every peewee team in Springfield) and Tigers (Western suburbs, Leicester, Detroit, Missouri, Auburn, Clemson) and even some made-up cat creatures (Cincinatti Bearcats?) nobody just goes with the house cat. Cats are all bananas, boy. Free State used to be called the Orange Free State, until the central govenment, based in one of those horrible bureaucratic new towns, Pretoria, decided to distance the area from the Orange bit of its history. What that meant was that it became illegal to wave the Orange Free State flag, bizarrely resulting in the barely comprehensible incident where a black man was thrown out of a Bokke game for doing just that. In 2010! The guy was black, waving a flag that was supposed to be a sign of oppression against his own people, at a sport that black people were banned from playing for 100 years in support of a team, the very symbol of which is a byword for apartheid. And they kick him out. Welcome to Political Correctness.
Anyway, the game was pretty great, with Natal running off to a 31 -17 lead at half time after some amazing long-distance tries, and plenty of invention from mercurial French git Freddie Michalak. Michalak clearly enjoys Currie Cup because, firstly it shows, but he also asked to be released from Toulouse before the semi-final of the Top 14 to go and play in it. I guess he still got a medal, but guys who want to be there are invaluable to any team. Natal are hugely impressive, especially Freddie, Stefan Terblanche, Craig Burden and Keegan Daniel. Just look at those names! Even guys with boring first names get amazing surnames (Ross Skeate, Trevor Nyakane) and vice-versa (Ryno Benjamin). Even boring names are made better by spelling (Riaan Smit). Cheetahs might have lost but they win best name for Sias Ebersohn.
Despite going in behind, Cheetahs really chased hard in the second stanza as the Sharks went a bit limp. Cheetahs were lucky to be in it, being awarded a try by the video-ref despite the fact that Boom Prinsloo clearly dropped it. That lifted them, and they came out all guns blazing in the second half. Sharks were probably happy with 5 tries in the first half, so they had nothing to play for, but Cheetahs got back to just 6 points with 5 minutes to go and the score at 40-34. Freddie scored a penalty to push it back to two scores but Cheetahs could have won a bonus point by losing by less than 8. Naturally, having chased so hard to get back, the last kick of the game would have done just that but Ebersohn missed. Typical. Best game of the weekend.
Moment of the match: This is a tie, between Sibusiso Sithole's try and Boom Prinsloo's concussion. Sithole's try was ridiculous. Cheetahs had the ball in the Natal 22, but a big-bopper had the ball, some fat scrum-capped guy so I guess it was WP Nel, had the ball which is bad news for everyone. His offload was so easy to read that I spotted it from my stool in Dublin. Turn over, the sharks spread it wide and it comes to Sithole off a pop-pass, still inside the 22. He explodes through a tiny gap, fending one and beating another with the happy feet and just goes away, going 80 metres in a blink. The guy has serious pace, and there's no substitute for that as Johnathan "Jiffy" Davies would say. Oddly, Cheetahs full-back Hennie Daniller wasn't far behind and never gave up although there isn't a man alive who would have questioned him if he did. Sithole gets bonus points, as does Freddie, for wearing his socks around his ankles.
Boom Prinsloo's knock out was kind of innocuous, he took a big hit despite being the defender. I think it was Keegan Daniel, who is one hell of a player, who just went over him. Don't let Boom's name fool you, he's actually a giant of a man. He was probably too big to fit on a stretcher, although I'd imagine Saffir stretchers are pretty big, so he was walked off by two physios. He nearly collapsed about 5 times and was dragging his feet. It was a pretty bad one. Luckily for Cheetahs they just brought an equally impressively named replacement, Herkie Liebenburg, from the bench.
GAA Quarter-Final: Kildare - Donegal
Don't let any of the reaction, including my own, fool you, this was a terrible game of football. Too many wides, too many aimless passes, too many soft frees. What it was, however, was enormously exciting. Drawn games usually are but this one was because extra-time was great for once. Kildare did have a goal controversially ruled out, but FUCK KILDARE. They weren't too pushed when Meath had an identically controversial goal disallowed. In both instances the media decided that it was "clearly" a goal, and should have been allowed despite the fact that you need to be able to tell whether a player has arrived into "the square", an abstract 3-dimensional space marked by a 2d line on the ground, after a ball traveling at pace through the air enters into that same abstract concept. It's often easy, but O'Connor's disallowed goal was as clear as mud. Kevin McStay, who is the sole black-spot in the entire world of GAA analysis, claims he stopped running before the square, but he CLEARLY didn't! No way did he. Then McStay decided that usually when the ball hits the post it kind of resets the square ball rule. Well, maybe in Crazyton. This is the same madness that caused him to, rather embarrassingly, declare that Bernard Brogan's controversial free at the end of the Leinster semi-final should only be given if it was "a hell of a foul". No Kevin, it should just have been some kind of foul. The fact that Kevin McStay has no Celtic Crosses means he wasn't the footballer that some of his colleagues were, but this kind of subjectivity has no place in the game, because legislation has to be concrete. But I digress. I dislike McStay is the point.
Kildare tend to lose in a bleeding-heart fashion every year. They conceded a controversial goal in the All-Ireland semi last year against Down. They lost to Dublin on that Brogan free. But the thing is that these things are largely arbitrary. You see, Kerry, Cork, Tyrone never lose controversially. That's because they don't care about things they can't control, such as poor refereeing decisions, they keep their mind on the task. Kildare had a goal disallowed early in the second half, when there was plenty of time to go, and immediately conceded three points, allowing Donegal to capitalise and equalise in that order. They then scored again and went ahead, and after Kildare leveled, scored a goal of their own though sub Karl Lacey, with his first touch. This all happened in the 10 minutes after the goal. Kildare just fell to bits. It looked like they dropped their heads and said, "here we go again". Donegal didn't score in the last 12 minutes and Kildare barely scraped a draw off the back of two very soft frees and a fluked point from James Kavanagh. Hardly the stuff of champions.
In extra-time, Kildare, who had fought back to draw were in the perfect position to push on and win, and we had heard all year about how fit they are. And of course they went three points ahead, usually a winning lead in ET. But then they went three points behind in the second half of extra time, as Donegal, who have to run their socks off to carry the ball all the way from their defence to their two-man half forward line, came storming back. Ok, Kildare did level again, and most people would say a draw would be fair, but the point from Kevin Cassidy that won it for Donegal was from the left sideline, on the 45 metre line, a full 65 metres from the goal, and he kicked it with the outside of his left foot! It might be the single greatest point I've ever seen, and I include Gerathy's miracle against Dublin, Maurice Fitzgerald's sideline ball against Dublin and Padraig Clancy's Leinster winner for Laois from a full 70 metres. It was just fucking incredible. And Donegal didn't deserve it any less. I know their blanket defence is like the jab in boxing, but still it's up to the other team to figure out a way by it and they haven't managed it yet.
The other thing is, that at the end of the day, all the whinging done about Kildare is moot. In every situation, against Down, Dublin or Donegal, at best Kildare deserved a draw. I don't think most teams talk about being robbed when they were never ahead (against Down or Dublin), or when they could have won the game three times but couldn't stop the opposition getting back into it (against Donegal). You know? I mean they had a goal disallowed when they were winning by 3 points. 6 points is easier to defend, sure, but they still let Donegal get 3 points ahead from that position. Why would anyone call that being "robbed"? I think Donegal punished that wastefulness, and that's the sign of a team with an edge. Kildare are too self-absorbed, I imagine due to an odd media idiosyncrasy that includes them as aristocrats of the game when they have won 2 Leinster championships and 0 All-Irelands in the last 80 years. They aren't owed anything, they have to earn it. Donegal did that.
Moment of the match: Emmet Bolton's dive. He ran into Ryan Bradley and went down like he had either been shot in the face or seen too many movies. It was ridiculous. When they showed the replay there was an audible groan from the crowd (replays are shown on the big screen at the game). It was, in a word, pathetic and I'm glad at how it was ignored by the officials and then dismissed by the crowd, because that shite has no place in any sport much less gaelic games. This isn't tennis, it's a physical contact sport. It was however indicative of the shite Kildare were pulling all day, as if you needed another example. In the commentary, Kevin McStay chimed in with, "ballet lessons". What has ballet got to do with falling down? Marty brought sanity to proceedings with his follow-up, "Hollywood beckons".
*I didn't just watch rugby
**League is a different "code" of rugby, with its own set of rules. What happened is that rugby was an upper-class sport in England when it was first associated, much as it still is to a certain degree everywhere that plays it today, and as such there was no need for players to be professional. They could afford to spend time playing rugby recreationally. When the first clubs began to spring up, the physical nature of the game, which up until the 90s was largely a posh form of fist-fight (it remains a largely provincial eye-gouging academy in France today), clubs were formed in coal-mining and industrial towns where manual labour was the order of the day. The thing is that the players for these clubs couldn't afford to take a day off from the pit to play rugby. Thusly did begin a rift in the original rugby union as the chairmen of working-class clubs pushed for professionalism. The posh twats in the union denied this, and in 1870 in Huddersfield the rugby league was formed, simply as a professional version of the union (rugby union, the other code and most commonly known code of rugby didn't become a professional game until 1996). Over the years however, as the league clubs tried to attract crowds sufficient to sustain the clubs as professional bodies, league slowly began changing the rules. Now. This was not done arbitrarily: League needed to evolve as a more entertaining form of rugby. League today plays with no set-pieces. This means no line-outs or competitive scrums. In rugby, the scrum is a mess, often taking more than 10 minutes in total over the course of the game, meaning that one eighth of a rugby match is spent watching a training drill. The fans don't like it, but when you show them the opposite, the league scrum where 6 players engage in a scrum, most barely even bend over, for all of 5 seconds and they're off playing rugby again, rugby fans don't like that, call it "a betrayal". But do you want to see rugby or not? The set-pieces are also a hiding area for poor teams, as referees often don't seem to know the rules (look at Wales try against Ireland in the 2011 6 Nations where Wales got away with breaking pretty much every rule in the book about line-outs) and despite the presence of video-referees they never use them in the scrum, where the referee often is standing on the wrong side to see what's wrong. I mean, look at the 2011 ERC Heineken Cup final, where Northampton scored 3 tries and 22 points all off the back of their scrum. In the second half, Leinster fixed their scrum and Northampton didn't even score. Now, I know it says a lot about Leinster that their coaches are so smart and concise that they changed the entire match in 10 minutes at half-time, and also about how good their front row is to not only stem the tide but go on to dominate the scrum in the second-half, including winning the penalty that put Leinster ahead for the first time in the game off the demolition of Northampton's scrum. But it also shows that a very limited team can achieve total dominance from having a good set-piece. I know that the number of scrums in the first-half of that match was extraordinary, but still, when it was taken away, Northampton had nothing. More interestingly, however, is that the means by which Northampton achieve their dominance in the scrum is to break two fundamental laws of the scrum: firstly by "popping-up" or coming out of the scrum, which is illegal for every other team on the planet but not them for some reason; and secondly for pushing the scrum upwards, in effect trying to force a pop-up. They don't actually win scrums legally is what I'm saying. How Leinster indeed turned the scrum around was by not pushing. Anyway, basicially, what I'm saying is that league removed the set-piece to make the game about which team is better on the field. The other major change is that in league the play is broken into "sets of six", which is a similar mechanic to basketball's 24 second shot-clock, whereby the team in possession can only be tackled a maximum of 6 times before handing over possession. This creates more urgency and means more running rugby, removing the kick-tennis that can happen in rugby, and also interestingly means more tries. There is an average of 5 tries per league match in England, against 3 in rugby in England. As I said, it has to entertain. Also, the sets of six dynamic removes the ability of a team to just keep possession all day and win by "anti-rugby". Munster were the best anti-rugby team of all time, winning two Heineken Cups by just not letting the other team play. It worked, but I absolutely hated it, because it wasn't about which team is best, it's about having the ball and continuously diving on the ground and leaving the ball in the ruck forever. It was like that in league until only the 1960s, where the famous St.George club in Australia, winners of 11 consecutive premierships, were so good at keeping possession that they were the only team to touch the ball in an entire half, the opposition only kicking the ball to them after they scored. It was then the League brought in sets of 4, then 5, then 6, and it really works. Anyway, what happens in rugby? One team will run around for a while and eventually run out of ideas or make a mistake giving the ball back to the opposition, it's actually rare for a team to reach 6 phases or more. Just because league is more structured, doesn't mean it's all that different at the end of the day. Also, having the tackles clean means that the "ruck" is clean, the act of recycling the ball when a tackle is complete. In rugby the ruck is the primary area where penalties are conceded, because there are about 50 rules and referees and players only vaguely seem to know what they are. In league, the guy who is tackled gets up and rolls the ball behind him while the defending team retreats 10 metres. Clean as a whistle, Homer. So there you go. League is the Professor Xavier of rugby, the misunderstood and feared evolved relative. And I thoroughly, despite the dismissive tone of this footnote, love them both. I just think that rugby needs to evolve too.
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