The Orange

Here’s a question.

If Tiger’s playing around (on his wife), does Steve Williams still handle his number one wood?

The guy’s a complete plonker.

Either that or a comedian like Rhys Darby who specialises in being funny by not being funny if you get what I mean.

His latest epistle is Ten Things We’ve Learnt From the Autumn Tests.

The funny thing is that he continues to deny that he’s got the game he’s always wanted.

Jones usually bleating about the ABs just looks plain silly after the ABs whupped the Froggies:

Even dynamic New Zealand were often pedestrian.

Some footpaths then.

Still, the same old same old:

6 New Zealand do not look the World Cup winners in waiting

They may have thrashed a hopeless French team in Marseilles last night but with less then two years to go before the Rugby World Cup, there is no guarantee New Zealand will break what would then be a 24-year drought with no world title. Their results are reasonable but with so many journeymen, it seems likely they will win many games before RWC 2011 and again be overtaken in the closing laps. Graham Henry must be the coach of the autumn. Anyone who can draw a performance from that crew must be a genius.

No one down here is saying that it is a vintage AB team.  Yet such a poor AB team (as stated by Jones) is still good enough to beat all their Northern opponents without letting in a single try.  Two years in row.

And Matt Giteau beats Dan Carter to the first five position for the team of the autumn.

Hey … someone’s got to spruik it

Read about it here.

I’m on a course today.

A race course.

Boom boom.

Hoping to have a Classic Day

Anyway, need a quick and dirty (as in fast not dirty ho) post so here we go – the ten most embarrassing moments in sport courtesy of the Granny Herald.

You can read them yourself you lazy rick-with-a-silent-p but my favourite is this one:

8. How about major-league baseball outfielder Milton Bradley of the Chicago Cubs who caught a fly ball at Wrigley field back in June and did what players traditionally do after the third “out” of the inning – he tossed the ball to a grateful fan in the stands. Only trouble was – Bradley had lost track of the number of outs and it was actually only TWO down – his gaffe allowed a couple of Minnesota baserunners to stroll around the bases. The crowd wasn’t impressed.

Hopefully, I enjoyed my course and still have some money left to buy fish and chips on the way home!

As Rhys Darby is wont to say … typical.

The Wallabies start playing like the proverbial and what do they do?

Take it like men?  Or even take it like Australians?

Nope, blame everyone else.

The Aussies are now blaming NZ and Pomgolia for the shocking form of the Wobblies.

Eddie Jones:

”I think we’ve lost that instinctive way we play, and we stand wide and we’re lateral and we play like a New Zealand side,” Jones told Sky Sports Radio. ”Robbie has a way of coaching, and I think he’s a very successful coach, but I don’t think his style of attack suits the Australian players and that’s something he’s going to learn over the next period of time.

Here’s a tip for you Eddie.  Very successful coaches win games which is why they’re very successful.

”I think [Deans is] a very good coach; he does need to change his methods a little bit, the Australian players are different to New Zealand players. New Zealand players have generally been the best in world rugby because they have been physically stronger and faster than anyone else.”

Yep, Aussie players are different from NZ players.  They say “mate” a lot and wear an awful green and gold.

”Australian sides traditionally, while physically we go OK, our point of difference has been that we’ve been tactically and strategically a little better than other teams. I think at the moment we’ve lost that a little bit.”

So you’re saying our players are thick?  You might have a point but come to think of it, ours are scoring more points than yours and that’s all that matters.

Anyway, it’s all the fault of the refs, the rules, the Poms.  Anything but the Aussie players.

It cuts me up seeing Australia playing so badly.

Oh dear, nevermind, let’s just hope the Taffies do it to them too!

The first cricket test started yesterday in Dunedin.

Yep, a test match in Dunedin in November.  Suppose we should look on the positive side … at least it didn’t snow.

The test raised a couple of interesting points related to the toss.

For a start, the game is technically a home game for the Pakis so Daniel Vettori as the “visiting” captain called the coin toss.  Strange that.

Which of course raises a completely separate issue about the importance of the toss and “home” advantage.

Listening to Mark on Radio Sport, he argued that the home team should get to call the shots – no toss, just choose.

I think he’s half right.  In many cases, there’s too much attached to the toss that there needs to be a real incentive to make sure teams don’t doctor the pitch.

By giving the AWAY team the right to choose, any attempt to doctor a pitch is almost certain to fail.

In baseball the visiting team always bats first, according to Wikipedia.

An inning is broken up into two halves in which the away team bats in the top (first) half, and the home team bats in the bottom (second) half. In baseball, the defense always has the ball — a fact that differentiates it from most other team sports.

(I left the last sentence in only because I’m a trainspotter – still an interesting point!)

Anyway, that’s sorted.  Let’s get rid of the toss and give the away team the choice.

Now that’s choice!

Yep, Stephen Jones – he of the The Times fame – tries hard.

He’s a real try hard.

Ba da doom.

Anyway, the Welshman who wants to be a Pom we most like to hate is suffering a bad case of amnesia.

Having spent what seems like his whole life sneering at the frothy rugby in the Southern Hemisphere – and especially the Super [insert number here], he’s now changing his tune.

Looney tunes would be appropriate.

There’s a problem with rugby (and it’s not just the ABs cheating at the breakdown):

England scored one try in the whole autumn series — but this is not specifically a rant against England. It is written on a weekend when neither England nor New Zealand did anything that remotely came under the heading of entertainment. And on Friday night there were two big Guinness Premiership matches that between them yielded a total of zero tries.

No meat pies.

We know who to blame:

The core of the crisis is the shocking mess into which rugby union descends whenever the ball is taken into contact, and the cause of that is the utter negligence of the International Rugby Board (IRB) in upholding the laws of the game and their utter failure to drive the laws so that they keep pace with developments in the sport.

Ahh, actually the Pommy press deserves as much blame for bleating on about the soft-cock rugby in the Southern Hemisphere.

The biggest crime of course was the decision NOT to go with the elves (ahh, not the ones at the bottom of the garden).  The ELVs.

You had the opportunity to do something.  You didn’t.

You got the game YOU demanded.  Now you complain.  Go figure.

Still he ends by admitting the whole game is in a rucking mess:

And they can allow boots on bodies, to clean up the whole phase and inject some of the old dynamism. It was sad to see the men in black, representatives of the world’s greatest rucking nation, struggling in the same awful morass as England and the rest of the world.

Actually, Stephen, it’s you who’s more ass.

Poor old Wobblies.

Losing to Scotland is like, ahh, like … Australia losing to Scotland.

It’s bad.  Really bad.  Michael Jackson Bad but like when he was good not tragically bad.  Not that I ever thought he was good but you know what I mean.

Our Robbie is getting some helpful advice from Eddie Jones:

“I think Robbie is going to have to change his ways a little bit and rethink the way the attack functions.”

Gee, thanks Eddie.  Yep, the Wobblies might have to change a few things.

Like kicking goals.

Scoring tries.

Learning to pass without trying to be a quarterback for the Giants or the Vikings.

Just a few little things like that.

More helpful advice from Greg Pearse:

Former Test backrower Gary Pearse got straight to the point with his observations of the game.

“Scotland have got nothing. And how dumb were we, we kept running into people and not into gaps,” Pearse said.

Don’t worry, Robbie.  The natives aren’t all that restless.

The Wallabies are atrocious ever since Deanes took over they have done nothing if it was any other coach he would have been given his marching orders long ago, why is he still there??????

Or may be not.  Next comment will be better.

DOES NO ONE REALLY GET THE MESSAGE HERE !!!!, THE COACH HAS TO GO AND NOW OR EMBARRASSMENTS LIKE THIS ARE GOING TO BE FREQUENT. THIS COACH IS NOT UP TO THE JOB AND YOU CAN TELL NO ONE IN THE TEAM IS PUMPED UP BEFORE EACH MATCH. NOW GET AN AUSSIE TO COACH US AND I SUGGEST MARK ELLA OR ROD McQUEEN, PLEASE MAKE IT QUICK OR THERE WILL BE NO ONE LEFT WATCHING THE SPORT IN AUSTRALIA ONEIL!!!!!!!!!!!!

Or not.

Now, what was that about Robbie Deans coaching the All Blacks?

In honour of the game played overnight between the ABs and Pomgolia, here’s a reminder of how things were in 1995:

Lots of puns on the “The Hand of God” incident with references to the “Hand of Frog”.

Why stop there?

• Steve Hansen’s reference to flashing the dunny and moving on?? – The Hand of Bog
• Problems with the air in China for during events – The Hand of Smog
• Trouble in a fly fishing competition? The Hand of Cod
• Watching the ABs sends you to sleep? The Hand of Nod

A punful post for all.