The Orange

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.

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.

This post will be hard to write but it needs to be written anyway.

Back in the Glory Days of Super12 (when we cared, we knew the players, their away strips weren’t 0% style and 100% embarassment), Stephen Jones was spwewing in the North about the froth of the Super12.

He pointed out the lack of power scrummaging, the emphasis on points and tries over the essence of sport – competition and drama.  Indeed, he suggested the heresy that a tight game with few points was more exciting than a point a minute extravaganza, which is what we had come to expect from the Super12.

Now, I admit I didn’t actually watch the game between the Highlanders and the Crusaders but I was keeping a close eye on the score updates.  At first, I was concerned that my browser wasn’t refrshing but then it became clear that deep inside the second half, no points had been scored.

I’m in no position to question the quality of the game but without any doubt the game epitomised the tension and drama that at its best makes sport so rivetting.

So, perhaps our nemisis Mr Jones may have been right after all.

On a related topic, it again shows what a farce the bonus point situation is.

The Highlanders won and are obviously deserving of the full points.  The Crusaders get a point for a close loss.  In most other professional competitions, you either win or lose – a close loss is another of those sporting oxymorons.

And who defined a close loss?  Why isn’t it six points or 10 points?  It’s completely subjective.

I’m now starting to see little reason for the four try bonus point – it simply rewards one part of the game when we all parrot that defence wins matches.  So why reward reckless disgregard for defence?

The bonus points also end up distorting the table at the end of the season.  You win or you lose.  Better teams will generally have a better for and against record. And don’t we want the better teams in the playoffs?

I have no doubt that Stephen Jones willl never ever read this blog.  In some ways, I hope he doesn’t because he may then think that he’s right on the rest of his rants which I happily tear into.

But if he did, I’d have to put my hand up and say mate – you were right about the Super rugby.

And that’s as unlikely as finding a Crusader supporter with two eyes.

In a reversal of the time honoured tradition, instead of the shit hitting the fan, a rugby fan has hit out at moi for my shit stirring comments about rugby earlier in the week.

It is great news for rugby that they still have a fan.  Perhaps like the kakapo, they could put him in captivity on an secluded island and start a breeding programme.

Anyway, “esoj” made a couple of comments about my post on the start of the Super 14 which appeared over on the Warriors forum – and a big shout out to the boys and girls at Warriorsland too!

Backwards Jose said:

I will argue that whoever wrote that article is cherry picking what to comment on. the bulls v blues game which the bulls won 59 -26 was highly entertaining but you wouldn’t see the author of the article writing about it in a million years.

Yes, I am picking cherries … actually in the business it’s called low hanging fruit because frankly it’s a little too easy to point the finger at the rugby boys at the moment.  And did I hear somone mention World Cups?

So … the Blues game was “highly entertaining”.  I’m sure Blues fans everywhere would have been highly entertained by their team being flogged by MORE THAN 30 points.

Perhaps if the game had been on at a time when people in NZ were awake or sober or both may have meant there would have been an audience.

But seeing you mention this Backwards Jose, how crap is a competition that gives a team like the Blues a competition point for losing by 30 points – the same number of points the Crusaders got for effectively leading for 79 minutes and 56 seconds.

I’ve given Stephen Jones stick at times in the past but I think he is fundamentally right – the essence of sport is competition and the Crusaders-Brumbies game walked all over the 90 point Blues-Bulls game in terms of sporting entertainment and drama.

Back to the Blues game – here’s what the Granny Herald had to say about this “entertaining” spectacle:

The Blues were trampled 59-26 by the Bulls in Pretoria this morning, a record defeat that raises question marks over their Super 14 rugby credentials.

And further:

It was the most points they have conceded in Super rugby history and it could have been more if the Bulls hadn’t eased off from their rampaging start, when they raced to a 26-0 lead in 24 minutes.

The Bulls capitalised on a glut of Blues errors and turnovers, scoring seven tries to four.

Keep in mind that the Blues get a competition point out of this!

I do accept that that Crusaders fans have been consistent supporters of their team (compared to say the embarassing levels of support in Dunedin).  You would hope so given their past level of success.  In any case, a crowd of 15,000 is not front page news when the same weekend the Warriors got similar numbers for a pre-season game.

The fundamental point that I tried to make in the original post with my tongue so far in my cheek it was coming out my ear is that rugby still hasn’t got its premier club comp right in the professional era.  Sure, rugby’s world cup is a legitimate global event.  Sure, people care more about rugby than the do about other sports (that’s heritage for you).

But that heritage doesn’t hide the fact that rugby as it is packaged right now is a poor product on TV.  Anyone mention crouch, touch, pause, engage, reset the scrum, change the channel?

For all the incompetence of the league administrators and the NRL clubs’ struggle with the cashed up Northern clubs, at least the NRL knows how to package up the game week after week, month after month, and give us a decent sporting competition.

A million years isn’t that long, is it Backwards Jose?

I feel sorry for anyone who Googles for Climate Change as stumbles across this post.

Actually, I feel sorry for anyone who googles anything and stumbles across this blog but I wish both my readers over the past 2 years no harm.

Stephen Jones is a Welshman who is unashamedly English.  Go figure.

He knows his job as a journalist is to sell papers and he seems to go out of his way to bad the All Blacks and New Zealand to do so.  I’m convinced he must generate thousands of sales to irate ex-pat Kiwis intent on spitting the dummy at his latest tirade.

Well bugger me if he didn’t come out and say something positive about the All Blacks and something that I couldn’t fault him on.

Writing in the Sunday Times, he praised the All Blacks for their mid-week game against Munster although there was the odd conspiracy theory as to why it happened in the first place – even if the role of Adidas wasn’t highlighted.

But let us praise New Zealand for entering into the spirit and for taking the match on. Let us praise the stadium and the mighty Munster effort, the three-man haka by the three Munster Kiwis and the respect shown by New Zealand for the traditions of this grand provincial giant.

Actually, I’m not trying to be petty but I thought there were four (as seen in the photo accompanying the story although he may not have included the honky in the haka).

For once, let’s allow Mr Jones to rant and rave and for once, let’s savour every word and agree with him:

And for goodness sake, let us praise what it was: a tour match! A ruddy tour match! The All Blacks, God bless them, forsook the normal giant hotel in the capital city – the base for all these teams (from both hemispheres) who make hit-and-run trips to play single Tests and have no contact with the country or its people, and who sit pompously behind security men wearing their posh branded kit waiting to train while wasting their visits.

They took their aura and their passion somewhere else, they met people and they showed the jersey. They played a match that was hell-for-leather, that meant nothing in the IRB world rankings but everything in the hearts of the players and the fans.

So there it goes.  Stephen Jones fulsome in his praise of the All Blacks.  Hell is indeed freezing over.