[caladanbrood]

Aye, after seeing Cole absolutely demolish Payne in the Leicester-Wasps match a few weeks ago, I cannot see how Payne can justifiably be ahead of Cole in the England pecking order - David Wilson was awful too. A few years ago you could say that Dan Ward-Smith would be a better 8 for England than Easter, but now... there really aren't any viable candidates. Even Shaw had a bad game, which meant that only Moody, Hartley and Haskell really came out with any positives from that game for the forwards.




Ball never really got out to the backs, so it was hard to say much about them - Tait and Flood were anonymous for the whole game - Flutey was clearly missed quite badly.




Andy Powell is a huge disappointment for me - he made his debut in grand style, but dropped off quite significantly ever since - he's a solid player, doesn't make many mistakes, but he's definitely not the outstanding ball-carrier he had the potential to become.

Less said about Ireland-Italy the better. I nearly fell asleep in the second half.

[alt146]

Only caught the England - Wales game and I agree, it was a little underwhelming. Can't remember names or anything, but neither team was playing particularly inspired rugby. The one thing that stood out to me was how 'meh' both teams were at the breakdown. England did ok and forced a couple of turnovers, but compared the southern style of play everyone just stood around. I suppose it's a much cleaner way of playing, I think there was only one penalty for playing the ball on the ground. Although given how much of an advantage you can get by forcing penalties or turning the ball over on the ground, I'm surprised none of them were more aggressive in that department.

Also, when was the Welsh tighthead dropped from the team? No points there

[Stradivarius]

do u mean gethin jenkins? injured

piss poor peformance from both team, awj's send off did have a impact in the game. even poorer scrum and line out by wales then, ireland? piss poor against a dredful italy, so lets see what france is like today! then we'll know if they can win this. cause lets be honest they havent got much competion going on the first 2 games!

[Tapper]

It was severely underwhelming, so far.

Ireland going on the automatic pilot in the second half was not unexpected given how it is the first match of the tourney, but I'd say pushing on and putting in a good performance would have resulted in more confidence - O' Driscoll saying it was atrocious was honest.

As for England - Wales, the less said the better and you all said it before, anyway
Welsh kicking (despite distance as a mitigating circumstance) was atrocious. They missed 3 penalties (2x Hook and one time Steven Jones) - would have been a lot closer if they did nail those.

[Cougar]

I never said AWJ' sending off had no impact, but I felt it had less impact than was made out by the commentators. It was a rankly stupid thing for any player, but for one of his experience and quality, not to metion how crucial he is to Wales, it was criminal.

[Stradivarius]

did the same against new zealand! useless bugger! i smell a conspircy

[Tiste Simeon]

Underwhelming? Who gives a flying crap?? WE FREAKING BEAT WALES, DO YOU NOT HAVE ANY IDEA HOW MUCH JOY THAT IS GOING TO GIVE ME FOR A WHOLE FREAKING YEAR?????

[masan's saddle]

Bit late commenting on everything but anyway, thankyou Cougar, I feel your love. It appears England can now only win against 14 men and If we give them the ball.


The game was pretty shoddy for the most part with both teams looking very nervy and making ridiculous amounts of basic errors. Someone above mentioned the breakdown again ? Prior to the start of the tournament the refs were given new (again) guidelines on interpreting the breakdown. Fucking ridiculous, the breakdown was a complete mess in all the games. Martin Williams was interviewed before the game and whimsically shook his head and said he'd try out 3 different approaches he's got to approaching the tackled player and see which one the ref liked !

England won and took their chances well with Danny Care having the best game i've seen him play in. But that said I don't think England should be crowing too much. Without sounding totally biased, after the worst first half performance by Wales i've seen in years, at 20-17 Wales were the only team in it. I was sat in the pub surrounded by Englishmen bricking it thinking Wales would win it like last year then.....interception Oh well, congrats to the Saes and good luck with your training run out against the worst Italian team ever. No Parisse means no decision maker. Maybe we will see some back play from England......Also is Croft injured ?

Missed Jenkins, Rees and Phillips massively and to be fair Gatland has got to take some stick over selecting Cooper and Tom James over Richie Rees and Halfpenny. Cooper can't even get a game at the Blues at the moment because Rees is playing so well and it showed, tried far too hard and his decision making was shit. James is big and fast but has got a touch like a rapist, as he showed on numerous occasions. AWJ's yellow was a big factor, 17 points against a team a man down speaks volumes especially when you consider that England got a nice morale boost after having gotten absolutley nowhere prior to it. Also, trying to defend a tryline for 5 mins missing a lock is extremley difficult and gaps are going to appear. AWJ is a fantastic player, today he was a double dick, not only for contributing to his team losing but also shafting my fantasy team !

Heaslip and Adam Jones scoring tries and Wilkinson slotting everything had me feeling pretty good about my team selection, until my original choices of Basteraud (two tries, swopped for Jauzion) and Harinourdiquy (man of the match, swapped for Dusautoir) turned up, bollocks.

Can't really see anyone touching the Frenchies this year, they were not great against Scotland but will only get better. Ireland have only won twice in Paris since the war and another interesting snippet, France have won the championship every year following a Lions tour, I think

[Use Of Weapons]

I thought Ireland were pedestrian against Italy. Kearney, apart from the charged-down kick for the Italy try, ran some good lines and was his usual self for the most part. O'Gara has had the kick he needed, and it'll be interesting to see which way Kidney goes if Sexton is fit for the France game. I think ROG will be under a lot more pressure in Paris than he was in Rome, and his game normally goes to pieces if he doesn't have the time to make the right decisions.

France were excellent, against a not-bad Scottish side. Scotland promised so much, and had some really promising running, but the commentary was dead-on -- not enough support, and playing too deep to get much momentum.

Very impressed by France though. Bastareaud is a fiend, Harinordoquy was excellent as per usual. It's a shame Rougerie had to go off so early, I reckon he would have made a huge impression on the match. Kicking from Parra was a bit suspect, but I loved it when he squared off against (was it Dickinson?) late on -- David and Goliath

Looking like France, but the proof will be if they can perform in Paris against us next weekend. The French crowd can turn nasty if they don't see the rugby they want, and if we can stifle them and keep it even up to halftime, we'll be doing well.

[Cougar]

Croft is injured.

The natural ebb and flow of any game leads to periods where teams are in the ascendancy, the loss of AWJ while significant, does not account for 17 points, and anyone who says it does needs to go and spend a season or two actually playing rugby to get them back up to speed on the game. It's counter intuitive in a game where there is almost no space on the pitch to break lines that the loss of a single player disadvantages a team so significantly. Only 2 weeks ago O'Connell took 10 in the bin with Northampton camped on the Munster line and they survived it intact. I'll accept that it has an impact when camped on the line when you need all your forwards, but it has little or no bearing on the Care try. It's being used primarily as an excuse, the absence of AWJ did not make Cooper miss a tackle on Care, or make Byrne knock on his Gary Owen, or make Williams miss Monye which were the factors which left England camped on the Welsh line prior to Haskells try. It didn't cause James to get isolated and turned over nor let Nick Easter beat Roberts in the build up to the second. I think attributing so much agency to one player is allowing the Welsh to fool themselves.

[masan's saddle]

I don't think anyone is arguing that the AWJ sinbin was the reason Wales lost or England won for that matter. If my post suggests that I think all 17 points were a result of the sinbin then sorry, it wasn't supposed to. It is simply stating that 17 points were scored when Wales were down to 14, which mentally and physically, is tough for any team to deal with. I think everyone is in agreement however that it did have an effect on the game. You are correct when you say it had no bearing on Care's try, however your suggestion that "space" is not a factor when down to 14 men is problematic. All professional rugby teams train on defensive patterns, with each player having a specific role or "place to be" usually depending on no's commited to a ruck, field position, called plays etc. When someone is missing for 10 mins the whole team has to adapt quickly to plug the gaps that inevitably appear due to a player's absence and then deal with the spaces out wide that are the result ( as Cueto can attest to !)

Talking about O Connell is fine, well done Munster. Wales didn't manage it.

If you're suggesting that I need to go and play rugby again ? No thanks, i'm too old and the game has not changed that much in the last couple of years.

As for the rest of your points, I generally agree. Cooper and James should not have been playing and Byrne had a bad day at the office.

[Cougar]

Well I think that realistically you are buying too much into the idea that coaches pedal that there is such a specific degree of organisation to defensive systems. There are systems and tactics like Blitz defence or working in pods etc, specific strategies like Leicester used to run where they would switch a good defender into mid-field and move Humphries on to the wing cos he was a lollypop lady. I've run some of these playing union myself, although, naturally not at the intensity of those boys. They don't all have specific positions in defence, that would suggest they knew the oposition's running patterns which they don't, they have approximate positions and roles, but in the end it comes down to one simple concept: Line-on, onside, mark-up, set and in. You don't leave gaps, everyone from 9 years old up knows that, if a man goes off you have to slide in and close the gap. If England had run tries in with overlaps on the wing, I'd agree entirely, that is where it will really tell but the yards were made from Welsh mistakes and from missed tackles, not from hitting AWJ sized gaps. In actual fact both tries were scored by expoiting the weakness of the defence tight to the ruck.

And no, I don't think you should go back and play, I'm seiously considering retirement myself.

[masan's saddle]

We could go around in circles about the "..exploiting the weakness of the defence tight to the ruck" equating to AWJ's absence but meh, there's no point. Defensive organisation is relative primarily to the speed of phase play, as well as breaking the line. The slow recycling of ball we saw over most of the weekend was a defence coach's wet dream. Plenty of time for the defence to shuffle around and man mark across the line, it was not coincidence that Adam Jones went around a prop for his score. That said though he was interviewed on Scrum 5 the other night and his description of his try already includes side stepping Monye, Cueto and Armitage ! He's a legend.

You are right in the sense that organisation counts for shit if a team is going through the phases very quickly and fitness starts to play a part. No amount of drilling ever made me man mark 60 mins into a game, especially against nippy littlle bastards, fuck that.

I think England's defence coaches will have had a little sex wee after watching Italy, although England definitley need to be more adventurous with their back play. Haskell and Easter chuntering up the park for 3 or 4 phases will be enough against Italy to create some space. Everyone raves about Tait and Armitage at club level, but we never get to see the poor bastards ! Has the time come for Wilkinson to hand over the reins to Flood ? Probably, but it will be a cold day in hell before Johnson discards a guaranteed 9-15 points and the Wilkinson^TM brand.

[Cougar]

Well, quite AWJ's absence could never be used as an excuse for inadequate marking either side of a ruck, that's, as I've said, a mistake that's drilled out of you as a junior - wherever you find yourself, you do the job. Fast ball will always undo a defence though and I suspect that was primarily at work in 3 of the tries (Care, Jones and Hook). What was marked I think was that the English tries relied on what amounted to a pushover, a break through a gap created by "gamesmanship" and an intercept, where as the Welsh relied in the "suck them in and spin it out" traditional way of scoring. When England did suck them in, they were reticent, in fact negligent, in shipping it to the backs. There were 2 clear occasions where my gran could have gone over in the corner and she's been dead 2 years, but England wanted to play tight.

Tait I thought made yards, he's got twinkle toes and with someone better than Flood at 12 he could shine.

England's defence is piss poor though.

[masan's saddle]

If by gamesmanship you are refering to Shaw's foul on Gareth Williams to allow Care to go through the gap then, yeh, he was lucky to get away with that. But he did and well played Shaw for doing so, that shit is part and parcel of open play when the refs not looking.Concerning Haskell's first try, England are like the dog who resembles their master. The complete unwillingness to put it wide for a guaranteed score could be interpreted as white line fever, or rather as I believe, Johnson putting his mark on the team. Physically dominating the opposing forwards was what Johnson and his cohorts were all about, unfortunatley things have moved on and everybody is bigger. This mentality of bash, bash, bash and then maybe let the backs stretch their legs is flawed purely as we have already discussed because of the efficiency (usually) of defences. With the breakdown being such an abortion, defensive teams can slow down the phases to such an extent that we saw pods of Italian and English players waiting to receive the ball standing still and the defence realigning easily

Care should take some of the blame even though he had an otherwise excellent game. Prior to the game Dallaglio was bitching that England should be more player led, this was a perfect example. Care should have said "fuck you fat boys" and spun it out to the backs. Ok they scored but as you say, a pushover, an interception and a ropey try are nothing to write home about considering how much possession they had, particularly in the first half. Flutey coming back in should make a massive difference, he's an intelligent player who can maybe take some pressure off Wilkinson and make some space for Tait and the back 3.

On a happier note ( Alt! ), Gethin Jenkins is back for the Scotland game.

Edit, Cougar is there any chance you could change the title to "Six Nations Fantasy League 2010 and related bollocks" or summit ? Ta

This post has been edited by masan's saddle: 09 February 2010 - 12:56 PM

[Tiste Simeon]

Wow, what's with the French hate for the Irish? http://news.bbc.co.u...ion/8512911.stm

[Tapper]

Tiste Simeon, on 12 February 2010 - 03:21 PM, said:

Wow, what's with the French hate for the Irish? http://news.bbc.co.u...ion/8512911.stm

Don't know, but this is the game I'm most excited about in all of the six nations, so if the French want to up the tension, it's all fine with me

[Tiste Simeon]

Aye it's going to be a grand one.

[Tiste Simeon]

Blinking Scots can't do anything right! That last 15 minutes was horrendous. You were freaking ten points ahead!!! Ah well...It was a fairly good game I thought.

[Tapper]

I was watching the France-Ireland game in an Irish pub - and I dare say that outside of a small pocket of french exchange students, I was the only one able/ willing to cheer on Les Blues. Great match, wish I had Morgan Parra selected as my kicker in the fantasy league, instead of putting him into the team but retaining O Gara as kicker