ASSISTED SUICIDE WITH UR

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Assisted Suicide with UR

Speaking to one of the grousebeaters by phone last Sunday after watching Ulster slowly succumb to an uninspired Dragons side he remarked, “makes you feel like topping yourself after watching that!”

Now, I have no thoughts of committing suicide in any shape or form, but if I had, I wouldn’t consider watching Ulster to be a remotely humane way of doing it. It would be a long drawn out slow death, if the Dragons game were your vehicle for self assassination. Dignitas might be further to travel to, better value for money and far more efficient.

Doing it the Ulster rugby way? To elaborate, death would finally arrive after 75 – 80 long minutes during which you would experience such heady extremes as exhilaration, plunging morale, followed by deep depression and bewilderment. For 60 minutes the manner of death would be in doubt while redemption taunts you as Ulster show signs of being the real deal. Gradually it dawns on you that you have just witnessed a false dawn and that here is a sure fire inevitability about the way the team descend into a chaotic and mixed up jumble of the irrational and the sensible. It is epitomised by their running the ball out of the 22 at the death before committing tactical suicide on the pitch and losing even a losing bonus point. It would be at this point on 78 minutes, as Trimble offers up the ball to the opposition and a losing BP is lost, that you finally join Ulster in ending it all.

Mind with the English speaking Welsh commentators chortling away in the background it would only add to the indignity of the whole thing. On the whole I think I would prefer a better and cheaper method of assisted suicide than watching Ulster.

 

Court Martial

Tom Court suffered ignominy in the Dragons match by being carded early in the game for allegedly obstructing the scrum half on a tap penalty. I have long thought when you take a tap penalty, the moment you tap the ball it should be in play, thereby avoiding the kind of nonsense we saw ending with Court being sin binned.

Watching the scrum half run into Court and his attempts to avoid being penalised by raising his arms high into the sky I had this vision of the ridiculous were the scrum half looks up to see were the big fat blokes are in the opposition ranks. The 9 taps the ball and runs laterally across the pitch, all of 30 metres towards Tom Court who realises what’s about to happen, raises his arms aloft and runs away, his limbs flapping frantically in the evening air.

Big Tom careers like a runaway bus towards the opposition line pursued by the determined scrum half who eventually catches up and crashes into the prop. Having actually went backwards from where he tapped the ball the scrum half has not gone the 10 metres and therefore can’t be tackled by the opposition. The referee is quick to produce a yellow and sends big Tom to the bin.

The Dragons then get a second free kick 10 metres further on from the first award whilst the remaining Ulster fat boys are safely hidden behind the backs,who are more agile and able to run away from the scrum half if he targets them.

 

1-2-3 go or no?

Well, did you get your online tick with discount and added fee of a pound for the transaction making the discount less attractive than it first appeared. First appearances actually were utterly deceptive as it appeared that Ulster’s marketing ploy had sold all the Terrace ticks, or so they said! In fact there were ticks still for sale for the Terrace, it’s just they weren’t at discount rates as I discovered last week when I bought them.

Now I’m all for marketing ploys to sell ticks for a game but this one was almost duplicitous in the impression it gave, that you were buying a discounted ticket.

Discount only applied to online sales and no doubt were subject to a transaction fee whilst if you bought through SS Moores then you paid the full whack.

If you are like me and don’t read the fine detail of these things then you are left with a feeling of being duped much in the manner of someone who goes into a Sale which promises 50% off and find that it applies to some of the items and not the ones you want. I imagine the average Ulster punter will find himself feeling much like I did. This is just another scam of the kind the current Labour government pulls when it makes you think your getting a tax break but in fact nothing pretty much is any different from previous.

 

From Sun to Shine

The irrepressible BJ Botha, aka ‘The judge’ was spotted shopping in Homebase on Saturday afternoon. BJ was not only notable for the speed with which he moved from shelf to shelf, as if going from ruck to ruck, but also for the fact that he was wearing shorts!!! Still fresh from a vitamin D intake, red wine and meat absorption in his homeland, the Judge clearly was relishing Ulster’s return to relative weather sanity. Still the locals were a tad reluctant to follow BJ’s example.

BJ must have been in a fine mood as his old rugby alma mater, the Sharks had beaten the Chiefs in NZ that very morning. In his weekly column for a Saffie newspaper the Springbok tighthead has been espousing the just how decent Super 12 is, with the games being close and competitive bar the Bulls game a week back.

From a spectator point of view I have to disagree with BJ. OK he sees it from a player viewpoint and a Southern Hemisphere mentality, in my opinion. For me though Super 12 is a bit like soft porn. Looks the part but isn’t the real deal.

 

The not so Super 12

A big feature of the game is the lack of penalties and punishment of offences with 3 pointers. These have been replaced by free kicks. For me this not punishing transgressions and its easy to give away a free kick in the knowledge that teams simply get, what looks suspiciously like a rugby league game – another go at running the ball. The Super 12 game will shortly be rendered in all the one dimensional vestiges of rugby league and the players physique will now no longer require to be that multi faceted appeal that graces the union game.

For me there is a perpetual watering down of the unique values of the union game. The game should focus on props, like BJ, whose primary function is to scrummage, hookers who hook the ball and throw in at the lineout first and foremost and locks who contest the lineout. Grafting in the tight comes next and anything beyond that is a bonus.

Were the ball to be fed into the scrum straight then the contest for the ball at hooker would be a genuine contest, as would scrummaging and would help to tie up players in the tight and create the wider spaces for the backs to do what backs do best, run the ball.

 

The Not so Super ELV’s

Instead what we have got with the ELV’s is the aerial ping pong in which the principle seems to be get rid of the ball to your opponents half, don’t chase it as this only opens gaps in your defensive line and pray that the opposition will run it back, preferably towards your predatory back row. The alternative is to hoof it back and allow a sort of stalemate in the ground warfare.

Sadly the IRB’s answer to the ELV’s mess will probably be a perverse one of introducing further laws to try and mould the game in the shape that certain countries in the IRB want it to be.

One reason why I love watching the Currie Cup is the competitive nature of the battle in many of the games and the true rugby values exhibited by many of the teams and individual players. The Springbok tradition in rugby of extenuating the physical nature of the game is in danger of being disseminated in favour of a watered down soft focus type rugby. It may charm some spectators with the attention span of a goldfish but will only serve to drive away the core rugby supporter who wishes for the traditional gladiatorial element of the game to be retained.

Evidence in Super 12 that spectators for one reason or another are voting with their feet and staying away was witnessed emphatically yesterday at the Chiefs half empty stadium despite the international array of talent on show on the pitch.

The IRB will probably see this as justification for inveigling more laws to entice spectators back but will probably just add to the existing confusion on and off the pitch as to what the laws actually are and if they are being implemented consistently, if at all.

 

Sunday life

The newspaper of the same name hails itself grandly as Northern Ireland’s only Sunday newspaper. My wife likes to read it for reasons she has so far kept to herself whilst I read the rugby section. The rugby correspondent’s appear to be gaelic journos who double up to cover the oval ball game and as such inaccuracies are inevitably apparent.

Worst of all though is the punishing headlines which are a dire drip, drip, drip of remorseless and at times gormless puns. Yesterday’s match in Croke is headlined by ‘Brians a slam Master’. This is actually one of the less punishing headlines in the back pages for mostly it is unrelenting coverage of local Irish & Premier League soccer. ‘Liverpool on Boro-ed time’ it yells at you from page 113. On it goes with every conceivable cliché in the book used up over 13 long and tedious tabloid pages. I’m not a fan of soccer but certainly don’t deny the local readership the right to read about their favourite teams every week but 13 pages is probably at least 3 pages too much, given the standard of Irish League soccer.

I’m packing in getting this rag every Sunday and the final nail in its coffin is the issue of country CD’s you find in its middle pages. I’m not a fan of the ‘one cookie left in the jar’, ‘two shotgun shells is all I got now,’ type of music. In these tough economic times one needs a little escapism, not a grim reminder of every hokum, dokum, broken up cliché in the back catalogue of singers long renowned for piling on the misery.

Actually I think this could be another miserable way to end your life, listening to cunnery muzak and probably even more excruciating than watching Ulster get beat by the Dragons.

 

Would you be seen dead with a Hugo Duncan CD?

The other week the paper had a Hugo Duncan CD in it. The woman in the shop checked to make sure it was in the paper before I left the shop. It dropped out on the street outside the shop. I was embarrassed, but fortunately it was early Sunday and I was able to scoop it into my pocket before anyone saw me with a Hugo Duncan CD.

Reminded me of the joke about Johnny coming out of Boots into Donegal Place with a load of condoms under his arm. He bumps into his mate who asks why he’s carrying a load of condoms in such a public place. Johnny explains he went into buy a Hugo Duncan CD and was too embarrassed to go through with it and bought the condoms instead!!

Well let’s hope Ulster don’t produce another suicidal performance this Saturday otherwise there will be blood!!! What paper should I buy the next day to read all about our hopefully dynamic performance.

As BJ Botha might say, chat soon.



2 responses to “ASSISTED SUICIDE WITH UR”

  1. Ballpark

    Ach, Tighty, the joys of this blog, you get a choice, Hugo Duncan’s back catalogue or my back pages!!! Actually i admit to be secretly chuffed to be mentioned in the same paragraph as the great wee country fella Hugo legend’ Duncan….honestly.

    “I think the proprietors have a schizophrenic mindset ie they are unsure whether they want to publish a quality newspaper or are aiming principally at a tabloid audience. Better to do one successfully rather than unsuccessfully trying to ride 2 horses at once .”

    Quite agree they should just go the whole hog like the Shunday World

    PS: I’m worried about media baron Dewi Barones, he was drawn into an unseemly scuffle the other week with those schoolboy hooligans on the UAFC board. Frankly i’m surprised he felt the need to get down and dirty with them.

  2. Tighthead Prod

    Listen to Hugo Duncan’ s back catalogue on CD or read the Collected Ramblings of Ballpark ? Now there’s item number 1 on the agenda for the next meeting of Insomniacs’ Anonymous !!!

    Parky – I never thought I would say this but I totally agree in respect of your views on the banal headlines masquerading as humour in our local sports press. They are dire !!! Indeed the standard of journalism throughout the organ you cite and its sister daily broadsheet can, at times, be extremely poor. I think the proprietors have a schizophrenic mindset ie they are unsure whether they want to publish a quality newspaper or are aiming principally at a tabloid audience. Better to do one successfully rather than unsuccessfully trying to ride 2 horses at once .

    The proprietors could be assisted in their deliberations in this regard by consulting the media Baron that is Dewi Barnes. Now there’s a man who knows his audience, the sties they inhabit, the troughs they feed from, and who is not ashamed to provide the swill and straw bedding accordingly !!

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