The Dew Drop Inn Virtual Rugby Pub, Trebanog

First topic message reminder :

Hello and welcome to the Virtual Rugby Pub, a place where you can come in for a sly beverage and discuss whatever's on your mind, or just eavesdrop on the regulars if you fancy a break from all the rugby chat.

The pub has made its way to Trebanog, the home village of Cliff Morgan.

So grab a beer, cider, whiskey or wine.... or a warm beverage and sit back and enjoy the 2013-14 rugby season.

              

The only rule in this pub is one of mutual respect for everyone in it, oh and no tampering with the pictures of the legendary
Cliff Morgan, Dorothy Squires & Esme Coles, Jason Tovey, Aaron Smith and Monterey Jack.  

last Pawb: https://www.606v2.com/t46425p1050-the-dew-drop-inn-virtual-rugby-pub-ealing-broadway#2269373

Well that's the Autumn hoodoo put to bed.

Come on Ireland!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Awh Pichot...Wales loves you too! What a lovely thing for him to say at the end there.

Gus Pichot - what a classy gent  

Evening, amigos. Haven't caught any of the matches yet - been out in my new hut  Good win for Wales from the score. Sad to see from an Argentine POV, but until the blazers at the UAR admit that they have to accept professional rugby domestically if they want to play with the big boys, then this will only get worse. You can't expect the same handful of professional players, all (?) of whom play in the NH, to play in the Rugby Championship all summer, then for their clubs all winter plus AIs. There was one match of the RC (can't remember which) where they fielded several amateur players from the domestic league - absolute disaster. The gulf between amateur and pro is now just too great. But, blazers being blazers, it may be some time before they bite the bullet. Sigh.  

Evening pubbers. Disappointed that England couldn't push on on once they got the lead. Credit to NZ though, they came back strongly in the last 20.

I have the Wales game recorded.

Ireland wtf happened there? I expected a decent win.

Hey pub, how's tricks an tings?  

Didn't get in from work till well past 6.30 so I've just watched Eng v NZ on "live record" and wasn't really disappointed. Good Test match, well contested is all I can really draw from it.

Hope you're all well.  

Just a poor side against a decent side.

Didn't think England were that bad Notch...  

Ireland were pretty terrible though- Aussies not invincible, but good enough to put away a poor, disjointed side with plenty to spare!

I didn't watch England vs New Zealand, probably a poor decision- much more competitive than the game in Cardiff. My real nation and my adopted second nation let me down today.

Tbh, if you watched us in the Six Nations, you would say we were bad then and there's no magic wand to make us better overnight. We had a very soft tight five out there- getting dominated in the scrum and maul by Australia is the icing on the cake really.

Not going to turn it around against NZ next week then?

Nowt to lose and a different perspective?

Ireland have some great players.

Well, we might turn it around but we're not going to be good enough to beat New Zealand over night! We'll give it a crack, just looking for a better performance- the journey of thousand miles starts with a single step and all that.

A performance we can call progress would be what I'm looking for, any kind of result at all would be a bonus.

Well, a result on the upswing is always better than one on the downswing.

I haven't seen the game yet, so I can't really comment on the actualities, but I know from games gone by that Ireland (like almost every other team) can look ordinary one week and unstoppable the next.

NZ aren't unbeatable.

It looks like Sexton is out injured too.

Ah, bit of a blow then.

There goes the "talisman effect", maybe that's not such a bad thing though.

Phoenix from the ashes?

Howya PJ and Notch. I watched both games - England's pack took it to NZ, but they were better in the backs.

Ireland

I expected a couple of tries at least.

I thought O'Brien and Marshall had good games, and was O'Connell captain rather than Heaslip?

I'll add that Hartley's injury was crucial for England. The line out went to ratshoite just when we needed to capitalise on every penalty we got.

Hey Hound, too long.   

I've been out the back playing with kiwis.

I'm still to catch up on the Ireland and Wales games, so I can't comment directly, I thought England would put up a sterner test today, likewise Ireland and likewise Wales last week.

Is that north/south divide getting any closer?

I'd say no, as things stand.

Hound of Harrow wrote:I thought O'Brien and Marshall had good games, and was O'Connell captain rather than Heaslip?

O'Connell is Captain full time now.

I thought we used Marshall as a dummy runner every move and the Aussies didn't buy it for a second. Of course, he did make a few linebreaks in the second half when we started using him as a carrier but there was nary a support runner in sight to take the offload so all that came to nothing in the end.

It was all very depressing!

Evening All  

Hope we're all relaxed and ready for the new week. It's supposed to get chuffin' cold this week too. Well it is nearly December I suppose...Just watching the Luther Vandross Cup highlights.

Notch - things could be worse - you could be Scottish. What happened to them earlier? Scotland usually do fairly well in their Autumn internationals. Didn't even get a whiff of a few penalty points. That suprised me considering the Saffas can be relied upon to give away a penalty or two.

I know I'm probably looking through rosy glasses, but despite the diabolical game Ireland had yesterday, I was impressed with some of Tommy's handling...ignoring the knock-on of course...  

Ah Scotland showed some heart, some fire, some aggression. Yes they were outclassed, but they at least looked like it meant something to wear the jersey. I'm not very pleased with Ireland for one reason or the other.

True...Marshall tried giving it some welly yesterday...just no one helped him.

I wasn't impressed with that Saffa fella (Pietersen?) shoving Denton's face into the grass and celebrating a tackle earlier today mind....yeah it was a decent tackle he made, but were the afters necessary? Big Jim (Hamilton) was certainly fired up. Can always rely on him for a bit of entertainment anyway.

Ah Cari. Sad to say even our Tommy was well below the expected standard yesterday.

It'll take a while for everyone to get on the same page I suppose.

Passion for he shirt is not something any of those lads usually lack. They just seemed totally stunned yesterday.

Hey Mrs P any sign of that Xmas market at city hall yet?

Yeah it's open now Rodderny

MrsP wrote:Ah Cari. Sad to say even our Tommy was well below the expected standard yesterday.

It'll take a while for everyone to get on the same page I suppose.

Passion for he shirt is not something any of those lads usually lack. They just seemed totally stunned yesterday.

Important thing is not to panic. It's good that people are putting their hands up and claiming responsibility.

I'm a little stunned too, Mrs P.
I was not kidding the other day when I said on another thread that I saw a 15 second clip of the Wallaby scrum training... and collapsing like a house of cards. It made me feel as though they still haven't got the gist of the basics and were going to get taught another lesson yet again.

I thought the 1st half was frustrating to watch, from an Oz p.o.v., when a string of scrum penalties went against us... some borderline interpretations... but that's the norm with us usually. We either get tossed around like Xmas wrappings or are into the presents too early - and we always get pinged!

Although I did also pray that usually the ref tries to 'even things up' in the second half - which isn't the way it should be either. I had to wait for the last quarter of an hour when Ireland was pressing on the line and getting awful close - and the ref miraculously gave us a couple of breaks.

So to sum up - the team has a more positive shape now, quicker delivery of the ball, more fluid in distribution and some power / stealth running in the backs. A few soft tries were scored but they looked switched on. Our defence was still adequate. Still the odd annoying fumble or crossed-wires stuff but there seemed to be a fraction less on Saturday night. I'm still seething from the England loss (had that in the bag... threw it away!) and think we would go better against NZ and SA if we played them right now. We'd still lose... but by less than last time.

We have to beat Scotland next weekend. To lose 3 in a row after a 28 year dominance would be very embarrassing!
The plan should be to try and score 28 points...

The players will desperately want to keep the momentum going up until the Wales match. That should be a humdinger of a match.

Have to say, you probably could have fared a lot worse in terms of yellow cards! Felt like the penalty we scored before half-time was a certain yellow card but the referee held back because you already had one in the bin.

Where you're attacking just outside the 22 it's always pretty annoying to see a guy who is on the floor and off the game pick the ball up and place it back on the Wallabies side! That should have been them down to 13 men.

Got to be fair to the Wallabies; they knew if they outscored us on tries they'd likely win so they had no problems with giving away so many blatant penalties if it interrupted our momentum and made us take 3 instead of 7- and the strategy worked, so fair play to them for that. Pathetically enough we took no advantage of either the red or yellow card so whose to say an extra yellow or two would have even mattered?

Hard to say. Fiji did well with 11 men but fell just short.  

Evening lads.

Guess who RTE seemed to think was the problem with the Irish performance?

Think of an answer before you read it!


Here!

Marshall. He should be hung, drawn and quartered. Rookie error.

But he'll learn from that.

I know Gibbo!

Sure we would have cuised home if Darcy had played!

 

To write an article about one of the very very few players not to let down the shirt and who was the one man enough to put his hand up for his part (and he wasn't solely to blame) in that try is one of the worst pieces of sports journalism I have ever seen.

MrsP - You're probably right...but I do like looking at Tommy through these rosy specs!

Breaker - what on earth is happening to the Oz team?  Are they sponsored by XXXX these days? Had to laugh at the Welsh press mind.  They've listed a pub crawl they recommend for the Oz team to go on in Cardiff before they play Wales - cheeky monkeys

Evening All by the way.

It's 'normal' behaviour for our sporting teams, Cari.  
Our RL team was sponsored by XXXX and the cricket team, VB.
So I guess there must be a clause in their contracts...

I don't Care a Dove  if they have the odd drink on tour but this idea of going on late night benders before a Test match is surely asking for trouble.

Linebreaker wrote:It's 'normal' behaviour for our sporting teams, Cari.  
Our RL team was sponsored by XXXX and the cricket team, VB.
So I guess there must be a clause in their contracts...

I don't Care a Dove  if they have the odd drink on tour but this idea of going on late night benders before a Test match is surely asking for trouble.

 You can do better than that, Breaker!

Notch wrote:Yeah it's open now Rodderny

Good man Notcho, its been a long time between strawberry beers....

Weather is apocalyptic up here this morning... hopefully it will extend south eastwards for Sunday to give us a chance against the ABs.....

Weather was rotten here this morning rodders, though you'd never guess now, it's glorious. It snowed higher up this morning, I'll try and send that over if you want?

Pelting down here at the moment, but it's not meant to last.

Never mind the snow its hurricane season!  

Friday!!!

Oh tell me about it, Swanny! It's been a long week!

I'm surprised Breaker hasn't been in here this morning...

I'm here!

Didn't you see my coat on the hook near the front door?  

It's the bright yellow one... with bits of lime green piping and random stars down the sleeves....

I only saw a coat with a label saying, 'property of Mitchell Johnson.'

He bowled well today. So too Harris.

I must say it was an unusual and pleasant surprise to see them dominate the day. That hasn't happened very often lately.  

The weather might assist Jimmy Anderson tomorrow. You could see it building up today... the milky cloud cover... perfect for swing bowling.

Two days in and we've already had shifts in fortune. Should be another great series. Best England can hope for is a draw in this one I think - unless there's a similar batting collapse from your lot.

Lucky,

Our lot just have to try and push on. Warner can score quickly... then get out. I'd like to see Rogers gain some confidence. He looked a lot like Trott - down on confidence and slow to score.

If the 2 openers can take the lead over 250 runs and and we avoid another mini-middle-order-collapse, then we could be looking at a massive lead.

I'd even be happy with a 350 run lead or so (that would mean all out for 189!)... but you can never discount the likes of KP, Bell doing something special... so I'd feel a lot more comfortable with a 450-500 lead (3 x 80-90 runs/session... try not to lose more than 2 wickets/session) and that would mean batting most of tomorrow.

Well you've got the wickets in hand to do that - and then you'd have two full days to bowl us out. But Stuart Broad seems to have the Indian sign over Michael Clarke.

Stuart Broad... I believe he's popular over there?

Yes, it seems so. Like Harris on Cook and Johnson on Root.  

Stuart Broad is OK... we appreciate fine sportsmen.
He has a lot of grit and ticker and genuine fans acknowledge that. It's just there are some people who like to make it sound like he's the 'villain'... same with KP. There's obviously some taunting going on but so far Stuey has had the last laugh.