I'm very suspicious about that last post. Very, very suspicious.
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I'm very suspicious about that last post. Very, very suspicious.
Get a room you two
Here we go again, asking where I've been.
Can't you see these tears are real?
If an old friend I know, stops by to say hello,
Would I still see suspicion in your eyes?
We can't build our dreams on suspicious minds.
onya,Elvis
....and here was me thinking he was living in Harlem.
I heard Associates wouldn't give Pally permission to sell any at their home game.
I tried to sell them to Wests supporters last weekend but I was too late.
They all left by half time.
Funny thing.
At 5.20 pm last Saturday there were only two Wests people still at the Palmyra ground and clubrooms -Carl Greenwood, and that South African guy with the broken nose. I think he was your fullback. Nice Guy.
The Pally women took the place of your guys for the boat race -drinking lemonade.
Pally put out a spread for Wests after the game - untouched.
Anything else you'd like to moan about in regard to bad rugby behaviour and good sportsmanship Westie?
No, I love the bastards.
Anyway, no Maltese at Wests.
Mind you they did have a pet Maltese referee in the old days named Briffa.
Don't know what happened to him ....
Heartless SANZAAR act as if culling of teams is a fait accompli
WAYNE SMITH
Senior sport writerBrisbane
@WayneKeithSmith
There was some sad, soul-destroying news on the weekend as SANZAAR circulated a paper that paved the way for a 15-team Super Rugby draw for next season. There was, however, some heartening news as well, as finally one Australian team decided to take matters into their own hands in Super Rugby.
The death of Australia’s fifth team hasn’t even taken place yet — nor, for that matter, have the two doomed South African sides gone to the gallows — yet already SANZAAR has moved on. There has been no wake, no mourning. It’s as though the Western Force, and the Cheetahs and the Southern Kings — or whoever they choose — have become, as George Orwell would have termed them “un-teams”.
Not only don’t they exist in SANZAAR’s eyes, seemingly they never existed, and history has been doctored accordingly.
It has been a shameful exercise, this task of reducing an 18-team competition to 15, but the callousness displayed by officials, both from SANZAAR and the Australian Rugby Union, has bordered on the breathtaking.
And it has just become more bizarre yet as the two teams shortlisted for extinction, the Western Force and the Melbourne Rebels, have both been invited to participate in their own destruction.
SANZAAR has asked them for their suggestions about ground availability and potential conflicts. Granted, this is a practice that happens every year. But all the while this year they can’t escape that fact that for one of them, this will be an entirely wasted exercise.
The 15-team draw won’t include them. Nor is there is a counter-balancing 18-team draw in circulation. There is only the scaled-down model that requires three sacrificial lambs.
That it almost certainly will be the Force who are photoshopped out of history defies belief. No team has better illustrated why Australian rugby expanded in the first place. In 11 short years, they have built up their side to the point where half the players are WA locals, so they are clearly nurturing talent. And they are playing such a direct, uncomplicated brand of rugby that they are showing up the elaborate duplicity occurring off the field.
SUPER RUGBY: The run home
That the other Australian franchises also have been invited to make suggested improvements shows staggering and callous indifference. They are like timid pedestrians who witness a mugging taking place on the main street but decide it is none of their business and hurry on by, eyes averted. It’s not their fault that this culling process is happening but certainly they benefit from it and they are doing nothing to stop it.
There is, of course, a second mugging taking place on the High Street, with New Zealand taking Australian rugby for virtually everything it owns. The count now reads 20-0 — the number of trans-Tasman matches this season won by the Kiwis — and, if the truth be known, Australia was probably lucky to get the zero. OK, Queensland lost to the Crusaders on the final bell but they’ve been so wilfully self-destructive where their season is concerned that it’s impossible to feel any sympathy for them. There are now only five opportunities left this season for an Australian Super Rugby team to break the drought before the Wallabies come up against the All Blacks, and four of them are away games — the Reds against the Blues in Samoa and the Highlanders in Dunedin and the Brumbies and Waratahs against the Chiefs. The only home game is the Force’s fixture against the Hurricanes in Perth next weekend and, as well as the WA side played to defeat Queensland on Friday night, it’s a different matter entirely beating the Canes. Still, with Beauden Barrett missing the Bulls match on the weekend because of concussion, it’s conceivable he will be pulled from this game as well to preserve him for the British and Irish Lions series. It’s not much, but it is a sliver of hope.
Yet, through all the gloom, one team has stepped up and all but claimed the Australian conference. It had almost seemed that the Australian conference would be won by the least-worst team, but the way the Brumbies have played abroad at least has injected some genuine positivity into the scene.
As far as road trips are concerned, the one that Australian teams are making this year to South Africa and Argentina is about the most gruelling of them all. The Reds lost both matches this season, the Force, with one of their best efforts of modern times against the Jaguares, returned home with a win and a loss.
But the Brumbies, who left on their world tour with a record of only three wins from 10 matches, will return with five from 12 after beating the Kings in Port Elizabeth and the Jaguares in Buenos Aires. After not scoring a try in 160 minutes of rugby against the Blues and the Lions, the Brumbies are now on a roll, and not just through their rolling maul. They scored nine tries in two matches on tour and some of them were as creative as any they have scored this century.
By general consensus, it was agreed that whoever won the Australian conference would last only the one week of finals and then be out on its ear. But the Brumbies are starting to threaten this theory. Their first half against the Jaguares, in particular, was close to error-free, and though they lapsed into carelessness for a period after the interval, they pulled themselves back together. Certainly there was no communal switch-off of the type that brought the Queensland Reds such grief on Friday night against the Force.
With a nine-point buffer over their nearest Australian rivals, the Waratahs, the Brumbies are probably already assured of winning the conference with just three rounds remaining. What’s more, they’ve now done the near-impossible and put an Australian team into the top half of the Super Rugby table.
Best of all, there is a belief now that the best is yet to come from the side. At very best, the Brumbies have only six more matches left to play under coach Steve Larkham. They’re starting to look very much like a team that intends to enjoy them.
http://www.theaustralian.com.au/spor...f254c5d10cf5b6
If Wayne is right about the SANZAAR "paper" that is indeed depressing news. And it would be the final nail in the cowardly ARU's coffin for mine.
Why is it almost certainly us now? This just gets me so annoyed! Depressing for a Monday..
Cameron Clyne is holding a brief media event at ARU Headquarters at 2pm EST.
The ARU will today provide notice to it's members of a EGM to be held on Tuesday June 20.
Wow so another month of no bloody clue what is going on. Sent another email to the ARU!! Just feel so powerless in this crap situation I can't even imagine what the players feel.. 😡