Loose pass
This week we will be mostly concerning ourselves with keeping feet on the ground and jobs for the boys…
This week we will be mostly concerning ourselves with keeping feet on the ground and jobs for the boys…
It was heartening to see Jason Robinson welcomed back into a rugby team last week after what has apparently been a tetchy time at Sale on the sidelines.
Robinson has joined Fylde, down in England's third tier, where he will once again be under the tutelage of Brian Ashton. That's quite the coaching team for a third-tier club!
Fylde are thus understandably over the moon and said in their press release: “'Great' is a vastly overused word in sport but Jason Robinson wears the label with ease.” Which is a perfectly reasonable summary.
However, they then followed it up with “…it's not an exaggeration to say that he is the best ever rugby player.” This is not a perfectly reasonable summary.
Fylde may have been swept up into the land of clouds and cuckoos as a result of their capture of Robinson's signature but surely choosing the greatest rugby player ever would be the result of a painstaking process of elimination based on a vast number of criteria and potential players?
Fylde fans be warned: he's good, but he ain't that good!
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Still in England, a gentle reminder of one of the reasons England's rose has wilted was issued this week in the form of an email from the RFU, a paragraph from which read thus:
“As part of the recent RFU brand review, a new set of guidelines that significantly rationalises how we represent our brand in every online and offline environment has been created. It starts from the perspective that we only have one master brand – the Rugby Football Union or RFU with the rose – and a few defined sub brands – Twickenham Stadium and the England Teams – and that is it. As a result we have eliminated all other brands, logos and visual representations.”
OK, leaving aside the innumerable opportunities for leg-pulling conjured up by the words 'master brand' in the context of England Rugby, never mind 'persepctive' and 'rationalises', we thought we'd go and examine the difference between the two.
We looked and looked, trying to compare the new logo with the old logo (the only copy of the old logo we could find was on our England country page), but no differences became readily apparent. No new leaves, no new petals, no fresh budding extra flowers.
But eventually it hit us. There is a difference. And we challenge you to find it yourselves between the rose on the RFU page here an the one on our own page here (RFU, we promise we'll change it soon, honest). If you really can't find it, the answer's at the bottom of this epistle.
Once you've found it, we invite you to imagine how much a re-branding process actually costs for such an operation (businessmen among you ought to have a decent idea) irrespective of the substance of the logo alterations.
And then, once you've digested that, we invite you to consider how often New Zealand make that kind of spend on that kind of operation, along with a consideration of their average Test score this year (41.5) and try count per game (5) and work out which of the two unions might be spending their money the wiser…
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Away from England and down to the Arabian Gulf, where a new rugby revolution is taking place.
At the end of this year, the Arabian Gulf Rugby Football Union (AGRFU) is disbanded as a member of the International Rugby Board (IRB), to be replaced by the UAE Rugby Association (UAERA)
The UAERA will be run by one Chairman Mohammad Abdulrahman Falaknaz, a complete rookie in sports admin who details the formation of the Association thus: “We were officially formed in February 2009 but we started may be a year and half before that, somewhere around 2007. We put together a team and everything. A bunch of guys who were rugby fanatics and an informal UAE national team at the time,” he said.
All of which is encouraging and the very best of luck to them. Considering the money on offer over there and the success and happiness of the annual Dubai Sevens, it would be good to have them as a bigger player in the rugby world.
However – and perhaps in an effort to fit in with the finer parts of rugby's administrative culture – Falaknaz also revealed how a non-rugby playing rookie sports administrator came to be involved in the new Association's formation…
“I have not been directly involved in sport but have been indirectly involved with my father (Abdulrahman Falaknaz). He is involved in the National Olympic Committee, is UAE Tennis Vice-Chairman and Chairman of the Dubai Cricket Council,” admitted Falaknaz.
Sport is set to be a family dynasty in the UAE it seems…
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We can't call him a clown, we'll be forced to apologise. So we'll simply talk about Peter de Villiers through the mouthpiece of others, in our one-off award: the cartoon of the week.
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Actually we will talk about him. De Villiers returned last week to face a grilling from his employers over his comments on the match officials.
All of which is reasonable enough, except that it was precisely those employers who instructed the Boks' representative on the Sanzar legal committee, Judge Lex Mpati, to 'take up' the matter of officiating bias against the Boks not two days prior to De Villiers' comments.
So… what's good for the goose is not good for the gander? Something more than just the coaching staff is wrong in SA Rugby.
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Interviewed last week over past Aussie-New Zealand conflicts, Keven Mealamu, a devout Christian, somehow managed to justify his punch-up with Brendan Cannon back in 2004 on the Christian edict that it was better to give than to receive.
But as if that alone didn't serve to educate that you can use any excuse to play rugby to the fullest, here's a story from the days of possibly rugby's most famous Christian, Michael Jones.
Jones was at the bottom of a ruck receiving some gratuitous shoe-pie from an opponent, and was eventually avenged by team-mate Peter Fatialofa, whose right hook left said opponent prostrate on the Auckland turf.
“Thanks Fats, but I'm not