The Silver Fern

@kiwiinmelb "Nice guns, Sonny".

"Thanks, Jack - I like your hair".

It comes from a song, that I think goes something like this....

A long, long time ago
I can still remember when the Chiefs won the Cup.
And this year they had another chance
To win again at the big dance
And Hamilton would be happy for a while.
But, Ben O'Keefe made them shiver
With every card that he delivered.
Bad news came at quickstep
They couldn't take the last step.
I think that Pakman might have cried
As he watched his telly, his beer beside
Crusaders won, some brains got fried.
The day, the Chiefs hopes....died!

I shall get my coat again!

Fuck me - those sorts of games are not good for you - especially in the early morning!

Massive effort by both teams.

Last few minutes were interesting - Ireland attacking very conservatively because they couldn't afford a mistake - us defending very conservatively - because we couldn't afford a mistake either.

Commiserations to the Irish supporters.

@Siam said in Indian Cricket Tour of NZ 2020:

Wags out. Baby coming.

But don't worry Henry called up

Don't know why Mrs. Wags can't do this on her own - the delivery is bound to be short, or very short!

@mn5 said in All Blacks v Argentina - Nelson:

@mariner4life said in All Blacks v Argentina - Nelson:

Shit team in a shit location. lucky the Warriors are on

DO NOT diss Nelson you Queensland Bogan fluffybunny.

Ignore him, MN5.

What would a fucker who lives in Cairns know about locations? He's choosing to live in a swamp, inhabited by nasty, poisonous biting creatures - and that's just the people, don't get me started on the wildlife.

In fact, do. Go to the beach - get eaten by a crocodile. Go for a run - get bitten by a snake. Go for a shit - get bitten by a spider. Go anywhere and get bitten by dengue-ridden mosquitos or some other fucking insect largely unknown to science.

Go to the pub and be entertained by Tex Morton and his pet bantam, Stu - singing "Blue Bayou" - a song about living in a swamp.

In summary, he wouldn't know a good location if it bit him on the arse - and in Cairns it probably will!

@gt12 They just seem to have ended up in an unusual place.

I suspect they did the whole thing down the pub.

Afterwards Fozzie emailed them the team.

Ryan replied, "Hey Foz, looks good, but we've only got 32 players, we need another LF".

Foz emails back, "Oh fuck, thanks - that would have been embarrassing - sorted now".

Foz: Now how do you spell Lester?

Very pleased to get the win - 10 days in camp with a rebuild squad - I was very apprehensive about this game.

Unavailable from the 23 that played in the final 6 months ago - Retallick, Frizell, Cane, Smith, Mo'unga, Jordan, Taukei'aho, Laulala, Whitelock - plus squaddies Coles, Roigard and Fainga'anuku.

That's a shitload of depth to have to replace.

Not surprised that we didn't see too much in the way of a discernable new pattern. Have to be very careful about downloading too much new stuff in 10 days.

Get through these three games - then we've got three weeks before the Rugby Championship - I'd hope to see some significant new stuff emerging as we progress through that.

A baseline performance put down - lots to work on this week - and, importantly, a win!

Well done, lad!

https://www.stuff.co.nz/sport/other-sports/126150980/paul-coll-becomes-first-new-zealander-to-win-the-british-open-mens-squash-title

Biggest win by someone from Greymouth in a while.

Dave McKenzie won the Boston marathon, but he was from Runanga.

I'm on the Razor bandwagon.

I used to think that if you had the cattle then any vaguely competent coach could get them across the line - but, Rennie (and Smith) vs Foster and then Razor vs Toddy Blackadder convinced me I was thinking bullshit.

Instantaneous improvement to repeated victory.

I reckon under Fozzie we're getting similar results to what we'd be getting under Toddy. Decent people, competent coaches, trying their best - but, they just don't quite have the magic touch.

Razor may not be able to work his magic with the ABs post-2023 (see Rennie and the Wallabies), but I reckon we'd be silly not to give him the shot.

@No-Quarter said in All Blacks v England:

Jesus the criticism of the DG is a bit over the top, that got us a 19 point lead with 10 minutes to go. That is 100% NOT the reason we lost, it has absolutely nothing to do with it.

Yeah - when we're 16 points up with 10 to play I don't want our senior players wetting their pants about a three-try comeback. That should have been another un-needed nail in the coffin and we should be talking about how good it is that BB took the opportunity to get in some dropgoal practice in a big game.

Maybe it will yet serve us in good stead next year.

Rob keeps the run going.

Unbeaten in the play-offs for the eighth consecutive year!

Fabulous stuff!

@Machpants said in RWC Final: All Blacks v Springboks:

So do those is say pretty much everyone backing black?

Listen to Matfield in Tim's video. Those Boks won't be turning up flat or tired. In 1995, we turned up half-dead and still took them to extra time.

We've got a small preparatory advantage, that's turned into a "we're gonna win" vibe. Everyone I've talked to is feeling it and I can see it in this thread.

Don't believe it. This will be at least as intense as the Ireland game and anything can happen. Just look at England last time - looked a sure bet and fell heavily on their arse!

And this is a "must win" game. Arguably the most important game in 20 years.

Just which 20 years is the question.

Not as important as the 2011 final - because in that game the monkey on our back had turned into a gigantic Gorilla that needed to be shot off the Empire State Building!

But, more important than 2015, when the relief of winning in 2011 would have sustained us - and when we had the confidence to smack the shit out of that monkey and bury him so deep that he couldn't dig his way out in the following eight years.

But, what have we seen in the past eight years? Aura left Twickenham dressed in designer robes, having put the fear of God (and Danny Boy) into all opposition.

We had a free swing in 2019 and missed it - and charitably left making noises of how it's nice for someone else to win for a change, blah, blah...

But now we're in 2023 and I can hear the sound of the fucking monkey's shovel. Jonny Sexton hasn't given Aura a thought - and the rest of us have seen glimpses of her buying clothes at the Warehouse.

If we win, we can collect the gold and bury that monkey under a massive pile of tailings. We will rock up to the 2027 tournament with the "won three of the last four" narrative. Aura will be the belle of the ball!

If we lose, it will be 12 long years since we won the Big Cup. Aura will be an Insta Ho and we'll have a fucking zombie monkey in tow. The narrative will be all about the Boks going for a three-peat - and a 5-3 advantage over us in Cups won.

We cannot have that!!!

@sparky said in RWC QF: All Blacks v Ireland:

It’s a bit of a win-win for me tonight.

If we win, it will be absolutely brilliant to knock the Number One side in the world and the World Cup favourites out of the competition.

If we lose, then I’ll be relieved the Foster farce is finally over.

Go Black!

I'd rather the Foster farce lasts another couple of weeks and ends with us winning the Big Cup.

What are my final thoughts about this game?

Well, yesterday I was a bit sceptical of our prospects. Ireland is a very settled team. We know what they'll bring and it will be good. They will be fucking hard to beat.

The variable in this game is, though IMO - not to put too fine a point on it - whether we turn up a bit shit or very good. We're certainly less settled, with our best props missing much of the build-up, various others a bit under-cooked, and a few slightly odd choices at the end.

I looked at our team and I thought Fozzie'd made some fuck-ups, but on reflection - they may work out for the best and hopefully they're not terminal.

I'm mainly surprised at the prop selections and that we didn't have Ofa in the mix. Frankly, I was thinking we might start Ofa and Nepo with the under-cooked de Groot and Lomax off the bench

Given how under-cooked out starting props are - I would have at least gone with the veterans rather than the rookies - but, we're hopefully not going to have statues on the field for the final 30 minutes.

I wouldn't have picked Christie over Roigard, but we've been relatively successful with Finlay on the bench and I'm wondering what the biggest game Cam has played in that has been won.

I'm sure Telea would have played if he'd gone to bed early, but he and Leicester are very different players and who's to say which would've been more effective.

But, fuck all that.

We've got 14 of the starting 15 who Fozzie inscribed on his tablet many months ago - and Telea was a late addition.

We've got some firepower on the bench.

We've been building nicely into this match and, hopefully, the mood in the camp is a damn sight more positive than the Fern!

We're a lot better than we were when we lost last year. On paper, we're a lot better than the team that lost to France in the pre-lims.

Get out there and play hard and play accurately. Who dares wins!

Go us!!!

Despite not getting the rub of the calls, we could - and should - have won that if we'd been more accurate. So many loose passes and dropped balls killed us.

Not to mention two kicks at goal to get our noses in front.

Congratulations to the Boks and Big Pieter Steph - phenomenal game by him.

@sparky said in Savea goooone Skudder in:

@Crucial Selling Comics.

Worst Wing Ever!

Well, that was pretty exciting and given that I hate losing far more than I like winning, I'm remarkably sanguine about the result.

I think some of you guys are being pretty harsh on the execution. The Lions defence was extremely good - no weak links - and I think the ABs decided they needed some pieces of magic to score. Maybe a lack of patience at times, but the two tries we scored both had a fair degree of magic to them - especially the second one. Taking pop passes into a close defensive line and getting smashed isn't the best way of retaining the ball - but, it's also a good way of breaking the line. On another night we could have scored four or five tries - we certainly created opportunities - especially in the first half.

I haven't really seen a massive decline in Hansen's coaching - we just came up against a team chock full of talented players and with the depth to match and possibly better the advantage we usually get from the subs bench - particularly once we lost a few players.

On the final penalty, I guess Poite will give a Gallic shrug and say something like "Il n’est pas la bonne décision, mais c’est la belle décision."

Which means, "It is not the right decision, but it is the beautiful decision." At least that's what I typed into Babelfish to get that result!

Right now, the Crusaders have won the same number of games as the Australian teams combined.

A big part of rugby is winning the collisions.

When you've got a lot of little guys in the team, you start to lose too many and too many in a row - and you get hurt.

You need a few playmakers - the best of whom tend to be a bit smaller and you have to accept they'll get flattened or run over occasionally - but, I like to have plenty of big guys around them so that there's bail out options regularly on hand and guys who can cover defensively. I miss Ma'a Nonu!

When we start fielding an under-sized 8 in Ardie, Aaron Smith, Mo'unga, Havili (a smallish 12), Sevu Reece and DMac that's starting to get a bit Japan-like to me.

I'm inclined to throw in a few more bigger bodies.

Firstly, good effort Wallabies. Turns out last week's first half effort was more of a fluke than the second half.

I was wondering about that - but, we were at home this week and struggled to win.

Secondly - fail on behalf of the AB coaches not to identify that. We spent quite a lot of this game playing like the result was a foregone conclusion and buried ourselves in a ditch for a while by not playing proper test rugby.

Thirdly - Man of the match - Nepo Laulala. If our scrum had been less dominant in that game, we would have been well beaten. Coles and Moody can take residual credit. No more of this Ofa bullshit, Hansen!!!

Fourthly - second man of the match, Rieko Ioane. Looked like an AB back out there, when several others didn't.

Fifthly - show some class Chieka. It's not fucking soccer!!!

@Crucial said in It’s Razor. Robertson New All Blacks coach.:

We’re going over old ground now. Fosters best/only chance is based on completion of the job he was employed to do. That option was taken away.

Thing is - Fozzie's not employed just to win the RWC.

He should have to stand on his record at the point NZR decide to recruit - not be given the chance to pull a rabbit out of a hat at the end (a chance no other potential candidate gets).

If he'd simply won more games he would have had a chance in this process. If he was sitting there with Sir Grahams record in early-2007 he'd likely have been a shoe-in.

I think it's a good thing that the future has been clarified. And on the other side of the coin, Fozzie gets his shot at winning a RWC and I'm fully behind him. Give him what he needs to win. If he's got assistants who are going to bail (as one article I saw today suggested) then maybe they're not the guys we need anyway. It should be a privilege to be on the AB coaching staff.

For what it's worth, I think (and hope) we'll get Ryan, Leon and Holland as Razor's lead assistants. I wouldn't mind seeing Smithy or Hansen in a mentoring role. I'm not convinced we need other old guys in the core team - maybe a few losses will change my tune.