Posts by st ephen
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Out of interest, what Education experience does Anne Tolley have?
One of the many crosses that teachers have to bear is that everyone who has been to school fancies themselves as an expert on Education.
Strangely, the same people can eat roast dinners without feeling they have become experts in Modern Agricultural Systems. -
Kyle that penguin is CLASS.
No it isn't. It's a foreign bird drawn by a foreigner in a foreign country. What's wrong with the morose, antisocial, endangered but local Yellow-eyed penguin? Just how often does a Rockhopper wash up on Dunedin's beaches, take a quick look around and then bugger off again? Is this "Dunedin" Penguins franchise also planning to relocate?
(This particular bah humbug market is going to take some cracking...) -
The fact that World Cup winners are generally rubbish within a year fits the theory that the World Cup is everything, teams focus on that alone and nothing else matters. So let's not go there...
I still think there are better sports to use as a model for rugby than football. When did the English football team last play Munster? When did Italy last win a Grand Slam against Brazil, Argentina, Colombia and Uruguay? When did Brazil ever win a test series in England with mid-week fixtures against Swindon Town and Wigan Athletic?
The only reason to treat the Rugby World Cup as the only thing that matters would be if that's the only thing you have a prayer of winning. I say it's time we hit up the IRB for a weekly presentation of that #1 Ranking ribbon/cuddly toy.
The clincher - the IRB rankings comes with a "draw your own pretty graph" feature (with more than the RWC's 6 data points).
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Well, OK, but apart from Giovanni, Legbreak, the NZRFU, the other national unions, the IRB, the players, the sponsors, the broadcasters, the overseas fans and most AB fans - apart from that lot, no one really thinks that the World Cup is all that important. Surely?
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We get bragging rights.
Knockout tournaments are irrelevant - the top teams in the English Football Premiership use them to give their B squads a run around (I believe Arsenal B just lost to Burnley in something?). Granted, if you are Burnley, then a knockout tournament is what you're going to focus on, since you've got no chance of winning a league. Likewise for everyone but NZ in rugby - they're rubbish year-in, year-out, so their only hope for glory is to fluke a win in a knockout tourney, where someone else does the giant killing for them.
We don't have to stoop to their level - we can ignore the World Cup entirely. (Just as soon as we get over the last couple).
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We get bragging rights.
Knockout tournaments are irrelevant - the top teams in the English Football Premiership use them to give their B squads a run around (I believe Arsenal B just lost to Burnley in something?). Granted, if you are Burnley, then a knockout tournament is what you're going to focus on, since you've got no chance of winning a league. Likewise for everyone but NZ in rugby - they're rubbish year-in, year-out, so their only hope for glory is to fluke a win in a knockout tourney, where someone else does the giant killing for them.
We don't have to stoop to their level - we can ignore the World Cup entirely. (Just as soon as we get over the last couple).
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The NZRFU and the players think it's important.
You are, of course, absolutely right. But since the whole thing has been a tragic mistake, can't the rest of us all just agree to ignore the World Cup and celebrate the rankings list?
I might as well confess that that's when I found out that New Zealand existed...
...and revived your dream of playing international football?
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oh - and France would have won the quarter final more comfortably if Barnes had penalised the AB's for killing the ball on the two occasions in the 2nd half the French broke out and looked dangerous.
The Kiwi commentators hardly broke off from whining about the sin-binning though, although Fox did murmur "the All Blacks will have to be careful here..." (code for "there go the All Blacks again, diving in from an offside position to kill the ball, surely another yellow card coming up?"). -
Giovanni, you've taken a totally football-centric view of the Rugby World Cup, which is perfectly natural, being Italian and all. Some Brit fans do the same - claiming to be happy to be crap for four years because it's only the World Cup that matters, everything else is a friendly.
That's rubbish though. The Rugby World Cup exists because in 1982 NZ qualified for The Other World Cup in Spain (after setting all kinds of records: most games, most goals, most kilometers travelled, most blatantly fixed match). Of course, we were then trounced by - among others - Brazil. But we saw ourselves as the rugby equivalent of Brazil - #1 in the ranking. And we wanted some way to make it official.
To their credit, the RFU old farts in football-dominated Britain opposed the whole thing - they foresaw a future of meaningless tests between development squads, separated by a knockout lottery every four years. But they lost, and we got a Rugby World Cup.
But now we have the official IRB rankings (from 2003 at least). So the World Cup is entirely superfluous to our original requirements. You think it's important, because you're making a wholly inappropriate analogy with Italy and football. But increasingly, NZ rugby fans are getting to grips with what a World Cup is really all about - and we're caring less and less.
Or trying to... :-) -
Ali Williams is erratic and Richie McCaw is awesome.
...or maybe Richie is a #7 with a consistent role and Ali is a tight forward, whose degree of 'tightness' depends on the game plan adopted for a particular opponent. Hell, I played open side flanker for nine years, and in at least two of those years I was the only player on our team who ever made a tackle. In the pre-Michael Jones days, that was pretty much the Job Description right there.
(PS. Can I haz regressions with confidence limits fitted?)