Sounds like Mexted is not a fan of referees … :rolleyes: On a side note, that was the first victory in 75 years over the Lions for the NZ Maori team.
All Blacks: 91
Fiji: 0
Yep, roll on the tests. 
Shouldn’t that be:
All Blacks + best of all 3 Pacific Islands 91
one Pacific Island 0?
Auckland’s the largest Polynesian city in the world, bro.
All Blacks: 21
Lions: 3
Dominated the game, thoroughly deserved their win. Lions were toothless.
He’s a thug. Deserves what he’s got.
O’Driscoll targeted as Lions danger man, and taken out of the game in the first minute, as players executed dressing room plans. He didn’t have the ball. The All Blacks had it. He’s now out of the tour. He could have suffered much worse than a dislocated shoulder. Result: South African citing office Willem Venter sees nothing wrong.
Lions captain Brian O’Driscoll spoke emotionally yesterday about the controversial “spearing” incident which forced him out of the three-match Test series. From telegraph online:
“[F]reshly released video footage of the initial stages of the incident [shows] hooker Keven Mealamu and his captain, Tana Umaga, each grab a leg and hoist the Lions captain to chest height before dropping him on his head. As the sequence begins, All Blacks scrum-half Justin Marshall has already passed the ball to fly-half Dan Carter.”
I’m still waiting for Jerry Collins to snap Johnny Wilkinson like a twig: course, they won’t let him hang on to the ball for more than five seconds for fear he’ll get hurt.
Things look pretty bad for the Lions, the tour could turn into quite an embarrassment. I wouldn’t completely write-off their chances of turning it around though. As good as the All-Blacks looked (and always look), there is a fragility to them that usually provides a glimmer of hope, they’re more than capable of bottling it (see previous world cups).
Paper says he had the Lions’ equal-highest tackle count though. Mind you, after a performance like that, this may be setting the bar too low.
All except Grewcock, evidently, though in my book sticking your fingers in his mouth is a bad move. Fortunately this minor incident which has invalided nobody out of the series has been properly punished, whereas… nah, I’m too pig-sick to add any more to the O’Driscoll incident. Fucking thugs.
It was the premeditated aspect of it that makes it so striking. Deciding one player has the capacity to stand in your way of victory, targeting him, and then eliminating him.
It really is quite shameful.
That’s a hell of an accusation you’re making. The South African citing commissioner, who probably knows a bit more about these things than you, decided there was no case to answer. And Umaga is universally respected as one of the fairest players in world rugby - remember that award he got after the 2003 test vs Wales?
Yeah, it’s a hell of an accusation. It was a hell of an act that prompted it - two men hoisting a player high in the air and dropping him head-first on the ground. Why the citing commissioner has done dick about it is a subject of some discussion Up Over, beginning with the common perception that Poms get a thoroughly skewed brand of justice anywhere south of the equator.
A point of view that’s likely to change in the light of this incident.
Yanno, I can’t help contrasting this with how Ben Kay got treated last year for breathing on an All Black in a ruck - an incident that the victim barely felt.
Presumably there are some rugby people in New Zealand who think that Umaga and Mealamu targeted the Lions’s playmaker?
If you’re suggesting that New Zealanders get unfairly favourable treatment from Sth African rugby officials - where have you been for the past hundred years?
Old fossil though I am, I’ve not yet clocked up the ton; but in my 45 years on God’s green earth I’ve lived in a world where it sure looks like no-one very much minds Englishmen (or Lions, obviously tainted by association with the white-shirts) being given a thorough shoeing any time they dare set foot in either South Africa or New Zealand. I don’t say there’s documented proof that provincial sides in either place set out as a matter of policy to make sure the tourists were going to be too injury-racked to put their first XV on the field for the Tests, but it’s often felt like the distinction was a purely academic one.
We always figure that any internecine squabbles between South African officials and NZ teams get put on the back burner when it’s a question of putting Poms in the right, and if Andre Watson didn’t do his level best to referee England out of the 2003 WC final, he sure took pains to pile up circumstantial evidence against himself. It’s not so much a case of doing it out of a determination to favour a fellow Southern Hemisphere side as of doing down the Brits.
Harking back to the citing commissioner knowing a good deal more about it than either roger thornhill or myself, you’re aware that we could apply this brand of logic to any official’s decisions in any game anywhere - which I gather from your previous post you don’t imagine always to be the case?
Meanwhile Graham Henry is quoted as saying: “There’s no way All Black players go out to maim the opposition.” Since the very question at issue is whether two All Blacks did exactly that, I’m left wondering whether, if Graham’s surname were McHenry, he would take sugar on his porridge. :dubious:
It’s a shame, because the most partisan England supporter has to admit that the All Blacks are, and always have been, fucking good at rugby.
My goodness you better stop talking like that or you will be called a whingeing Pom.
Rugby is god here. Sad but true.
It isn’t going to change anytime soon.
Tana is not a bad sport though…bloody whingeing Poms
Natch. This is the standard silence-all-criticism scare quote. :rolleyes:
On the one hand: “How can you tell when a planeload of Poms has landed at Christchurch? You can still hear the whining even after the engines have stopped.”
On the other: “We are now landing in Christchurch. Please put your watch back twenty years.”
Yet neither make sense.
Hey I don’t even like rugby (I could be deported for saying that). I was much more interested in tonights netball result.
Rugby is just blokes rolling in mud then whingeing if they lose.
Though the South Island is the land where time stood still. I am an equal opportunity insulter. Bloody South Islanders hate us more then they hate Poms!