The British & Irish Lions of 2013 were named team of the year and Warren Gatland won the top coach honour at the 2013 BBC Sports Personality awards. Kiwi Gatland, 50, led the Lions to their first Test series win in Australia for 16 years.
bbc
With the series poised at 1-1, his side crushed the Wallabies in the final match as they racked up 41 points in Sydney to secure victory in style.
Lion Leigh Halfpenny was one of 10 on the main Sports Personality shortlist.
Victory in the decider came after Gatland controversially dropped Ireland centre Brian O’Driscoll for the deciding Test.
The New Zealander admitted at the time that he wondered whether his role was worth the level of abuse he suffered, but has since hinted he might make himself available to lead the Lions against the All Blacks in 2017.
He has been Wales coach since 2007 and won two Six Nations Grand Slams in 2008 and 2012 and reached the semi-finals of the 2011 World Cup
Gatland stepped aside from coaching Wales last year to concentrate on his Lions commitments.
In his absence, interim coach Rob Howley led Wales to the Six Nations title.
The British & Irish Lion of 2013 were certainly good, with a good coach… but it must be remembered that they caught the Wallabies probably at their lowest ebb in the last 16 years too.
But as far as British Rugby goes, it was the only shining light against Southern Hemisphere rugby this year… so I suppose it’ll have to do.
Well done to Gatland, a really good coach, for me his defining moment of the Lions tour was the dropping of the adoring fans favourite O’Driscoll, was so much anger from many quarters about that BUT it was a correct decision that had to be taken and it worked out very well for them as Lions forwards, playing in a match blown by northern hemisphere ref,completely dominanted the Aussies in that 3rd test.
1 @ grootblousmile:
Yeah the southern hemisphere dominance continued although the Lions success wasn’t the only success for the north. England beat Australia, and Ireland ran New Zealand closer than any other team did this year, also an England team missing quite a few big names beat Argentina in the series midyear in Argentina at the time the Lions were winning in Australia, and Argentina also suffered various defeats on their end of year tour up north. Samoa, Tonga and Fiji also suffered defeats during their tours up north.
3 @ Bullscot:
Come now Bully… your yardstick should not be Argentina, Samoa, Fiji & Tonga.
The southern & northern hemisphere yardstick should be to measure against the world top 3.
In light of that, the British & Irish Lions 2013 and England had some success… against an off-beat Wallabies side, who are clawing their way back up the food chain again.
Look, somebody had to win the northern hemisphere BBC awards… and I agree that has to go to the British & Irish Lions 2013, Gatland… and to some extent Wales in 2013 (once again under Gatland).
For northern hemisphere rugby to advance and catch up, something has to be done about your Test venue surfaces up north as well as a few tweaks here and there… and for that matter importing less southeners in order to strenghten the Club and Euro leagues and competitions.
Something has to be done to get into line with southern hemisphere interpretation of the laws & rules and some cross-polinisation will have to happen where southern & northern hemisphere clubs & unions play one another on a regular basis.
If I was in charge up there, I would use this window of opportunity (in the spat between the ERC and it’s members) to change the face of northern hemisphere rugby, by involving the south, pro-actively!
I am a new registration here.
I hope I am welcome here. I used to chat frequently on http://www.keo.co.za but a new Commenting System (Livefyre) was introduced there which is totally unsatisfactory.
I was drawn to this site by the new rugby content daily updated and have read here a while without the courage to leave where I’d been before.
I am impressed to see this web site is privately owned and run and the impression I get is that a lot of love and effort goes into keeping it going.
The comments is rugby oriented and I’ve been burning to provide my point of view.
5 @ Alles wat mal is:
I received a Mail notification about your registration, Alles, I am webmaster here.
Goodness gracious, of course you are welcome here, to the Friendly Rugby Blog.
We (or a lot of us) also used to blog on Voldy (Keo), pre August 2009, but the darker side of slagging and in-fighting drove us away to found our own site and I’ve definately become better for it since.
Yeah, it is a labour of love and dedication to keep this site going, but the rewards are just too good to miss out on. We’ve become quite a community here!
It is our mission to keep news fresh, even in the Southern Hemisphere off-season.
Your opinion will be most welcome and we look forward to your continued participation, hope to see lots of you here!
Now about Livefyre… what in hell entered the Dwarf’s mind to use Livefyre? I did all the research on the different platforms for blogging yonks ago, including Disqus, Livefyre and the options inside WordPress and the problems associated with Livefyre and Disqus are just overbearing. The biggest problems specifically relate to the comment levels or nesting as it is termed, PLUS we would lose our archive of comments, which is simply undoable here. There are other problems too, too many to mention.
We’ll keep our format here and we’ll keep on improving the site, that is a given.
grootblousmile, thank you for the welcoming words.
I wrote a whole dissertation on Keo about why Livefyre is not the solution and it is good to see you agree with my assessment.
7 @ Alles wat mal is:
Alles,
Oh my greatness… another technofreak like me…. hehehe
Would you mind finding the dissertation on Keo and pasting it here, I’d be most interested to read it!
PS! We have REPLY and QUOTE functions here in the comments, as well as some nice SMILIES and EMOTICONS you can use… for example….
@ grootblousmile:
I wrote the following:
If one wanted to move away from WordPress’ NATIVE COMMENT FORM, there would have been different options.
1. Livefyre
2. DisQus
3. IntenseDebate
4. Jetpack Comments for WordPress
The problems with Livefyre are obvious.
* It forces one into NESTED COMMENTS (where replies are nested into a 2nd tier), which becomes difficult to follow on a busy blog.
* For the blog owner, suddenly your comment Database is in the hands of a Third Party.
* Numbering of comments in an ORDERED LIST falls away.
* Load times of pages increase
* Users have to re-register
* Archiving is more difficult and of course Keo has now lost his already commented content, unless he goes back to the WordPress NATIVE COMMENT FORM. When one goes back, one of course loses the Livefyre content.
The only advantage here seems to be the SOCIAL MEDIA interaction and the LIVE COMMENT REFRESHING, nothing else.
If the WordPress Database was becoming too large, then moving to a DEDICATED SERVER INVIRONMENT would have solved that issue (maybe Keo is already on a dedicated package) and if so CPU load or Shared CPU abuse would not be an issue.
If one desperately wanted SOCIAL MEDIA INTERACTION, then Jetpack Comments (in fact the whole Jetpack System for WordPress with all it’s “Plugin’s) would have achieved all objectives and one would have kept your Comment Formatting situation. There are a number of other Plugin’s which also would have achieved the effect, if bundled well.
This move to Livefyre comments was a serious step in the wrong direction.
Whoever advised towards this step simply does not understand the objective at hand.
What troubles me more than this bold move to Livefyre, is the lack of NEW CONTENT from a rugby news perspective, on Keo in recent months. Keo has become a chat forum in stead of a rugby forum, if we have to be brutally honest, a clan of folks who like and/or dislike each other and tend to take that out on each other.
Where are the old regular rugby people and where is the diversity in discussion now?
Something drastic has to happen to turn all of this around, unless it is the objective to eventually move people from here over to the SA Rugby Magazine site, where the news is fresh.
*********************** end of dissertation ***************************
On the contents of this article, congratulations and salutations to Warren Gatland and the British and Irish Lions, well done.
9 @ Alles wat mal is:
Phweeew, a very well reasoned argument there!
Well done man, you know your way around design and blogging platforms!
I cannot fault your summary!
To include the Social Platforms via WordPress Plugin’s, is a breeze!
We’ve had some problems in the past, running on a Shared Server Environment (with using too much CPU time and Resources) and the goal is to move over to a Dedicated Server Environment somewhere in 2014, but the costs are high per year… will be around R 24 000.00 per year, so we will have to start selling some quality advertising space on Rugby-Talk to advance to that level.
Once on a Dedicated Server, there are some Plugin’s I would really like to use (which currently is a bit out of the question due to the CPU Usage limitations), including Jetpack and Geo-Specific Analitic items as well as offering us the opportunity to do some Live Audio and Video streaming.
You are not the 1st to mention that new content has become a problem on Voldy and of course I have first hand experience on how people can take out their frustrations on one another on Voldy.
Our view and stance here is simple, banter at will, differ at will, but do it with respect… in other words do not abuse your fellow blogger or his family and friends in the process, keep away from politics, racial slurring and religion… because that is what lets everything go pear-shaped and very quickly too.
Other than that, the platform is there to enjoy and the freedom is yours!
@ grootblousmile:
Why do you call Keo, “Voldy”?
From a technical perspective I can see that we’ll be getting along well!
11 @ Alles wat mal is:
Alles,
I do not know EXACTLY when started to use “Voldy” and when it became the norm, but it has something to do with Lord Voldemort, the villian in the Harry Potter movie and books series.
It is just light relief, nothing personal against the man.
@ grootblousmile:
It makes perfect sense now.
4 @ grootblousmile:
There are many things to be worked on in the rugby world, as I’ve been saying hopefully we will come through this period of uncertainty up here stronger.
Can’t just focus on the top 3 teams in the world rugby would die if we didn’t consider the rest of the rugby playing world and Argentina do play in the Rugby Championship now so results against them count just as much as any of the results the Boks obtain playing against Six Nation opposition who are below Boks in world rankings, I’m hoping we beat the All Blacks next year but overall happy with what Mr Meyer achieved with his team this year – his high win percentage this year that is widely quoted includes quite a few victories against teams outside the top 3 like Samoa, Italy, Wales, Scotland…
5 @ Alles wat mal is:
Hi there Alles wat mal is welcome from me as well to the site, looking forward to hearing from you here, it is encouraging to read that the work that goes on here to bring rugby news and especially the live coverage is followed by folks such as yourself hopefully many more people will also get a ‘nick’ and come chat here too
5 @ Alles wat mal is:
Which team/teams do you support?
@ Alles wat mal is:
Oh fukc, not another Bulls supporter?
17 @ Loosehead:
Hello Loosehead hey if you can’t beat ’em join ’em maybe you too will see the light some day
@ Alles wat mal is:
Welcome to the site, Alles wat mal is. I hope you have many years of great rugby chat. All good as long as you support the Lions 🙂
@ Bullscot:
@ Loosehead:
I support WP, Stormers, Springboks.
@ Alles wat mal is:
Oh boy!!! What are your thoughts on Alistair Coetzee’s ultra conservative game plan in Super Rugby?
21 @ Lion4ever:
Allister and the Stormers are almost where they should be, it is so close. But if he does not at least reach the semi-finals in 2014, I think he should go.
The game plan is not so conservative as all believe, they always start off with good tries in games but then they go back into their shell and play too defensive in the second half of games.
20 @ Alles wat mal is:
Eish…. we’ll grin and bear your comments then!
Hahaha
5 to 22 @ Alles wat mal is:
I am now damn tempted to go look what LiveFyre has done to Voldy, but on the other hand I have vowed to myself not to comment there…
Shall I or shall I not?
What I was considering in fact is to go bury some hatchets over that side, to let them know that I do not harbour any grudges regarding the past. I was not always the most pleasant blogger there and I suppose I added feul to the fire of fights there. This site has changed my outlook so much on rugby, respect to fellow bloggers and generally towards an inclusive South Africa.
What’s keeping me from going is pride, I suppose, as well as the fact that I might be villified over there and needlessly attacked. I also do not want to come accross as taking advantage of a detrimental system there to lure readers over here.
There were some good chaps there, interspersed with the not so nice ones… but we cannot have the fighting culture permiate over to this side. This site will always have respect towards one another as the basis of our community.
Damn, should I even post this comment….
24 @ grootblousmile:
I often think about having “a quick look”, but eventually see reason and just don’t bother.
There were some really nice bloggers there, but in reality if they are too lazy to look for an alternative outlet for their Rugby “fix”, then they get what they deserve IMO.
Before I came across here to RT, there were some “discussions” over “there” that REALLY SADDENED me from both a Rugby and Human perspective.
25 @ Scrumdown:
Me too…
@ Alles wat mal is:
Welcome to the Rugby site where the maddest thing is probably the “Webmonster”.
Apart from being a besotted Blue Bull “bewonderaar” (alliteration intended), an IT technogeek and all round good oke, he also (literally) has a few “dead issues” lying around waiting to be tended to!
Now, if only we can persuade him that living on the FAR East Rand SHOULD make it compulsory to support the Pride of JHB!!!!
27 @ Scrumdown:
Daar’s flokkol fout met my nie… met my nie….. met my nie!
28 @ grootblousmile:
Jy klink nou soos die GLRU se bestuur!
29 @ Scrumdown:
O donner…. neeeeeeeeeeee!
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