General
I do think the SA rugby public is sometimes a little unrealistic if not arrogant with their expectations regarding Springbok rugby.
Part of the Springbok success story is certainly the high expectations so one does not want to make excuses for average performances.
Make no mistake the Pumas is a handful at home. Not only passionate but they also have a very destructive style. There is a lot of niggle; a lot of in your face; substantial clever obstruction and push and shove stuff off the ball. A few years back the All Blacks almost lost a match against the Pumas in South America.
Griquas lock Jonathan Adendorf is lucky to be alive, after being attacked at the weekend.
A rugby fan beaten to death outside Durban’s Kings Park Stadium may have been involved in more than two fights on the fatal night, the Durban Magistrate’s Court heard on Tuesday.
Prosecutor Krishen Shah said information had been received that former Royal Marine Brett Williams might have been involved in another altercation prior to the two clashes he had with the five men accused of beating him to death.
This information needed to be investigated, he said.
Former Australia winger Digby Ioane has avoided conviction over an assault charge in an incident at a Melbourne bar when he was in the city with the Queensland Reds in March, local media reported on Thursday.
The 28-year-old, who is undergoing rehabilitation after sustaining a shoulder injury in the first test against the British and Irish Lions in June, was involved in a scuffle over a mobile phone.
GBS, Wynie Strydom & Snorrie in Soweto
Change isn’t a word that comes easily at Loftus Versfeld but a big changing of the guard is set to be announced on Wednesday as long standing team manager Wynie Strydom stands down.
Marketing men rub their hands as Sevens format quickly gains ground around the world. “Get on the train and see where it takes you,” is how Mark McCafferty of the Aviva Premiership described this past weekend’s inaugural World Club Sevens.
Hello Friends,
Finally I have managed to get the time to set up SuperBru Pools for Rugby-Talk for the Currie Cup and The Rugby Championship!
Both Pools have been upgraded to Super Pools, giving us the added benefit and advantage to show a bit more than usual, like our SuperBru Widgets for these two competitions on the right hand sidebar.
To be eligible to join our Rugby-Talk SuperBru pools, the only requirement is that you are a REGISTERED RUGBY-TALK SUBSCRIBER.
To all our recently added Users / Subscribers, this counts for you lot muppits, moepels and mopkoppe as well, you can now join in the fun!
Invitations have been sent to our regular Pool members, but in case I missed you, register for these Pools too… this of course counts for our new and recently registered Users / Subscribers too.
Here are the Pool details:
DHL Western Province and the Vodacom Blue Bulls are scheduled to face each other today at Twickenham on day two of the World Club 7s tournament. Both teams will be looking forward to improve on what was a disappointing first day for them at the inaugural tournament. Western Province lost all three of their games while the Blue Bulls lost two and drew one game.
Edinburgh Rugby players will turn out in black and red hoops for the first time in club’s history with this season’s playing kit, branded ‘old town, new look’.
Hi,
When we started Rugby-Talk none of us could have foreseen how this website would have grown, matured and become so successful. It all started as a group of friends broke away to form our own thing and where we could discuss rugby without having to scour through a plethera of political comments, racial slurring and plain nasty and vindictive comments.
Today Rugby-Talk has become a leader, with great content and our Live Game Articles are unrivelled in the rugby world.
To date we have 7 126 Articles plus another 174 web pages and over 280 000 comments on the website. We have generated over 7 320 000 Page Impressions (website clicks) since we first started counting a few months after inception of the website.
England won the toss and elected to bat at a cloudy, but dry Chester-Le-Street with an unchanged side. With the Ashes in their pockets, thanks to the draw in Manchester, England were hoping to keep the Australians winless in the series. The Australians made one change in the quickie, Jackson Bird, who came in for Mitchell Starc. The pitch was hard and dry and swing was expected.
England put up a first innings score of 238 runs, all out and Australia replied with 270 all out. England’s second innings delivered 330 runs, all out.
On Day 4 the target set for Australia in their 2nd innings was 299 to win the match. Australia started well and with over a third of the runs in the bag, they lost their 1st wicket, then in the early 170’s they lost the plot and lost a number of wickets in the space of a few runs. After that the wickets kept falling in regular intervals and almost at close of play on Day 4 England bagged the last wicket to win by 74 runs.
It’s that time of the year again – RBS Rugby Force weekend is here. This is an initiative by the Scottish Rugby Union to get folk involved with their local rugby clubs.
This is what really happened behind the scenes…
[youtube]http://youtu.be/_APSHxnTZp8[/youtube]
You know we’re joking, of course
South African Rugby player Bryan Habana pushed himself to new heights as he went up against British Airways’ brand new superjumbo, the Airbus A380.
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P66ISniQCqY[/youtube]
Hi,
So, the transition to new webservers by our web hosts created all sorts of problems today.
Rugby-Talk was suspended, the SQL Database was blocked… we were OFF AIR for a day!
It felt like I was the naughty child who had to go stand in the corner and it reminded me of the old fighting days when Pietman, myself, Cuzzy, Kwagga and the old fighters from the bad old Voldy days would get banned, suspended and worked our way around the impediments till we were shouting from the rooftops again, fists bared and the bit between the teeth.
Friends, Brumbies, Countrymen (rugby supporters)… lend me your ears… or in your case eyes!
Rugby-Talk’s web hosts indicated before the weekend that they were in the process up upgrading their Servers to bigger, better, faster ones and to carry far more load.
It seems that the web host server migration process completed successfully and luckily we have not had any OFF-LINE time, having managed it well from our side and also from the web hosting side.
Because the new web host servers point to new DNS Nameservers at the web hosts, we might experience SLOW LOAD TIMES on our website and web pages for about 24 hours, due to the fact that the changes to these DNS Nameservers would have to propagate throughout the world’s internet sphere to point to and direct traffic to the new ones. The old DNS Nameservers are currently forwarding traffic to the new Nameservers, causing expected longer load times, however as the New Nameservers propagate the speeds will increase until all world traffic to our site points directly to the new and improved Nameservers.
It’s a small and almost negligible cost to pay for no downtime whatsoever, though!
Thank you for your continued support and patience during the vital upgrade process!
As you might already be aware, a couple of years back we switched web hosts when the earstwhile web hosts could not deliver what we needed, wanted and demanded and they could not handle all the traffic the way we wanted them to. The change was a big positive one, to one of the largest web hosts the world offers. We have to keep up with the times as we steadily grow!
The IRB in conjunction with the SARU’s Referees Departmant have translated Laws of the Game – Rugby Union 2013 into Afrikaans and Xhosa and it is now available for download, in an effort to extend the reach and understanding of the game. Various other languages are also available.
International players have renewed their calls to develop a global rugby season by moving the June Test window to the end of July.
The International Rugby Players’ Association (IRPA) – the worldwide representative body for professional rugby players – held a conference in Australia recently and considered the possibility of moving the June Test match window until the last three weeks of July, beginning in 2016.
This is going to be a very short article. Maybe it will be removed, but do we really talk RUGBY or are we just moaning, bitching, complaining about things that went wrong for OUR teams.
I want us to talk about the deeper things in the game we love. Laws, interpretations, bad coaching, player stupidity.
Let’s try and have a free for all on this article.
There are no current moves afoot to establish a global calendar for the Rugby Union season, a senior IRB official said, amid complaints that it is too long.
Brett Gosper, the IRB’s Chief Executive Officer, said it was a matter of complex negotiation for which no one currently had the “heart”.
Former Springbok coach Nick Mallett has been appointed to the International Rugby Board (IRB) rugby committee.
The IRB said on Friday Mallett would fill the position of coaches’ representative on the committee, with immediate effect.
I was engaged through my Rugby-Talk E-Mail Address by a gentleman who sent me this very interesting piece on The Psychology of the Internet Troll.
Full credit for what follows goes to the following website and link: http://academicearth.org/electives/psychology-internet-troll
We’ve all been subjected to these Trolls and Rugby-Talk has it’s existence largely to thank due to these “Keyboard Warriors”, because we broke away as a group from a website where that was all too common, vowing not to let it happen here at Rugby-Talk.
I have had the displeasure to expel a few of these creatures, who have attempted their stunts here, but luckily we set the ground rules for participation here strongly from the outset and have controlled things well, so as not to allow these idiots to ruin our enjoyment of the game of rugby here at Rugby-Talk.
To keep them out, pre-suposes an online presense of a strict set of controls and a no-nonsense approach from the webmaster, something I do not do out of choice, but rather because I have to.
Have a good read and watch the video below:
This initiave was launched by the daughter of one of the bloggers on Sharksworld. Most of us are passionate about the plight of our rhinos.
Here we are midweek already and looking forward to the coming weekend’s rugby. Most of the attention up north is due to be focussed on the RaboDirect Pro12 and the Aviva Premiership as there is yet another break in the RBS 6 Nations tournament. Last weekend’s rugby may now be a distant memory but felt it would be interesting to share the views of two former international players of the action between Scotland and Ireland.
Hello friends,
Rugby-Talk, like every season, joins SuperBru via it’s own Super Pools and 2013 is no different.
If you are registered here at Rugby-Talk as a subscriber then you are welcome to join our pools, if not then quickly register and join us all in the fun and excitement.
Our Pools are fiercly competative and fun…. and we want YOU to be part of it.
The first 4 Rugby-Talk SuperBru Pools were registered today, now we just need to fill the Pools up with members!
ALL our SuperBru Pools have been upgraded to Super Pools, giving us added functionality like the SuperBru WIDGETS on the righthand sidebar.
Enjoy the Pools and most importantly, enjoy rugby with us.
New scrum laws to make amateur rugby safer will come into effect at club and schools level as the season gets under way this month, following an initiative introduced by the South African Rugby Union (Saru). A new scrum engagement sequence has been devised for amateur rugby to minimise the risks of serious injury suffered in this facet of play.
With the news this week that Springbok great, Jan Ellis, passed away at the age of 71, I just had to write this tribute to Jan.
Jan Ellis personifies Springbok rugby for me. It has been said that as humans we think in pictures. When we think of something we see a picture of some sorts and this picture can differ from one person to the next, which is why we sometimes voice the same words but come up with different understanding or meaning. The best communicators are those who can create clear and vivid pictures in the mind of his listeners.
When I think of Springbok rugby I see Jan Ellis. Hard, uncompromising, fast with a touch of artistic moodiness and flair but with relentless motivation to succeed based on a staunch work ethic and absolute conviction of what is right and wrong – that is Jan Ellis in a nutshell, for me.
So, I don’t see all that, I just see pictures of Jan Ellis flashing through my mind.
(see the photo gallery I’ve created of Jan Ellis here).
The analogy between the Springboks and Jan Ellis, for me, came along probably because I had so many pictures of Jan Ellis when I started with my sampling of rugby pictures in 1970. I was born in Windhoek, South West Africa (now Namibia) and Jan was SWA’s second Springbok, the first being Sias Swart.
The snow is deep and crisp and dangerously uneven by health and safety standards, and Jim Telfer is barking out instructions like a rugby regimental sergeant major.
‘Cookie’s a big b*****d,’ Telfer bellows. ‘He thinks he’s tough, OK. Drive him back into the bloody Tweed.’
His young charges do their best to obey against the accompaniment of the coach, who is now transported into a state of quasi-psychotic frenzy, shouting the mantra ‘low, low, low’.
Scottish Rugby announced on Thursday that it had secured the biggest sponsorship deal in its history.
New kit partner, Macron, will come on board in the summer to become official kit supplier for all Scotland representative teams and the professional clubs, Edinburgh Rugby and Glasgow Warriors.
Following on his controversial interview with Oprah Winfrey, more shocking details of Lance Armstrong were revealed. The doping scandal is but the tip of the iceberg.
As reported earlier, the gravely sick former WP and Stormers prop, has died of cancer.
Junior Springboks coach Dawie Theron on Thursday named a strong starting line-up for the South African Under 20 training squad’s match against the University of the Western Cape, to be played on Friday afternoon at the Markötter Sports Field in Stellenbosch.
The Sharks beat the Dolphins at Sahara Stadium Kingsmead, in the Pick n Pay T20 match in aid of charity, “and charity won big at the end of the day”.
Let me be the first to say that we were treated to a festival of cricket and fun with both team’s players doing their utmost to give time to fans and at the same time try put up a spectacle worthy of these high class sportsmen, and so they did.
Following on our series of articles about the player pedigrees, it was suggested we do the same for the coaching teams. To do the entire spectrum of a Super Rugby Coaching personnel would be too encompassing (the research was hard enough), so I am going to focus only on the people responsible for the main portfolios of Head, Backline, Forwards and Defence coaches.