Club’s budget blues

“AGENTS and players come to us and say ‘commit’,” Lions vice-president and shareholder Altmann Allers revealed to Tightheads this week. “And I say: ‘I can’t. With whose money?’ ” he added with a straight face.

REFEREEING upstart Rasta Rasivhenge made a mild faux pas by watching Boots ’n All at one of Johannesburg’s most loved sports clubs, just as an insert on him was aired on Thursday. It drew all manner of responses, but the ref took it in his stride. Not even the question about how the pink covers were earlier removed from the weights he was bench-pressing in the insert could wipe the almost permanent smile off Rasivhenge’s face.

IN the press conference following their defeat at Loftus last weekend, the Kings’ New Zealand-born coach, Matt Sexton, was asked to comment on the view that Jake White had expressed that Australian players do what you tell them and more, while SA players do what you tell them and that’s it. “They did okay in the 2007 World Cup,” Kings’ head coach Alan Solomons, seated next to Sexton, chirped quickly.

TIGHTHEADS chuckled at a recently published Endangered Wild Life Trust report that trumpeted the reintroduction of the first wild cheetah into the Free State for more than a century. Which makes you wonder, how many wild pumas are there in Mpumalanga, or griffons in the Northern Free State. As former Cheetahs fullback Bevin Fortuin pointed out a few years ago, when Tightheads reminded him of the dearth of cheetah in the province: “That’s why they come buy us from elsewhere.”

WEBSITE rugbyheaven.com this week reported the good grace with which axed British & Irish Lions hero Brian O’Driscoll accepted his fate. After receiving the news, O’Drsicoll walked over to Jamie Roberts, the guitarplaying flying doctor who had replaced him, and asked if he had completed his training sprints. When Roberts said no the pair finished the session together.