Booby prize?
REMEMBER the Alamo! Tomorrow night it’s the Big ’Un at Kings Park. Whatever might or might not happen further in Super Rugby, tomorrow we simply have to reverse the travesty of Ellis Park in April when prissy and one-sided interventions by the TMO robbed the Sharks of victory in what was without doubt our best performance of the season.
The Lions are now on top in our section and looking to top the overall standings and win themselves the right to a home final. But it’s 40 minutes each way at Kings Park tomorrow, and anything can and does happen in rugby.
It’s an old philosophical argument that you cannot compare the relative strength and ferocity of a lion and a shark – talk of a contest between them – because they inhabit different elements, air and water.
Okay, make it Natal and Transvaal and the game is on! Olé, Olé, Olé! Cossack dancing in the Duikers’ Club; a blizzard of knickers at the Street Shelter for the Over-Forties as catapults are fashioned from the elastic to shoot out the streetlights in the traditional celebratory feu de joie!
I hope I’ve made myself clear. This is one we just have to win. MEANWHILE, Free State Cheetahs and EP Kings play each other as a prelude to being chucked out of Super Rugby.
They will no longer play the Japanese Sunwolves and the Argentinian Jaguares; make long and exhausting journeys flying east and west.
Instead, they’ll be flying short north-south journeys to play top sides in Ireland, Wales and Scotland.
Ireland, Wales, Scotland? Didn’t they have something to do with the British and Irish Lions drawing with New Zealand?
Is this really the Booby Prize?
Pioneers
LET’S be honest, Super Rugby has over-reached itself. It began as an extension of the internal competitions of South Africa, New Zealand and Australia.
But it’s become an increasingly artificial creature of the TV networks – over-complicated and sprawling too far. People have lost interest – just look at the pathetic crowd figures.
In South Africa it’s all
but extinguished the Currie Cup as the furnace where Springbok rugby was forged.
Free State and EP will be pioneers, baanbrekers. The northern hemisphere beckons. Meanwhile, let’s get the Currie Cup back into shape. Die mense sal praat – the crowds will be there.
Love story
LET nobody accuse the cops of Muskogee, Oklahoma, in the US, of lacking in romantic sentiment.
Brandon Thompson was at home celebrating Independence Day and his birthday, and was about to pop the question to Leandria Keith, when the cops marched in and snapped the handcuffs on him for six felony warrants, according to Huffington Post.
As they led him out to the car, he asked if he could propose. They stopped and let him say: “I love you, will you be my wife please?”
Then the cops switched his handcuffs from behind to the front so he could slip the engagement ring on to her finger.
Not a dry eye in the police station.
Legbreaks
IAN Gibson, poet laureate of Hillcrest, chides me gently for mentioning my deadly legbreaks while playing for the Durban Press XI (4/32 against the RAF Red Arrows), yet not mentioning the coach.
Yes, I am most remiss. Ian can claim credit for my leg-spin prowess because he coached me at cricket when I was Under-14 at Maritzburg College, just before the rinderpest.
Meanwhile, he notes that master leg-spinner Shane Warne, in the commentary box recently at Lord’s, now sports a neatly barbered beard and has a hairstyle with blond points in it.
That former leg-spinner