One down, one to go...

So England lost the Rugby Union World Cup Final on penalty kicks, lets move on, its a busy sporting weekend.

Or perhaps linger here for a just a few seconds to ponder on the style of the defeat last night, five penalty kicks to two, no try's scored in 80 minutes, only one team getting even close to the other teams try line on one just occasion only to have the try disallowed for clearly putting a toe into touch.

Points scoring is an area where I've suspected for a long time that rugby union has got it wrong and that rugby league is right, or at least more right. Five points for a try, three for a penalty and drop goal, two for a conversion against four for a try, two for a penalty or conversion and only one for a drop kick - its a more equitable points system and forces the emphasis of the game onto try scoring rather than hoping that the other team give you a kickable penalty through one of a myriad of technical offences, because while you're waiting for that penalty you could just as easily find yourself giving away penatlties up your end of the pitch - just a thought.


So, Lewis Hamilton has the opportunity to lay his hands on the F1 Drivers Championship today at the Brazilian Grand Prix,a circuit that until this weekend he has only ever driven on his Sony Playstation, so thats like me then, I won the F1 2000 game on eyear and I too loved the Interlagos circuit but then my addiction to computer games faded, real life beckoned once again and the Playstation eventually went to a charity shop where it probably still resides high on a shelf somewhere with a 20p label stuck forlornely to it.

Lewis Hamilton on the other hand suddenly burst upon the F1 scene this year with...

...and thats as much as I can write about F1 racing.

You see, its incredibly tedious.

I like the build up to a race, I like the warm up lap, I like the start, the first corner, the first lap during which the finishing positions are sorted out...

...and then I switch off and go and find something much more exciting to do instead, and it usually only takes a few seconds to find something more exciting to do.

Driving a full length race at Interlagos on the Playstation would be one thing more exciting, I wonder if the charity shop opens on a Sunday ?

World in Union

Video Saturday.
Rugby Saturday.

OK, so it was rugby Saturday for me last week as well with the Rugby League Grand Final which my team Leeds won - so yippee there then.

Today is something a tad different, for today is the Rugby Union World Cup Final featuring (beyond all expectation) England vs South Africa.

I enjoy both codes of rugby, the professional league season having just finished (most amatuer league teams play through the winter) I now turn my attention to union and I seem to be geting dragged into involvement at the club where our Ned coaches the under 9's, Moortown RUFC, where yours truly has been setting up a web site (its in a rather skeleton form at the moment, obviously, have a look at the u-9's gallery).

Its not too difficult to follow both codes and yet many seem incapable of doing so, incessently comparing one with the other, its something you should never do if you want to have a year long feast of rugby, you simply switch your head into whichever mode or code it is you are watching, not too difficult then, rather like watching a game of cricket and then a game of football and not comparing the two.

For the uninitiated the League format is a stripped down version of Union - most of the things that slow down the game are removed from League, constantly contesting possession being the main element, its faster, its simpler, the ball is in play longer, its very easy to watch and understand from the spectators point of view.

Union on the other hand can be like a game of chess, a game of attrition where both sides attempt to grind the other down, mere yards are fought for with an intensity that is matched only by the armies in the trenches during WW1, its a technical game, a game where many ways to infringe a passage of play exist and it can sometimes be difficult for the spectator to see why the referee has blown for a penalty but the "mic'ing up" of the ref has been a huge sucess so that now you can at least hear why he has given a decision.

Its a fascinating game when played between two evenly matched sides and just one element tonight will be how South Africa treat Englands goal kicking supremo Jonny Wilkinson, there is nothing they can do about his goal kicking skills but plenty that they can do to get him off the pitch early on, and there have been mutterings all week that he will be targeted - having watched Jonny Wilkinson play at Newcastle several times, and come back from several serious injuries at Newcastle I can only add that he is not the sort of player and he does not play in a position where he can hide during a game, the team cannot shield him from whatever SA want to throw at him and that single element will be fascinating to watch tonight.

And whilst the pundits was lyrically over the battle of the front and second row forwards - and it will be a battle, have no doubt, this will be a no holds barred bloody battle, this is Ali vs Frazier all over again - I will be looking out for the running backs and especially Jason Robinson (Leeds lad) and SA's Bryan Habana and whilst Robinson has lost a percentage of the pace he used to have when we first watched him in the League code all those years ago he still has the ability to wrong-foot and sidestep at least one tackler everytime he has the ball, I do hope he finds several gaps today.

When Jason Robinson was a 16 year old playing at Hunslet and being touted around the (then) semi-pro First Division Rugby League clubs, Leeds were offered the chance to sign him and another young lad, Gareth Stevens, both were given trials, Leeds offered the wrong youth a contract, we signed Gareth Stevens the decision not at all swayed by the fact that Gareths dad was on the Leeds coaching staff at the time. Wigan signed Jason Robinson and for the next eight years he tortured us every time we played Wigan, if you think he is a difficult player to stop when running into space at the age of 33 then you should have seen him at 18, it is not for nothing that he earned the nickname "Billy Whizz" in Rugby League and was often the only player to leave the pitch with a clean shirt having scored all the tries, being untouchable for 80 minutes - PS, Gareth Stevens struggled to hold a first team place at Leeds and soon disappeared, as did his father on the coaching staff.

Tomorrow - step forward Lewis Hamilton...

Opera man...

Video Saturday again, but today is no ordinary Saturday, for today is Grand Final Saturday.

Today the Leeds Rhinos take on St Helens at Old Trafford in the culmination of the rugby league season, Grand Final night in front of 70-something thousand spectators is now the biggest occasion in the rugby league calendar and today its only fitting that John Innes should perform a couple of little ditties being that he is to be found warbling "Nessum Dorma" at Headingley on many big match nights.

"Opera Man" as he has become known to your average rugby league fan who, it has to be said, would in all other circumstances call John Innes and his ilk "big puffs" has introduced the concept of the aria to the sport so much so that the crowd actually sing along with him now, even though they know not the words and simply make the sounds.

Either way its a spine chilling start a great sporting contest, kickoff is 6pm tonight on Sky Sports, followed straight after by the England v France rugby union world cup semi final - how fine a sporting night can that be ?

And no, Idon't have a ticket for Old Trafford tonight, through choice, Amanda does though and she has somehow managed to wangle an afternoon's shopping at the Trafford Centre in with the Grand Final - this is what happens when you introduce females into sport.

The video was taken at one of the summer evening Headingley "Opera Nights" staged on the famous Headingley Cricket side of the ground, dinner and arias, must go one year.

Jerrychicken MA (Northern Studies)

Now here is a Master of Arts degree that I'd like to study if someone wants to sponsor me...Northern Studies.

Leeds Met is offering the MA course to study - the North - and what makes us what we are and why we are sooooo superior to those soft southern nancies who don't talk proper.

Stuff such as our mill heritage, cotton to the west as it was imported via the New Worlds across the Atlantic into Liverpool and Manchester, and wool to the east, Gods County, Yorkshire, home of the finest woollen worsted cloths in the world.

And with the mills came the brass bands, mention brass bands and mills come to mind with famous names such as Black Dyke, Hammond Sauce Works, and of course Grimethorpe Colliery which is not a mill but rather obviously, a coal mine.

So coal mines will be on the prospectus too, right across the north we're riddled with old coal mine workings and it came as no suprise to me when purchasing this house that I had to pay the princely sum of £5 for a geological map search for mine workings underneath my dwelling - there are none - but I knew that anyway.

All of these heavy industrial workplaces brought tight knit communities, tight knit because the houses were built packed together on the smallest plots of land available and so we see another Northern feature, the terraced rows of hundreds and thousands of small dwellings, two rooms downstairs, two rooms upstairs, a small back yard with an outside toilet and your front door right on the street, Coronation Street is not a myth it exists in every village, town and city in the North.

And in Leeds we did things even smaller, not content with terraced houses we built back to back houses, terraced dwellings with no back yards but the row of houses in the street behind attached to the back of yours so that neither had a back to their house at all, just a frontage - in this manner we crammed twice as many dwellings per acre and the city of Leeds grew to the size it is very quickly.

Not only the cloth industry, nor mining but heavy engineering too, the first steam railway in the world was built for Middleton Colliery in Leeds and its location south of the river spawned a massive area of heavy engineering works with the Fowler Engine Works, the Hunslet Engine Works, Monkbridge Foundry and many others providing heavy manufacturing machinery that was exported all over the world - the Monkbridge Forge made famous because my Uncle Sid worked there and actually made the engine turbines for rolls royce jet engines - my Uncle Sid worked for many years on The Concorde engine blades and the stories he told of their exploits on the night shift made me promise myself to never fly on an airliner that used any of his blades.

The tightness of the dwelling houses made for tight communities, places where you didn't knock on your neighbours door before you walked in, places where you were all either skint or flush depending on whether the mill was on short time or overtime, for the whole community worked for the same employer and this tight knit community made for our Northern reputation for openess and friendlyness, you won't get ignored oop north like you will in that there London which in all honesty is a shit city.

Which brings us to accents - there is a belief among the soft southern nancies that we speak all wrong up here, that we don't pronounce words properly or that we miss words out of sentences completely and that "the Queens English" as is spoken by said nancies is the correct way that English should be spoken -is it bollacks - the Queen isn't even English, she's from a German family and her offspring are German/Greek mongrels, speaking "Queens English" is a buggeration of the English language spoken only by those with malformed, immobile jawlines - proper original English is spoken up north.

For instance the word "bath", the practice of bathing, a vessel for bathing in, its pronounced "bath", one syllable, the principle sound being the second letter, pronounced in the same way as the "a" in "apple" - "bath", say it one more time, "bath".

The soft southern nancies among you will be struggling to incorporate an "a" for "apple" into that word, you'll be trying to pronounce the word, wrongly, as "baarth" with the "a" pronounced as "car", an elongated sound that has no place in the word "bath", you're wrong, blame the Queen and her German/Greek family.

Likewise us northerners can lay claim to the authentic method of swearing, swear words just sound right when spaketh with a northern accent and if you don't believe me then I refer you to an Eddie Izzard monologue, a southern nancie himself but one who is prepared to admit that he can't swear properly unles he does it with a northern accent - the word "bastard" is the best example, it should be pronounced "BAS-tad" with the emphasis on the first syllable not gentrified into "baaarstard" as The Queen suggests, yes she uses that word all he time, so would you with a house full of corgis shitting all over the expensive carpets.

And finally I'm sitting here tonight listening on the radio to the Radio Leeds rugby league commentary from Wigan, (vs Leeds) - the only true and pure form of rugby, just stop arguing, you know I'm right really.

This is Rugby League...

OK, so its my team Leeds being beaten by Hull in the 2005 Challenge Cup Final at Cardiff's Millenuim Stadium but the video encapsulates what the game of Rugby League is all about and more importantly what the Challenge Cup final means to the supporters.

Hull (black and white hoops) went into that game as underdogs, it had been twenty years since they had reached the final, but the hordes of supporters in the motorway service areas on the way to Cardiff that morning didn't appear to be lacking in confdence that their team had what it took to overturn 4/1 favourites Leeds.

Its a four hour trip from Leeds to Cardiff, five hours from Hull, we'd all had an early start that day but the 74,213 spectators who packed the enclosed three tier stadium were far from sleepy as the teams took to the field, my seat in the lower tier corner of the ground offered me a completely crap view of the game and it was made even worse by the party of Leeds supporters around me who seemed to have travelled all that way to simply drink beer, lots of it, necesitating trips to the bar and/or toilet every five minutes, disruptive was not the word.

There was never more than one score to seperate the two teams right through the game but when Leeds sneaked into the lead again with five minutes to go we breathed a sigh of relief and out on the field the team seemed to do so too, so much so that, as can be seen in the video, Hull's Paul Cooke slipped almost unnoticed through the Leeds line to score and clinch the game by one point.

To the neutral it had been one of the best finals seen in the modern Super League era and strangely enough it was to me too, despite losing, despite leaving yet another challenge cup final on the losing side I was happy to have been there to witness a great game played with 100% commitment, a rought, tough hard physical contact game played without animosity by athletic young men at the prime of their physical condition - this is the sport of rugby league and the passion displayed in this video is the reason why I have been supporting it since I was ten years old.

But why did Marcus Bai throw that pass out behind his own line ?

Headingley again...

Another day, another game of rugby, another visit to Headingley.

Today it was the turn of the Leeds Tykes who also play on the same ground as the Leeds Rhinos (last nights game), and also play rugby...

...but its not the same game, oh no.

The difference between rugby league and rugby union mystifies many UK citizens so we cannot expect visitors from overseas to understand the complexities of the argument, but let me try and give my potted (very potted) history and definition of the two games...

Once upon a time there was a game called rugby, a game which differed from nancyball in that you were allowed to pick up the ball and run with it in rugby rather than have to kick it with your feet all the time, fall over and pretend to be mortally injured as happens every three minutes in nancyball.

In rugby your opponent was allowed to tackle you by whatever means he found fit, and grapple you to the floor in an attempt to wrest the ball from your grasp, in doing so all of his team mates were allowed to join in the wresting of the ball and all of your team mates were allowed to join in to de-wrest the ball and retain possesion for themselves - crossing a line at both ends of the pitch was the way to score points.

Are you with me so far ?

In 1895 a group of rugby teams in the north of england petitioned the English Rugby Union to allow their players to recieve compensation for lost wages, something that was strictly against the rules of the game and the rules of Victorian fortitude - games were for enjoyment and not for profit.

And here is where the good old class system of the British Isles joins the fray - the English Rugby Union was based in the south of England and many of its member clubs were connected or related to the fee paying schools of the toff class that were prevelant in the south at that time, players of their clubs were generally financially supported by fathers allowance from the family estate and they were quite able to play at any time without worrying about losing a days pay from their employer, as they didn't have one.

On the other hand the clubs in the north doing the petitioning were in the mill towns and relied upon working class grafters for their playing staff - playing games on a saturday meant taking a day off work and losing one sixth of your pay, and if your full pay only just kept you off the breadline ("breadline" being a quite literal metaphor) then losing one sixth of it every week with the threat that t'gaffer would replace you if you took too many saturdays off, was unacceptable.

So the split occured, the clubs in the north of England became The Northern Union and eventually The Rugby Football League (Rugby League) and allowed members to make "broken time payments". In order to do this those clubs had to generate an income and it wasn't too long before rule changes came into force to make the game more attractive to spectators who would then pay money to watch the game, which in turn went in the players pockets - all the time that this was going on the southern (Union) clubs kept to the original gameplan and remained strictly amatuer, although "expenses" were eventually allowed and these "expenses" could sometimes reach epic proportions resulting in the saying in the 1960's that the only difference between Union and League clubs was that the League players declared their income for taxation purposes.

In recent years the sham of Union players purporting to be amatuer was discontinued and their players were finally allowed to draw a wage from the game, both games were now fully professional at their respective top tier leagues but both codes of the game were by now completely different, Rugby League having evolved into a spectator sport where the ball is visible to the viewer at all times, where tackles are made and the ball immediately recycled into play again, its a game played at speed with tactics that are deliberately simple to understand and partake of.

Rugby Union has retained much of the original game before the 1895 split, only a part of the game involves running with the ball and much is made of the "ruck", a period of the game after a tackle has been made and players of both sides grapple on the floor and attempt the wrest the ball from their opponents, its not extremely viewer friendly to the casual observer and many things that go on inside the ruck are penalised without the viewer seeing or understanding why the penalty has been given - still, its supporters point to the ruck as one of the sports great assets and vigourously resist any attempts to clean up the rolling around on the floor bits.


So there you have it.
Two different games
Played on the same pitch
With the same ball
And similar, but not identical, rules.

And I enjoy watching both
I'm in a minority as most supporters of one of the codes do not enjoy the other
But I do, so there

Today it was the turn of the Leeds Tykes to take on a team by the strange name of The Earth Titans, an example of why clubs should allow themselves to be totally dictated to by sponsors - for "Earth Titans" read Rotherham, its not as glamorous but then "Earth Titans" fools no-one, we know that Rotherham is not glamorous.

Rotherham won, but Leeds were already promoted to the Premier division two weeks ago so the result counted for nought, what did count though was the fact that my nephew Ben was playing in the half time entertainment junior league game, a 15 minute exhibition of "tag rugby" (I won't confuse you any further, this is another form of rugby for youngsters), what Ned (his dad, my brother) didn't explain as that 24 other junior teams were doing the exhibition too so at the half time interval we were treated to over 200 seven and eight year olds running in all directions all over the pitch in something like a dozen games of tag rugby - the kids seemed to know what they were doing anyway.

It was fantastic to see and at the end of the game when The Leeds Tykes were presented with their trophy for winning their league, all 200 kids were invited onto the pitch to join in the celebrations with them and have official commemorative photos taken with the players who spent the best part of half an hour sharing their glory with shitloads of ankle biters, all of whom will never forget the day when they played rugby on the Headingley pitch and then celebrated with the players - something that you will never see in nancyball where the players are jealously guarded from the public to the extent where they start to believe their own hype and disappear up their own arses.

So a weekend of two rugby games, two different codes of rugby but two very enjoyable games nevertheless.

Life is good sometimes.

That half-time music...

I mentioned this morning that I can remember precisely which music was played at the half time interval at the first ever rugby league match that I attended back in 1966...

Well,

Guess what I've found on YouTube...






I'm saying nothing

Headingley tonight then...

Its about time I returned to Headingley, the home of the Leeds Rhinos rugby league team I thunk to myself earlier this week, its about bloody time.

I've been a Leeds rugby league supporter since 1966, since the day that a far distant relative took me to a night match on his Vespa scooter, full story here.

But this season the house removal has got in the way, I started off well going to the first two games of the season but then whenever I mentioned "theres a rugby match this weekend" I got the look from Suzanne that said "leave this house instead of packing cases and you are 200lbs of dead meat", and so I didn't go.

Tonight though is the biggest game of the season (so far), at home against St Helens and its a game of such prominence that deserves my attendance, so I "got her telt" this week, bought my ticket over the phone, and I'm off, she will sulk and find some spurious jobs for me to do today but tools will be downed at 5pm, scarf and rattle will be donned and I'll disappear from the house for a night of delight or disappointment, or a combination of both, such is the pleasure of supporting a sporting team.

Rugby League is a game where supporters still mix freely before, during and after the game, we don't need to be segregated like the supporters of the game known as "football" or "soccer" or as I prefer to call it "nancyball" as the prime requirement for any professional footballer appears to be the ability to look and behave like a big nancy.

Rugby League is different and tonight, as is my want, I will be standing on the Western Terrace with the St Helens supporters whilst cheering on Leeds, its more fun that way and you get to meet some interesting characters and strange as it sounds you get to see the game differently when you stand with the oposition, you can actually see your own teams failings much easier when your not stood in amongst your own partisan section.


As can be read at your leisure in the excellent jerrychicken biography, the reason that I can be so accurate about the date of my first visit is that once again I can fix the date from the music that was payed at the half time interval, in particular the number one hit of the time "They're coming to take me away (ha ha)" by Napoleon IV, rather appropriate given the infatuation that pervades the brain when a sport grabs you - but isn't it strange how evocative music can be ?