Same old, same old …
Saturday 22nd October; European Rugby Challenge Cup group stage – Edinburgh Rugby v Harlequins at Murrayfield, kick-off 3.00pm. Result: Edinburgh 36 Harlequins 35.
As it happens, I am happy to report that, due to family circumstances, while this game was taking place ‘north of the Border’ and simultaneously being shown live upon BT Sport, I was in fact driving from the south coast back to London and therefore am personally unable to give Rust readers any idea as to what happened and why.
I could actually go further and admit that – in the erroneous belief that I had previously arranged to record the BT sport live coverage on my home cable television box, which I had planned to watch upon my arrival – I deliberately avoided listening to any radio channel offering sports reporting on my journey back to civilisation by tuning to BBC’s Radio Four.
On this I caught an episode of a series called (I believe) Soul Music, featuring pieces of music that people regard as going to the heart of what makes us British and/or English, in this instance Jerusalem (words by William Blake, anthemic music written in 1916 by Sir Hubert Parry). It was a light affair, featuring a range of interviewees – some academic, some connected to the history of the song in some way and others just members of the public that loved it – but it was an informative method of passing half an hour. The following programme was the weekend version of Woman’s Hour, presented by Jane Garvey.
All I have been able to glean of the match so far – from one newspaper report and the Quins’ fans unofficial website – is that (true to form this season) Quins yet again played appallingly ‘on the road’, exhibiting their usual faults of naivety, lack of application, poor discipline and rank stupidity, but also running foul of unpunished borderline cheating at the breakdown by Edinburgh, further assisted by an extraordinarily inept, possibly even deliberately biased, performance by the match officials from Romaine Poite of France downwards [albeit that strangely the Sunday Telegraph report I perused online just now failed to make any mention of this!] …
Those Quins fans who have bothered to enter the online chat-rooms since the game (a group who may or may not be representative of supporters generally) have once again laid into the players and most particularly the coaching staff.
The trouble is that, based upon (1) the lack of player acquisitions during the pre-season period; (2) the fact the club saw fit simply to promote from within to replace the departing Conor O’Shea; and (3) the insipid on-field displays in our pre-season matches, the fans – including your scribe – had bought into a pre-conceived narrative that the club ‘shot itself in the foot’ by failing to recruit more heavily and going for ‘A’-lister new blood in the posts of director of rugby downwards on the coaching side … and that the chickens might soon come home to roost this season.
Results, and indeed performances (if indeed the reports are to be believed) such as this one are only reinforcing that line of thinking.
