Same old, same old (with sleigh bells on)
Tuesday 27th December: Aviva Premiership: Harlequins v Gloucester Rugby (Big Game 9) at Twickenham Stadium, kick-off 4.00pm (attendance 77,000); Result – Harlequins 28 Gloucester Rugby 24.
Regular Rust readers will be aware that I gave up attending matches at Twickenham Stadium some eight years ago because of the dreadful match day experience at the RFU’s supposed ‘Cathedral of Rugby’. It’s a horrible venue for any sport and a perfect example of somewhere that, if you had the opportunity to start over again, you certainly wouldn’t build anything like this. This fact is relevant – but only as an aside – to the ongoing general debate on whether in general terms attending sporting events live is a preferable experience to watching them on television.
Thus I watched the live broadcast of the match as transmitted by BT Sport, in front of a roaring fire after a very-pleasant-thank-you lunch of beef stroganoff, greens and mashed potato plus two shared bottles of wine followed by half-time servings of tea and mince pies all round. It made the issue of whether or not we’d made the right choice a no contest.
Anyone wishing to read or view the events of yesterday should (of course) direct themselves to the newspaper reports and/or the Aviva Premiership highlights programmes.
From where I sat this was another typical performance by the Quins of late, who have lacked dynamism and any sense of élan or overpowering momentum these past two and a half seasons.
It was also a contest that (some doom-mongers like myself might say) was wholly predictable after the thrills and spills of 2015’s Big Game 8 in which Quins, after being all but home and hosed following an early epic blitz, somehow then opted to wave through attack after Gloucester attack and contrive to let the West Country team back in the match to the extend of going home having shared the spoils of an extraordinary 39-39 draw.
As some Frenchman once said of The Charge Of The Light Brigade ‘C’est manifique, main c-est ne pas Rugby Union as nous connais it …’
Midway through the second half yesterday Harlequins were cruising to what looked like it was going to be a five point (bonus points for four tries) victory, but then two things happened: Gloucester, who had never entirely given up, kept trying … and Quins back rower Jack Clifford took a trip to the sin bin.
The result was a nail-biting finale with Quins defending, backs to the wall, and Gloucester huffing and puffing – and ultimately damned unlucky not to be awarded two or three match-winning penalties in the dying seconds for Quins infringements that could/should easily have been spotted by the officials and for which the ‘home’ team would only have had themselves to blame.
For the Quins, prop Joe Marler and Joe Marchant (our former England Under-20 centre who scored two tries) stood out but frankly it was a curate’s egg of a game: the first half was a bore-fest that reduced the nearly-full Stadium atmosphere to little more than a general hum and the second was unadulterated chaos, no doubt highly entertaining for any neutrals watching, but deeply frustrating for committed fans of either team.
