Andy Dufresne and lovely Rita.
“Me? My lawyer fucked me. Everybody’s innocent in here. Didn’t you know that?”
As Declan Kidney said in the aftermath, you can only control what you can control. It’s no news that Nigel Owens comes down on the side of the hometown team more often than not; Ireland, Munster and Leinster have all profited by it before on their own patch. Continue reading
Cronin scoots in on eighty minutes for the fifth Leinster try. While it must have been hard to take for Ulster fans, Leinster fans will be happy that the team played for the whole match and kept scoring until the final whistle.
Leinster were always going to try and stretch the eighty minutes; one of their major advantages over Ulster lay in the fact that they had more talent on the bench, especially in the pack. The starting eights seemed quite equal on pre-match inspection, but it was obvious that there was a quality disparity in whom the respective coaches could call off the bench. Continue reading
Vintage Heaslip: Jamie Heaslip backs himself and goes around the outside of the Glasgow defense for a fifty yard break. The Leinster No8 still hasn’t lost a match as captain of his province.
Leinster battled out a teak tough eighty minutes against a gritty Glasgow side to seal a place in their third successive Magner’s League/Pro12 Grand Final. Continue reading
Would you recognise this man without trademark blue scrum cap? Quality player. Picture: Huw Evans (Murray!)
The end of an era. This match brought to mind the game against Toulouse where Mick Galwey pleaded with his team mates to keep it under 50. Munster managed to restrict the Ospreys to 45 but that will be of scant consolation over a long, barren summer. Continue reading
Vintage Drico.
In a raucous and colour-drenched Stade Chaban-Delmas, Leinster edged out French heavyweights Clermonts in an absolute dogfight of a semi-final. Continue reading
Ruan Pienaar was the Magner's League Player of the Season in his first term with Ulster, and was in a different class than everybody else on the Lansdowne Road pitch.
Ulster and Edinburgh played out a fast-paced semi-final in front of their boisterous supporters, and while the end-game wasn’t quite as tense as the final score would suggest, everyone in Lansdowne Road got their money’s worth. Continue reading
The Cardiff Blues brought a knife to a gunfight at Lansdowne Road, and were absolutely hockeyed off the pitch in the first half. They saved some pride with a hard-fought if uninspiring performance in the second forty, but were ultimately held scoreless for 78 minutes, having opened the game with a Leigh Halfpenny penalty. Continue reading
Ulster performed an astonishing smash-and-grab raid in the first half-hour at Thomond park, then stuck around to take an absolute walloping from the suddenly awakened and irate home-owners before finally staggering away with the spoils. Continue reading
The Mole was pretty excited about what promised to be an entertaining, high octane game between Munster and Leinster, the biggest derby in the Pro 12 and a game that always has a natural spark. Continue reading
The England scrum is about to disappear stage right in about three seconds ...
Twenty-four of England’s thirty-point haul came directly from scrum penalties; the other six were from two penalties late in either half for offside. Rory Best was pinged for “taking up the space” on the English side of a ruck on about 33 minutes, and the Irish defensive line were penalized en masse at 76 mins in front of the sticks, from which Farrell mercifully took the points instead of inflicting another scrum. Yep, it could have been even worse … Continue reading
Digging Like a Demented Mole 