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Time line:
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COWBOYS AND INDIANS

RICHARD GRAINGER READS FROM HIS FORTHCOMING NOVEL:

COWBOYS AND INDIANS

Cowboys and Indians is a black comedy set in South Armagh during the Troubles. Double agent "Fishknife" has one final assignment to escape his past and pocket £5.5m

John Harris has unique skills. Aged 17 and disaffected with life, he opts for a career as an IRA terrorist. 

Diffident and cold, he soon becomes the perfect killing machine. Then he meets Ellen, the niece of the head of the PIRA and falls in love her. He is led to believe that she - and their child - were assassinated by Special Branch.

But when he finds out that he has been used and lied to, he becomes a double agent working for the MI6 sanctioned Force Research Unit.

Given the codename “Fishknife”; he becomes the harbinger for death and destruction across the province in a British Government sanctioned blood-fest.

But the Good Friday Agreement makes him redundant. He passes his time working as a Life Coach for former terrorists, writing erotic fiction under a pseudonym and his Saturday nights as a ‘70s disco DJ.

And then he receives the phone call he has been waiting for.

To claim the £5.5 million in a Gibraltar bank account, he must assassinate Sir John Stephenson, whose report is about to reveal who he is and expose the depths to which the British Government sunk during The Troubles.

Before, that is, they can assassinate him.

cowboys and indians by maverick writer

INDUSTRIAL ACTION SURVEY

The Public Sector industrial action has polarised the country in a manner not seen since Scargill and Thatcher locked horns in '84.


Should people with jobs and pensions go on strike to protect their own interests when there are millions who have neither a job nor a pension? We are facing maybe 10 years of austerity - where is the money going to come from? Have your say on the strike action.

Last Wednesday Jeremy Clarkson ruffled a few feathers on The One Show. What did you think of his comments? Please click on the link below (I finally managed to load it to my blog, but Word Press is still stubbornly resisting; it would have been quicker to hand write the survey 22 times and post it to each of you, but that's technology for you).

Thanks very much for doing this.

Yea right...


Thanks very much to all of the five of yis who contributed to this survey! And very little thanks to the rest of yis who couldn't be arsed! No Christmas pressies for you lot!


Anyway, enough of the vitriol; I mean haven't we all get enough to do with coursework, partying, buying Christmas pressies without filling in some silly feckin' survey that takes about 2 nano feckin'  seconds to do?


So here's a chart showing what the five of yis thought about hisself's comments on The One Show, and what yis think about the strikers themselves. Not very representative, mind, but at least it's job done.


Have a good one, and don't bother asking me to fill in yer feckin' survey next time!


By the way, this counts as a Christmas card, so don't expect to get another one.


PS. This post will probably fail me the course, but I've had to have some light relief after four feckin' hours of trying to get my voice onto the internet.

A thief in the night…

I unlock the front door to find a diminutive but devastatingly beautiful uniformed Crime Scene Investigator dangling her identity badge for me to inspect.

“I’d better check that”, I say, “you’re way too pretty to be a copper”. She smiles at me, as I usher her in.

Actually I don’t and she doesn’t – but I think it, and that at least means a valve for something approaching humour is loosening the anger I’ve lived with for the past 14 hours, since my life was turned upside down.

It only takes her a minute to conclude that there’s no point in dusting the place for prints or looking for smoldering cigarette butts or whatever forensic people do. It may be a crime scene, but as crime scenes go, it’s not worth circling the wagons for.

I tell her that her colleague, when he had called for my statement last night had told me to be very careful not to touch any door handles until they had been dusted. And how, when he left, he had grabbed the outer handle and pulled the front door shut behind him. She roars with laughter revealing a mouthful of metal fillings. I wonder if they’re copper.

Now, here’s a challenge for my Uclan cohort: let’s see how many crimes you can name that I was the victim of last night. And for a bonus point, add the recommended custodial sentence for each. First correct answer sent via Twitter, Facebook or email wins you a bottle of champagne.

I’d returned to my flat at around seven, having eaten my first solid meal for three days; spaghetti bolognaise, cooked by my girlfriend, Jane – delicious. I’m much too old to have a girlfriend, but partner…well, I don’t know…it just doesn’t sound right; makes us sound like a couple of raddled old queers.

Anyway, I digress.

I was in for the night, and so I lock the front door, finish a piece I was writing for Rugby World and was enjoying Dirty Harry and a hot chocolate when Jane rings. She was on the way back from her writing group and wanted to call in for a glass of wine. That’d be nice, I say, and when she arrives at 9.30, I unlock the door to let her in.

If she’d been intending to stay for any length of time, I’d have locked it behind her, but for reasons that I won’t bore you with, I knew that her visit would be brief.

We enter the living room, off the landing at the top of the stairs. I pour her a glass of wine and reluctantly swap Clint and his .44 Magnum  (…“I know what you're thinking. "Did he fire six shots or only five?" Well, to tell you the truth, in all this excitement I kind of lost track myself. But being as this is a .44 Magnum, the most powerful handgun in the world, and would blow your head clean off, you've got to ask yourself one question: Do I feel lucky? Well, do ya, punk?”  - again I digress) for Jeremy Paxman and University Challenge.

It’s a bit cold, so I go to the kitchen, which is next to the living room, turn the heating on and close the living room door – something I rarely do.

Mid-way through University Challenge we both hear a noise – or think we do. Being old, my hearing isn’t terrific - although there still are enough instances where I wish it was worse. I link my television to the stereo, and with a large speaker on either side of the room it throws sound about a bit, so naturally we attributed the curious noise we had noticed to the stereo.

Around 11.15, Jane goes to leave so I accompany her down the stairs and open the door.

“Where’s your car?” she asks.

My middle-aged toy - off to Eastern Europe

It’s a simple enough question but it my eyes won’t tell my brain that no amount of goggling will bring it back.

It has gone.

“Did you leave the keys in it?”

“No – I’m not stupid.”

“Sure?”

“Sure I’m sure or sure I’m not stupid?”

“Sure you’re sure?”

“Sure…”

“Did you leave them on the ledge inside the door?”

“No!”

Ditto the above sequence of questions.

We look in my bedroom; the key’s not there, and neither is my wallet. For a moment I think I may have left my wallet in the glove compartment but then remember I’d used my debit card to book a hotel room, replacing the wallet on the dresser beside my car keys and my watch…

“Shit! They’ve taken my fucking watch too…”

“You mean my fucking watch…”

Either way, the Georg Jensen £1000 silver watch has gone along with my keys and wallet.

I call the police and we stand and pathetically try to find some sort of logical explanation for what’s happened.

I mean, surely, someone didn’t walk in the front door, climb the stairs, go into my bedroom and help themselves to my car keys, wallet and watch. Her watch, Jane points out.

Shit! What if I’d opened the living room door as they were coming out of the bedroom? I would have been between them and the stairs, cutting off their escape route? What if they’d been carrying a knife or a gun? I mean, they must be pretty fucking desperate to have the balls to walk straight onto someone’s house, when they knew there were at least two people in the living room?

Maybe they were high on drugs? What if they had a knife or a gun and were high on drugs? Fuck me! One of us would have been killed, and it wouldn’t have been me I say bravely, now that the intruder’s gone.

We were lucky!

Or were we?

No…not lucky. I’m angry – mainly angry at myself for leaving the door unlocked and for being so fucking stupid as to fail to recognize that I was inviting a thief in the night to come in, enter my bedroom, heap themselves to my stuff and make off in my car.

I certainly won’t be making that mistake again!

THERE’S NO JOB LIKE A SNOW JOB

THERE’S NO JOB LIKE A SNOW JOB

Within 24 hours, I’ve had my dreams of being a successful magazine journalist shattered.

It’s nothing to do with efficacy; I believe I’ll get there in the end. It’s just the realization of what I’ll have to do to get there.

Now before you say that I’m much too old, too chunky (I refuse to call myself fat) and too dull to sleep my way to the top, that isn’t exactly what I mean.

This dissonance began with a visiting speaker at Uclan on Wednesday. Alumni of the university, Rob Crossan is now a successful freelancer specializing in travel writing. He had four years at Front magazine but managed to wean himself off “lads mags” and regularly gets features in the broadsheets.
Sounds great – if he can do it then so can I. Then what’s the problem?

The problem is that to be a travel writer you have to sell your soul to the devil. It works like this:
You come up with an idea for a story, which is finding a “peg” to visit some exotic location where you fancy a holiday; anywhere, really, other than Scotland or Wales. You then think of a really clever angle – or better still, six or seven clever angles so that you can sell your feature to six or seven different publications. Nothing wrong so far, is there?

Next, you get a commissioning editor to say: “Great – that would sit really well in our travel section!” You will, of course, somehow have to put those words into his mouth.

So off you go to that exotic location to research and write your commissioned piece at the publication’s expense? Wrong.

Very, very few publications will consider paying your expenses. Ever. Not even your bus fare home from their offices.

And your piece, brilliant though it may be, will earn you anywhere from £130 (e.g. TNT magazine) to £750 (e.g. The Times or Telegraph) so that’s not going to cover a fortnight in Cape Town.

To fund your trip, you will have to beg. You will have to go cap in hand to airlines, travel PR companies, tourist boards and blag the bits and pieces that will make your trip feasible without causing insolvency.

And in return for that, the airlines, resorts, restaurants, tourist guides, theme parks and anyone else who opens their doors to you free of charge, will expect you to write something about them; something nice about them.

The simplest way to do this is to add them to the “how to get there” footnote part of your piece. That’s works well for airlines, as it draws attention to a destination that travellers may not know about, and may open up a new market for them.

However, the problem is that if you say in your piece that the destination was awful and really no one should go there in a fair, objective and balanced manner, no one will buy a seat on the plane bound for your destination.
Furthermore, you
will seriously piss off the PR people, the country or region’s tourist board and anyone who felt the fallout of your wholly unbiased feature.

Let TripAdvisor do that, if you want to be a successful travel journalist – and by that I mean one who gets to go places at other people’s expense – you have to write what us referred to in the trade as a “snow job”. That is, to say how wonderful everything was and why everyone should spend their lives’ savings to go there.

So that’s travel writing out, then – I just can’t do that. I actually like to find things that are rubbish and write about them.  If I have a meal in a restaurant that is inedible and they service is dreadful, I cannot bring myself to praise it.

Well that’s part one of my disillusionment.

Now, for no better reason than I have to put it somewhere, I’m going to add a video clip of me grumpily reading some news.

I have to do this for the Digital Content part of my MA so it might as well go here as anywhere.
Please ignore the fact that it has absolutely no relevance to this blog and enjoy it for what it is – a very amateurish piece of multi-media.

Part two of my disillusionment tale will be coming right up. Enjoy.

Ricky Gervias. Love him or hate him.

Ricky Gervias. Love him or hate him.

Here are a few recent quotes from Ricky’s website:

“I love how me using "mong" to mean "div" or "gimp" (and explaining that 20 times) has become...” …become what, Ricky, a bit like Brucey’s ‘…nice to see you, to see you…nice’? A bit like Sir Bob imploring us to ‘…get yer f**king money out?’

‘"Ricky Gervais abuses Down's Syndrome children.’ Ha ha. Why children?”

Why indeed Ricky? You put the thought out there; you’d probably call it “the mong elephant in the room…or perhaps, the elephant in the mong room”.

‘Also a tweet that wasn't even mine is suddenly one of my "sick jokes"’. Did anyone laugh, Ricky? ‘Cos it certainly can’t have been one of yours if they did.

“I also love how everyone is trying to get in on it too. We'll definitely see some comedians on daytime telly discussing how terrible I am, then mentioning their upcoming gig that's not selling. Good luck to them though.” Ah, there’s no such thing as bad publicity, is there, Ricky? But they’re right about one thing – you are terrible, so anyone discussing you can’t be that bad. Definitely.

“I'm keeping out of it.” Bollox – you’re milking the publicity for all you’re worth!

“Now I understand that you can't please everyone with the things you say and nor should you try... but surely they have to report what I say accurately before they start to damn it?”  Well, yes, you do have a point there, Ricky. But that’s the press for you; accuracy never stands in the way of a good story. But actually although you may have been a teeny-weeny bit mis-quoted on something of absolutely no consequence, evidence of your use of the word “mong” is pretty watertight. Just have a look at the first quote from your own blog.

“Again that's the good thing about Twitter. It's documented.” Ah yes, it is. And the bad thing about Twitter is also that’s it’s documented.

“I should just say a thank you for the overwhelming support too. Means a lot.” Vanity, Ricky – pure vanity.

And that's another thing. All these people saying it's "disgusting" and "ban him from the telly"... They never liked me anyway. They couldn't have or they would understand.  Vanity…followed by paranoia. Hitler was misunderstood by people who didn’t like him too. And while I’m not comparing you to Hitler, Ricky – perish the thought - there are certain similarities: short, pompous, self-deluded, had a lot to say - none of which was remotely funny, especially if you were disabled or a “mong”…I could go on.

But hang on – do you seriously believe that there are people out there who don’t like you, Ricky? People who don’t find you amusing? People who consider that your extraordinary arrogance and the distain with which you treat your audience is less excusable than the use of a mildly controversial word? My girlfriend has a dog named “Mongo”; we sometimes shorten it to “Mong” and he’s not offended and he’s about as mongrel-oid as it’s possible to be.

And I don’t suppose anyone else would be have been had you not done your best to divert attention away from how unfunny you are by being so utterly provocative.

But you’re probably right – your distracters never liked you anyway. And as you say, they certainly can’t ban you. Why? Because you’re Ricky Gervias, of course, the indisputable, indispensible funny-man and comic genius.

But I’ll let you have the last word, Ricky:

“Still mustn't grumble.”

TEN REASONS WHY NEW ZEALAND WILL NOT WIN THE RUGBY WORLD CUP

TEN REASONS WHY NEW ZEALAND WILL NOT WIN THE RUGBY WORLD CUP

Think it’s an absolute certainty, don’t you?

Once they overcome Australia they’ll brush aside either of the puny northern hemisphere challengers who make it through to the final, and lift the trophy for the first time since 1987.

Well, that’s not going to happen and here are ten reasons why:

1)  INJURIES:

Please tell me you have a back up plan for Carter, Ted?

“Err…um well, there’s a bloke who’s gone fishin’ on the Waikato River by the name of Donald, I think. Used to think he was pretty good but guess I must have forgotten about him at squad selection time…trouble is, bastard won’t answer his phone. Probably reckons it’s Bath Rugby ringin’ to see where the f**k he is! But in the meantime, there’s always Cruden”.

Who? Ok, but what about the others?

“Well, there’s Muliaina, one of our finest players, he’s out. And Richie McCaw, one of our finest cheats, he’s pretty crook too…can’t lie on the ball and wink at the ref any more without it hurtin’." Of course - for legal reasons - this conversation only took place in my mind.

2)  EXPECTATION

There is a massive expectancy from the New Zealand nation who genuinely believes that their team is the best in the world. They have repeatedly failed to prove this since Captain Kirk lifted the cup on the first outing. It’s unthinkable that this won’t be their year. But they’ve been here and bottled it before…several times.

3) LACK OF EXPECTATION FROM THEIR OPPONENTS.

Ok, there is a bit of pressure on the Aussies. They did, after all win the Tri-Nations, a competition in which New Zealand lost twice. Folks back home in the land of Oz will believe that the competition is theirs to win. But folks who know anything about Aussie scrummaging will disagree.

4) REFEREEING

It’s almost traditional for referees to favour New Zealand. When they played Argentina, Nigel Owens might as well have worn a black shirt and done the Haka. The only time that a ref had an off day and allowed the opposition to compete without penalizing their every move, was in the semi-final at Twickenham in 1999. And guess who the opposition was that day? France. South African, Craig Joubert, refs them against Australia in the semi. So don’t expect another Wayne Barnes moment.

5) TED’S CHOICES

For Grumpy Graham, the key issue, if he wants to get his mitts on the Webb Ellis Cup, is to get his selection right. But wait – where were Gear, Rokocoko and Sivivatu when he named the squad? Don’t know many sides that could discard this kind of finishing: http://youtu.be/a9G-JpQO18g and http://youtu.be/dlLhwQEOizI

Haven’t seen much of that against quality opposition recently have we?

6) THEY’VE BEEN WATCHING THE WRONG ANALYSIS VIDEOS

Have you noticed any similarities between New Zealand and England? Before you say: “don’t be daft” just have a look at this: http://youtu.be/M7-9uZd-7qs Ok, it was a score against a disorganized and knackered defence towards the end of the match, but just look at that labored passing. Who does that remind you of?

And another thing, since when have the Blacks adopted the stupid, utterly pointless practice of passing deep behind unconvincing post players to drifting attack runners who wouldn’t even fool English defenders?

Oh, since about the time that they lost Carter.

All that’s missing now are players wildly gesticulating to the ref at ruck time instead of getting stuck in; but then they don’t need to do that just yet.

Perhaps someone mixed up the videos of the men in black.

7) “THE PAGES OF RUGBY HISTORY HAVE BEEN WRITTEN – AND THE PAGES OF RUGBY HISTORY WILL BE RE-WRITTEN…” PHIL VICKERY

Ok, it’s true – no team who has lost a game in the pool stages has ever won the World Cup. Australia lost to Ireland, which did the northern hemisphere sides a huge favour. Wales lost to South Africa and as for France…well, while their Tongan tailspin may have tarnished their credibilty, they did the right thing in losing to the Blacks when they met in Auckland on 24^th September. Had they won, they faced the unpleasant prospect of topping the group and meeting South Africa. I’m surprised they even came out in the second half. So discount that one, but expect the history books to be re-written. Actually, Phil, they won’t be re-written, because this is history in the making, you moron.

8) I’ve just watched the Ireland V Wales game again this evening. Big ask that, for an Irishman. But well done Wales, you were the deserved winners of a magnificent game of rugby. Wales have momentum and, bizarrely, so do France. New Zealand never build momentum because they are used to winning. Whoever wins on Saturday– and I expect it to be France – will take this momentum into the final and that will be the telling factor.

9) The winner of the the first semi – Wales or France – will have a day longer to prepare and recover. Believe me, this will make a difference; if there are any niggling injuries, a day is a long time.

…and finally…

10) THE HAKA

Now this is the best bit of kidology in the entire history of sport. Who on earth allowed this nonsense to become enshrined as a fully endorsed pre-match formality? Make no mistake, this is the most potent motivational tool known to man. Who needs a sports’ psychologist when you can chant, slap you thighs and stick your tongues out at the opposition?

But have you noticed, recently, that the performance of the Haka has got just a teeny bit ragged. They look as if they’ve not all singing from the same hymn sheet. Have a look: http://youtu.be/hNgxvbwh09g Bit of a mess that, wasn’t it? Bunch of pissed-up gap-year students in a club in Ibiza could do better. Not a good omen.

Well, there may be madness in my method, but for me it just points to another four years of soul searching for the men in black…all of them.

ONE LESS PINT.

ONE LESS PINT.

I was a student in 1979, the year in which Sid Viscous departed and Margaret Thatcher arrived.

My father, who was born 99 years ago today, gave me an allowance. He was too proud to permit me to take a student grant.

Fergie was a brilliant businessman, a lover of people the bridge between my mother and I, which an absence of siblings demanded. 

He knew the value of things, but had absolutely no idea as to their cost. 

He also believed that you should start each day with a good breakfast.

It was not difficult, therefore, to persuade him that one might expect to pay five pounds for a good meal to start the day.

On the basis of this, and, of course, a decent evening meal, sufficient to sustain one until breakfast time came around once more, I lived the life of Larry.

I am a student once again and I have just had breakfast.

Two small boxes of cereal swimming in a bowl of milk garnished with the contents of a tiny plastic container of tinned fruit, two pieces of ashen bacon wedged between the stogy thighs of a white bap, and a mug of tea.

This cost me £5.25.

Not much has changed then, least of all the superficiality of my expectations and the fragility of faith when they are dashed.

And, in 1979, the extra 25 pence would have meant one less pint.

DON’T DESPAIR ENGLAND – YOU’RE STILL THE BEST!

DON’T DESPAIR ENGLAND – YOU’RE STILL THE BEST!

Before the echo of the final whistle in Auckland had faded, Steve Rider turned to his ITV studio panel and asked: “England as a squad of players, are better than that, aren’t they?”

Errr…no, they aren’t actually, replied the three former international forwards, Sean Fitzpatrick, Francois Pienaar and even Lawrence Dallaglio.

For Fitzpatrick, the breakdown was the real issue. “England turned over too much ball. It cost them any momentum that they had managed to build throughout the game.”

Pienaar put England’s failure to progress down to a lack of leadership. “When England conceded the two first half tries there was no one there to say: ‘Right – this is what we have to do for the next five minutes. We need to get down there and get three points on the board.’”

At the post-match interview, Johnson appeared surprisingly calm: “I thought when we had the ball we looked ok.” Ok? Ok is the word you use when you want to let a waiter know that the over-priced meal you have just eaten wasn’t quite bad enough to be sent back. Which, in a way was quite accurate - England did look ok with the ball – before, like an unacceptable meal, they coughed it up.

But without the ball, England were even worse. Turned over at the lineout, out-played at the scrum, naïve at the breakdown, but worst of all, woeful in defence.

Médard’s try summed it up: three players were drawn onto Palisson, leaving no one at home on the till for the fullback to cash in on a simple inside ball.

I didn’t quite get Vickery’s analogy of the England defence being akin to a Tesco’s checkout. I’ve certainly never walked through one with my shopping as easily as the French walked through weak-shouldered English tackles. Maybe Vickery was surprised that Cueto, Foden and Ashton didn’t ask the dominant French backs if they’d like a hand with their packing?

There were a couple of sub-plots in this game to keep it alive and suggest that a French lead of 16-0 at the break didn’t stamp the game as a dead rubber.

Quite why Lievremont took Yachvili off, heaven knows. And why Johnson replaced Croft with Lawes at 6 to allow the magnificent Harinordoquy free rein from the base of the scrum is equally unfathomable. Laws has never played there at international level and it showed.

How bad were England and how good were France? The only player in an England shirt who played with any real passion was Manu Tuilagi, who was a handful for the French, before they shut him down in the second half. Tuilagi was outstanding in both attack and defence, looking as if he relished the contest as much Deacon looked as if he didn’t.

Sure, Foden’s try gave England a glimmer of hope, but one always felt that the French were only as good as they had to be and no more. When Cueto laboriously grounded the ball with five minutes to go and Flood missed a simple conversion, it became clear how badly Johnson would love to let Wilkinson and Flood to share a shirt.

Trinh-Duc replaced Morgan Parra at 10 and he applied his own unique tools to something that didn’t really need fixing. However, his two early touch-finding wipers checked England’s back three and freed up more space in the midfield for Rougerie and Mermoz to exploit. It was a substitution that would have worked better if Lievremont had left Yachvili on.

But had Yachvili kicked the two conversions and a straightforward first half penalty, and France not butchered two second half chances, the margin of victory would have been embarrassing. Perhaps Johnson knew this and his post-match demeanour reflected an acknowledgment that England had got off lightly.

Maybe losing by seven points to a side that dominated every phase of the game wasn’t so bad after all. And their discipline was better: they only conceded five penalties, none of which were converted.

I’ll leave the last word to Johnson: “Only one team goes away from the World Cup smiling and that is the team who wins it.”

And that team, for my money will still be France. For sure, they will have to be better than they were today to beat New Zealand or Australia, but the gears are there, and they will go up them.

For France, the World Cup is only about the knockout stages. For England it is only about the journey home and mis-placed reflection on how good that could have been.

England                     - Player Rating /10:

15 Ben Foden          5 – took his try well, but defensively weak and nowhere under the high ball.

14 Chris Ashton       4 – poor defence once again exposed. No swan diving tonight, and what happened to that player who used to go ball hunting?

13 Manu Tuilagi       9 – England’s only hope of a line break – until France closed him down early in the second half. No plan B.

12 Toby Flood          6 – asked questions of the French defence when moved to 10, but why was he at 12 in the first place?

11 Mark Cueto          4 – another one who must look at the team sheet and wonder why his name’s still on it? Made an absolute meal of his try.

10 Jonny Wilkinson 4 – one of his worst games in an England shirt. May have two feet but only has one hand, which makes a talentless midfield look even worse than it is.

9 Ben Youngs          6 – a promising player, but lacks pace and made it easy for the French back row.

8 Nick Easter                        8 – Engand’s second - best player; cleaned up the mess left by a beaten English scrum.

7 Lewis Moody (capt) 6 – ineffective, but did slow French ball down on occasions early in the piece.

6 Tom Croft               6 – a force in the lineout, ineffective at the breakdown

5 Tom Palmer          5 - ditto

 4 Louis Deacon      2 – he must keep asking the question I do – “why, in the name of Zeus, do they keep picking me?”

3 Dan Cole               3 – great beard – failed to out-tickle his opponent at scrum time; continues to give away needless penalties.

2 Steve Thompson  4 – There must be a better 1^st choice hooker.

1 Matt Stevens          3 – ditto for prop

Replacements: 16 Dylan Hartley (5) 17 Alex Corbisiero (6)

18 Courtney Lawes (5 – but should never have been put at 6)

19 Simon Shaw (7 – should have been on there from the start instead of Deacon)

20 James Haskell (6 - Should have been on from the start instead of Croft)

21 Richard Wigglesworth (6)

22 Matt Banahan (4 – if he absolutely has to be selected, it should be in the 2nd row).

ANOTHER- BLOODY-OFF-THE-FIELD-GATE AND PRAY FOR THE GREAT ESCAPE

Can England Escape an Early Exit in Auckland?


I’ve never really understood why England football supporters adopted the theme to “The Great Escape”.

If it has to be an English sporting anthem it should surely be heard be at rugby, not football internationals.

Martin Johnson: part of the problem?

 And maybe, for good measure, Martin Johnson should have at least one “Get Out of Jail Free” card in the deck for the poker game on the team bus; if not a whole pack of them.

Scotland’s gallant attempt to reach the last eight came down to the bounce of the ball as Nick De Luca failed to gather, cross the line and extend the Celtic under-achievers’ lead to the eight points required to send their old foe back to Heathrow.

The result is that the black-shirted Northern Hemisphere champions limp on to Auckland to face France on Saturday.

The two most unpopular sides in the tournament will play each other for the right to meet either in-form Wales or resurgent Ireland. 

Some time ago I posted a feature attempting to explain why Team England are so unloved. I cited arrogance, based on an over-inflated expectation of their capabilities to beat the best in the world. I got a little criticism for my comments, of course, but here we are again.

Team England doesn’t have to work hard at being disliked – it comes naturally. The black shirts with numbers unraveling like the fragility of their on-field confidence didn’t help. That, however, wasn’t their fault – the blame for this can be laid at the door of their sponsors, Nike, in an attempt to out-black the All Blacks. Pathetic.

While for most other international teams, a bit of dwarf chucking or chambermaid baiting would be regarded as de rigueur and a normal part of touring (certainly for the French) England’s discomfort at appearing in the spotlight for the wrong reasons is cringe-worthy.

And that’s without the not-so-fairy-tale-ending of the captain who marries a princess (well almost) then snogs her friend. Mind, you I can’t see the French having a problem with that one.

Ashton’s swan diving only serves to juxtapose the pettiness of ball-gate, beer-gate chambermaid-gate, and every other off-the-field-gate which Team England have presented to a press hungry for disunity and in-camp discord.

Mind you, they don’t have to look too far for that within the French camp. The French, who appeared either to spurn or be ignorant of the fact that a simple kick in front of the posts would see them progress to the last eight, are in total and very public disarray.

While they are not quite refusing to get off the bus – as their soccer counterparts did in the 2010 World Cup - they’re not far from it. Marc Lievremont commented that instead of the team bonding-over-a-beer scenario that he wanted following the Tonga defeat, his players splintered into small fractious groups and sat brooding with their agents, pondering how much harm all of this was likely to do their commercial prospects. Quite a bit like English football, then.

But don’t be fooled by how badly the French appear to want to be knocked out of this competition. Ok, there must be something about New Zealand which is totally abhorrent to the Gallic psyche. Maybe it’s all those sheep or perhaps it’s the fact that New Zealand women seem to find Mike Tyndall attractive.

Either way I expect them to buck the odds of a formbook which includes three previous World Cup loses to England, and come out on top in Auckland. I am also tipping them – which I have done since last year - to lift the Webb Ellis Cup on 23rd October.

And England? Martin Johnson, great player as he was, is more a part of the problem than he is a part of the solution. Until Johnson and his Leicester Mafioso are shown the door, Team England will always be the proverbial bed-wetters of international rugby – cocky in the playground but hiding from their own undisciplined shadows at night.

If this mediocre England side is to pull off the greatest of all Great Escapes and lift the trophy at Eden Park, it will take more than Jonny’s boot to do the tunneling.

Rihanna and The Goblet of Ire...

Here’s an Irish joke: what do Rihanna and a Free Presbyterian Ulster farmer have in common? Give up? The answer: absolutely nothing. 

On Wednesday, The Times reported that Rihanna was ordered off a barley field for what farmer Alan Graham (61) deemed as “inappropriate behaviour”. In other words, she took her clothes off. I have to say I’m with him, here. I grew up in Ulster and I never considered taking my clothes off in a field to be an appropriate behaviour. Too bloody cold and wet.

And quite why Rihanna’s entourage considered a field near Bandit Country – as it was known in the good old days - as appropriate for anything involving the 23 year-old R&B star, God only knows.

Bizarrely, this was their chosen location to shoot footage for her new single “We Found Love”. Historically, the only things of interest to have been shot in the vicinity were a couple of incompetent UVF volunteers and the odd fox.

It’s a sign of how much has changed in the Province that the matter was raised at Stormont. Peter Robinson was asked whether he considered if farmer Graham’s sanction would adversely affect Ireland’s stake in the entertainment industry.  

Not half as much as what your wife got up to, Mr Robinson.