British Rugby media

[Manu Vatuvei]

There were a few excerpts in the NZ Herald today from various British papers, about the ABs v England game.

I know it really isn't anything new, but I just had to mention what a bunch of weirdos the British rugby media are. I just can't get my head around the way they manage to see things. Stephen Jones is nothing short of a raving lunatic. He is the rugby writing version of someone suffering from a terrible case of tourettes syndrome. They're all just so bizarre.

Yep, so that's about it. Poms huh.

 

[ThrashViking]

What the hell was Stephen Jones babbling about the haka for?What a whinging old tosser.

 

[Manu Vatuvei]

The guy is completely nuts and if I was a Brit I'd be embarrassed by him. Unfortunately I'm guessing the Brits probably love him, and the Herald seems to have latched on to him to stir up some controversy.

I've probably given him too much credit already with this thread. Usually I just ignore him. He's like the journalistic equivalent of an internet troll, but there really shouldn't be a place for trolls in "serious" newspapers.

 

[SpaceMonkey]

Lol don't worry too much guys, most poms find Stephen Jones an embarrasment as well. the guy is on another planet, he has a real complex about NZ and about Jerry Collins in particular, you'd think JC had f*cked his wife or something.

 

[Iafeta]

I wouldn't even batter an eyelid about Mr Jones. I mean we all know we only won 3-0 against the Lions because Super Man O'Driscoll was dropped from 47 metres above the ground head first into the middle of a cricket pitch with the medicos laughing on the sideline at the time. We all know if O'Driscoll was playing it would have been 3-0, comfortably, to the Lions. We all know New Zealand's deep attacking backline movements are destroying the game, we all know Carl Hayman must have been boring in significantly to out play Andy Sheridan at scrum time.

Who gives a flying f*ck what he thinks. The guy is seriously deranged. I feel most sorry for his family for having to listen to that dribble outside of crayon and paper time.

 

[Jackal Dog]

If this is the same Stephen Jones as the one who writes for PlanetRubgy (which I think it is) then yes the guy is a toss pot, he uses his position in journalism to make vicious attacks on individuals or teams he dislikes. He even some times trolls on the PlanetRugby and IRB forums as well.(no joke)

 

[Jackal Dog]

[font=Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, MS Sans Serif]The worst thing? he got Britain's Sports writer of the year! in this little pearler he discusses the differences between Heineken Cup and Super 12....

John Mitchell, the former New Zealand coach, was present last Sunday at the Causeway Stadium, High Wycombe, in leafy Buckinghamshire. He has been staying with Nigel Melville, the Director of Rugby at Gloucester, and sat alongside Melville and the coaching team to take in the Heineken Cup quarter-final match between Wasps and Gloucester.
And he must have winced along with the rest of us at the thunderous nature of the exchanges. The opening quarter was of a raw-meat intensity and the Wasps performance, almost humiliating Gloucester with a menacing, strong-arm display of driving forward play, was one of the finest in the history of the great London club.

As an occasion it illustrated starkly the single greatest problem facing the club game in England in the current era - the lack of capacity of the stadiums. Many Zurich Premiership clubs are sold out for the rest of the season and on Sunday, the marketing departments told us that Wasps' 11,000 capacity could have been sold out three times over and indeed, could have been sold out to visiting Gloucester supporters alone.

Mitchell may well have said to himself that if he had a domestic rugby structure to compare in physical crunch and real forward passions with the Zurich Premiership or the Heineken Cup then he would not have been in High Wycombe. He would still be in New Zealand as the All Black coach, probably with a World Cup winners' medal in his pocket.

His inner reaction to watching the performance of Craig Dowd would also have been fascinating. Dowd has been on sensational form over the past three seasons and on Sunday, years after he last appeared for the All Blacks, he still looked the leading loosehead prop in the game.

Dowd handed out a roasting in the scrums to Phil Vickery, the Gloucester and England tighthead and Dowd was so effective with his hard-yards bursting on the fringes. He is fitter and faster than he has ever been and his Wasps team-mates, Lawrence Dallaglio included, speak of his form and influence with awe. And to think that the powder-puff New Zealand scrum had to operate without him in Australia last year.

The quarter-final weekend of the Heineken Cup saw four outstanding ties, full of passion and also skill. Biarritz were sensational in hammering a brave Llanelli at Stradey Park; the Munster-Stade Français game, in which Stade were afflicted by injury and illness to their props was slightly looser but another classic, and the Toulouse-Edinburgh game a glamorous affair at the vivid Toulouse Stadium.

The contrast with the several Super 12 matches which were also televised live in the United Kingdom was again substantial. The likes of Graham Henry, Eddie Jones and Mitchell, himself, are all firmly on the record in the last few months that the Super 12 is not a help in preparing teams for real rugby and especially, for international matches.

In this respect they finally caught up with me after six years but I confess that I felt the Super 12 of 2004 would be a far tighter, more passionate, more thumping and more forward-based affair. I felt that men with the influence of Henry and Jones would hold sway over the rump of the discredited marketing people who still feel endless movement and torrents of tires is the way forward.

It simply has not happened. It seems the scrums are still used merely as some excuse for the 16 forwards to meet up for a chat. The line-out is rather more of a contest these days than it was in the early days of the Super 12 but there is still not the full-on desperation in the part of the opposition to ruin the throwing team's ball. It still seems that referees, marketing fools and even coaches and players are labouring under the rubbish ethos of old, that you deserve to win your own ball.

The rucks are an apology. Occasionally, a referee might come to life and penalise the team in possession for holding on too long when isolated but the forward phases as a whole, in tight or loose play, are still predictable, still not contested with any real passion, and the ball whizzes this way and that with what many would consider a lively but unsatisfying rhythm.

Time will tell is any of the three coaches of the major southern hemisphere nations can drag their team together and forge a proper forward effort in time for the international season. But one thing is for sure - there is not a single Super 12 pack who would not have found a meeting with Craig Dowd's Wasps last Sunday a brutal experience.

Perhaps it was typified with the awesome power of Trevor Leota or Simon Shaw, the lock who is playing out of his skin. Or perhaps by Paul Volley and Lawrence Dallaglio, the back rowers who clashed heads in the first half. Both were clearly stunned. Volley had to be held up by three Wasps medicos. But they both played on - silly, perhaps, but indicative of rugby's status in the northern hemisphere as a contact sport as well as repository of skills.

There were some lovely moments. When Volley was laid out, Vickery came up with play still proceeding and removed the gum-shield from Volley's mouth. Good on him. At Stradey, home of the wildest crowd, there was an ovation of major proportions as the fine Biarritz team left the field.

All very sporting. Except that the action itself was reverberating and the packed stadiums would not have wanted it any other way.

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[Manu Vatuvei]

He even some times trolls on the PlanetRugby and IRB forums as well.(no joke)

LOL! Are you sure it's not someone impersonating him? That's so pathetic.

 

[Iafeta]

I really enjoy these comments from Phil Gifford, puts Stephen Jones into context really doesn't it.

November 21
There are a lot of vivid memories from the All Black win over England at Twickenham.


The biting cold, the huge gap at the ground where the north terrace used to be, the power of the All Black forwards, the courage the team showed playing 30 minutes with 14 men on the ground, the beautiful touches Dan Carter brought to the game.

Oddly one of the strongest memories, and certainly the most surreal, was sitting through the England coaches, Andy Robinson and Phil Lardner's press conference.

If you hadn't seen the game you would have sworn, apart from Robinson's acknowledgement that losing to the All Blacks was devastating for him and his team, that England had won.

If you hadn't seen the game you would have sworn that the All Blacks had not scored two tries to one, you would have sworn that the All Blacks hadn't trailed for the first 20 minutes, but for the first 79, and you would have sworn that the All Blacks were very, very lucky to win.

It was the sort of theme carried on the next day by some, but to be fair, not all of the British media.

Stephen Jones in the Sunday Times, of course, spewed out more bile, and displayed more xenophobia than my old friend Loosehead Len. When a man says that Dan Carter played "like a frightened schoolboy" as Jones did, and the same player is awarded the man of the match title, it's a fair bet that somebody is out of step.

I used to think that Jones wrote his vicious anti-New Zealand stuff for consumption in New Zealand to make his name with Kiwis.

Now that I know he writes it for British consumption too you can only conclude that as a child growing up in Wales he must have been warped by the terrible series of losses Wales suffered at the hands of New Zealand.

It's an odd thing to consider that in 2003 in Wellington, when England was reduced to a six man pack and held out the All Blacks for a victory, it was, according to the British media, a triumph for English pluck and spirit.

When the All Blacks do much the same thing they've committed cynical professional fouls, and were scared to death by the power of the men in white.

If you looked at the game with both eyes open, I'd suggest that England played well, the All Blacks not as well as they can, and the result on the scoreboard was a pretty fair reflection of the game.


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courtesy of stuff.co.nz

 

[ali]

If this is the same Stephen Jones as the one who writes for PlanetRubgy (which I think it is) then yes the guy is a toss pot, he uses his position in journalism to make vicious attacks on individuals or teams he dislikes. He even some times trolls on the PlanetRugby and IRB forums as well.(no joke)

I think there are a few British Rugby League fans who would like the bloke dead.