Newsgroups: rec.sport.rugby
Subject: What a massacre !
From: wft@math.canterbury.ac.nz (Bill Taylor)
Date: 23 Jul 92 13:53:55 +1200
Distribution: world
Organization: Department of Mathematics, University of Canterbury

40 - 17   Oh my God !!!    Did the teams have the wrong uniforms on, or what ?

If this sort of thing continues, I'll have to remove the map off my sig !

This was indeed the worst performance of any AB team ever, both in the score
book, and on the screen. I can't think how I managed to sit it right through
to the end.

We are used to the bad reffing decisions by now, of course, (Sydney halfback
offside for half the match, only caught once). But this was finally irrelevant.
There are simply no excuses for this one. Never have we seen such a dismal
succession of bungles, knock-ons, dropped passes, lost possession and
(especially !!) missed tackles as we saw here. Only the fact that Sydney
bungled many chances of their own, prevented the massacre becoming a holocaust.

In retrospect, perhaps, this result was inevitable; AB morale is obviously
shattered after those two agonizingly close and not-really-deserved test losses.
The last two matches would be better not played at all ! What we saw was a
fully fired up 2nd-string NSW, with everything to play for, against a feeble
2nd-string AB side who obviously couldn't care less and would rather have been
somewhere else altogether (except maybe for Eroni Clarke). It seems like they
must have thought they only needed to put on Black jerseys, to win !!! Did I
say 2nd-string ? More like 4th-string. They were far worse than the B team
left at home to play the English, and beat an equally-talented team on guts
and fire. I think Canterbury would easily have beaten last night's "All Blacks";
hell, even South Canterbury would have had a good go.  Even WALES could've won!

As I said in my last post, the final test will be an irrelevant nonsense, and
this last game illustrates that well. I had predicted a 2nd test win by a
small margin to NZ, and a big 3rd test win.   Well; only a yard or so of
Fox's drop kick in the dying minutes prevented the former coming true; but
----------------------. this morale/irrelevance problem means the latter will
                      | fail too. The Aussies should have a comfortable win now.
          \           | 
           \          | (I still think that a 1-point win in the 2nd would
           \\         | have seen us blast home in the 3rd, but who cares.
            \\        | Speculation of this type is futile; all counterfactual
             )`--')   | conditionals are trivially true.)     In any event, the
            <  o /    | result, AND its margin will be quite irrelevant, as I
             `\  /    | said before.   The tour finished when Foxy's last pot 
              / /     | missed; the final unlucky nail in the All Black coffin.
         /_,, ~~      |
        /   )         |=======================================================
        |  /          |
       /  _>    <-------- Bill Taylor         wft@math.canterbury.ac.nz
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