By apb
October 25 2004

Tykes were on top for most of the match. Disappointingly in conditions that were conducive to good, fast, free-flowing play, the only points were all scored through penalties. One of these heralded the first points on the board in a Tykes top for Tim Stimpson.

But in the dying seconds the Grenoble fly-half slotted over a kick to bring some respect back to the home team, and the honours were even at nine points each.

Worryingly, Stuart Hooper was helped off the pitch and was sent to hospital with a suspected broken ankle. Whether this turns out to be the case or not, it would appear that Hoops is going to be out for a number of weeks now, so the Tykes injury troubles are increasing.

So that's all there really is to say about the match itself. What I think is more serious is the difficulty encountered in finding out what was going on in Grenoble from all those of us who were left at home. Ceefax has a sprinking of Challenge Cup results, but many were missing, even at midnight last night, when all the games had long since finished.

Scrum.com, Sky.com and many other of my normal ports of call to find out results all concentrated almost exclusively on the Heineken Cup - those that didn't only making reference to the matches that had kicked off at 15.00, rather than the many that were later.

Most damningly, though, I couldn't find anything on the official ERC website, ercrugby.com. Carrying articles about last year's final, and this year's draw, but it was as if there hadn't been any inkling of matches being played in the "Parker Pen" cup.

And that's another thing. Are Parker this year's sponsors or not? There doesn't seem to be any reference to it on the ERC site, and it could be that Parker have decided that as a publicity tool for their products, it wasn't terribly good value. With this kind of coverage - even from the body whose competition it is - you can't really blame them.