An Online Odyssey!!!


By Ozzy3213
September 30 2014

It's fair to say that nothing beats being there in the flesh and taking in the atmosphere, the drama and the tension, but I have to say, following the game online can, and does run it a close second.  To sum up, yes, I'm summing up at the start, Tigers lost, and it wasn't their fault.  Now as fans of London Irish, we've all been there, seaching for answers as to why we’ve fallen short, again, so it's nice to have the boot on the other foot for a change.

Now you might think that Twitter would be a place where excuses for defeat from fans were at a premium, but it wasn't. Tigers fans on there, who I interacted with from my @RugbyLI account, were magnanimous in defeat, and wished us well for the season. For those who follow the account, you will know that I did take issue with some "journalists" in the immediate aftermath of the game, as their spin on it was for me, a little tigercentric. Anyhow, here's a selection of mine and others thoughts and feelings through the game...

I could post 100's more comments, but you get the drift, it was up and down online, with nerves as the scores were levelled, and absolute joy as Shane nailed the final kick and when the whistle went. It's hard to tell if we played well, but my overwhelming feeling is that you can't win at Welford Road without having done so. I went onto various forums afterwards, to see how people felt the game went. As you can imagine, the Tigers board on here was in melt down. Some of their posters are gracious and ready to discuss, others not so much. I was called both a troll and a plonker by one gentleman for daring to question his assertion that we only won as they had 20 players missing. Away from here, I found mainly Tigers fans who'd been to the game, and here are a selection of their thoughts…

"London Irish deserved to win because in Shane Geraghty (cynical yellow withstanding) they had the stand out performer. In a game with a lot of average to poor kicking he was the only decent kicker (Noakes, Burns and Williams all had shockers) from hand and off the tee."

Overall it was a poor performance by both teams and the officials. Leicester just about hung in there in the first half. However, but for dreadful displays by Paice (woeful throwing) and Aulika (could not scrummage, was fat and barely ever managed anything more than a stagger in loose) and a butchered try attempt on 40 minutes after a goal line interception, Irish could and perhaps should have been well clear."

"And Garner. I felt his management of advantage was dreadful. I am sure LI fans will find examples where their team suffered too, but I am a tigers fan. Anyway the first lineout that Paice underthrew and gibson nabbed, Skivington grabbed him by the neck and threw him to the ground while in the air and a scrap ensued which Garner deemed sufficient. Several knocked on lineouts by LI were waved away as Youngs had to scramble back to retrieve. and a scrum that marched forward with LI disengaging was deemed ok as tigers sort of had the ball."

So to summarise we have: Gash (LI) Gasher (Tigers) and Gashest (Garner).

So I've decided that I now probably don't need to watch the game (I will though). I know that we were gash, and only won because the referee favoured us and they had lots of players missing through injury. Apart from Shane, our kicking is crap, our England international hooker cannot throw, and our try scoring tighthead who made the Times team of week can't scrum and is fat. Oh, and we're gash, but not as gash as Leicester or Greg Garner.

It's a wonderful place the internet, you can find all sorts of opinion and comment. A word of caution though, don't take it to heart, it's not good for you. Do what I did on Saturday night. Get the wife and kids to bed, and pour yourself a nice glass of Bushmills, and savour the fact that we beat the Tigers, and look a completely different outfit this season to the one we've seen over the past couple of years. It will be back to watching live for me this week as the Saints march into town. See you at the MadStad, where hopefully we'll be loud and once more proud of our boys.

COME ON YOU IRISH!!!

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An Online Odyssey!!!
Discussion started by The Craic www.londonirish.org , 30/09/2014 15:04
The Craic www.londonirish.org
30/09/2014 15:04
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Lazyboy346
30/09/2014 17:16
Nice report Ozzy. Think you've captured the pretty broad views of what happened and why brilliantly. Those last few minutes trying to listen in were absolute agony, followed by the joy of realising the game was over and I wasn't dreaming.

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GHA
30/09/2014 17:30
Good stuff Ozzy - I couldn't make the game so went through similar emotions. You might want to be careful copying and pasting other people's tw@tter content though winking smiley

Nice one (Sm152)

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Tjobbe
30/09/2014 17:36
GHA - it's perfectly legitimate to share tweets. Twitter actually give you the functionality to do so, which we've taken advantage of here.

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Ozzy3213
30/09/2014 18:27
Thanks to the new Eds for getting it up and making it look so tidy.

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MickeyMouse
01/10/2014 10:43
Quote:
GHA
You might want to be careful copying and pasting other people's tw@tter content though winking smiley

What Tjobbe said! I may be a Twitter luddite (my thingy is @DontGetTwits - they wouldn't let me use @DontGetTweets!), but there was one tweet Ozzy had included that I could not for the life of me find, so I think their privacy settings had been changed to prevent people who weren't following from seeing the tweet.

It's all in the control of the user.

I think this was a great idea, thanks Ozzy! So far we've had:

A view from the telly for the LDC
A Dickens fest for the Newcastle match
A twitterfest for this game

The craic is doing well with the imaginative match reports, I wonder what we'll get for this weekend's Northampton match!

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