By BrianC
June 17 2004

For the last year BrianC has been keeping a diary of things that have been happening in and around the club and the site. These will be published over the next couple of months. This is the first one, 27th June 2003. An Ed’s Diary - 27th June 2003

The things I lose sleep over.

It’s 3a.m., I’m wide-awake, thinking about the Craic website. For over a month now, whilst there has been no rugby, we have been running a series entitled ‘Meet the Family’. This has been very successful and has kept the site going through the summer, the stats are very healthy. So why am I worrying? Quite simply I don’t have a clue what I’m going to do next summer.

An idea then comes to mind. Why not, I ask myself, keep a diary of what is happening in and around this site and the club? This could include some of the things we couldn’t let you know about at the time as it was too political or there were discussions underway. It would also be a way to keep a track of the mood and ideas on the messageboard, on things that may well be long forgotten next summer. If I am disciplined enough about it to average one diary per week we’ll have a good bank of stories to keep us going through next summer.

The next day I bounce the idea off Dutch Bird who thinks it is a good idea, now I find myself writing the first of these stories.

Two weeks ago we managed to pull quite a scoop, we published the page from the Canterbury catalogue containing the new LI shirt. Some people are not happy. We have been asked by someone in the club to take the page down. This I feel would be counter productive. Most people have by now seen the page, to remove it now would do little good and may indeed do more harm by sparking a debate about censorship, ‘Kremlinesque’ silences from the club, some supporters being more privileged than others, etc.

By publishing this page I’ve also managed to put LISC in an uncomfortable position. A week or so beforehand at one of the LISC/LIRC meetings they were shown the shirts. They had agreed to absolute confidentiality and had stuck to that so well that there had not been a whisper anywhere on the site or indeed quietly to me. The ironic thing is that had I known about this I probably wouldn’t have published the page. To LISC’s credit, perhaps they know me too well by now; they have not attempted to ask me to remove the page.

Us Ed’s had a brief email exchange yesterday. Normally the club include us on the list of those they send press releases to. Yesterday they posted one on t’offy site that we hadn’t seen. Are they taking revenge? Seems a funny way to do so, press releases are supposed to be for generating publicity. My feeling is that this is all a storm in a teacup and will soon blow over.

Interesting post on the new shirt thread by John_H. He reckons that our major sponsor for next year is Guinness and that the blue on the shirt is to match the branding that Guinness use for AG Extra Cold. This prompts me to write a story speculating if this could be the case and comparing the new shirt to the Extra Cold branding. Later I decide not to publish this, too many feathers have been ruffled already. We’ll know in a few weeks what the truth is, my guess is that it is not Guinness, such an arrangement would have to have been signed months ago, surely something would have leaked somewhere. Perhaps it just has?

On the messageboard we have two very long, very silly, threads. ‘Mornington Crescent’ and ‘Msg. LISC Committee’. We get threads like these throughout the year but they normally die off after 50 or so posts. Such is what happens when there is little or no rugby around.

The Connacht/Ulster world tour has been announced but there hasn’t been much discussion about it. Worryingly, to my mind, at the moment there appears to be more interest in the France vs. England game on the same weekend. Perhaps I should stir some interest up?

We’ve started a roll call for Henley, looks like we’ll have 100 or so this year. We should be able to feed them all, if it gets much more than that we’ll be turning people away. Note to self, must do something about pulling list of names together.

Some concern about lack of signings for the new season, this has been highlighted by Orville Spoonbender’s excellent ‘Comings and Goings’ thread. Much more comprehensive and accurate than anything elsewhere in the press. To date we have only signed two new players, much less than the other clubs. If OS compiles another list I’ll try to turn it into a story.

I’ve pulled about 30 pictures off Bisach’s CD which we’re using as captions, that seems to be working well. Now confidant that we’ll exceed 200k hits this month (183k with 4 days to go, although 2 are weekend days).

Hope to God that I can keep these diaries up, will save me a lot of grief next summer.