By BrianC
August 13 2004

London Irish beat Sale in a hard fought, scrappy game. A remarkably long period of this game passed without a score for either side. An Ed’s Diary – 2nd December 2003

London Irish 9 – 3 Sale, a hard fought, scrappy game played in difficult conditions. By all accounts Sale were quite undisciplined, at one stage they had two players in the bin. I have to say I was worried that we didn’t take advantage of the situation but a win is a win and we deserved this one if only for the fact that we kept our cool under provocation.

It is a long time since I can remember a game going so long without a score. It was 6 – 3 after 15 minutes. The only other score of the game was a Tofty penalty with the last kick of the game, five minutes into injury time. All in all there was some 70+ minutes of scoreless rugby. I can’t recall us previously having such a long period without either having scored or being scored against.

There has been one quite remarkable thread this week. It was started by James MacIntyre who raised the issue that whilst wearing an England shirt on the day after England’s RWC victory a few of those in the crowd had questioned whether he should wear such a shirt to an LI game. What started off as quite an innocuous thread ended off reaching over 100 posts. People are divided into roughly three camps, those who don’t think England shirts should be worn or swing low sung at LI games, those who don’t see any problem with it and those who whilst they may hold one view or another conspicuously want to avoid any debate. What strikes me is that those who are most strident about LI being ‘an Irish club’ tend to be second generation Irish, born in England to Irish parents, rather than those who have been born and raised in Ireland. I’ve resisted using the term ‘Plastic Paddies’ as it would be way too inflamitory at the moment, that said I can’t be the only one who is thinking thus.

We ended off November with in excess of 257k hits, our second best ever month. December has started brightly but will no doubt tail off as Christmas approaches.

Next weekend sees a world tour away at Montauban, I’m kicking myself that I can’t make it.