By PerryGo
October 22 2002

You may have criticised his choice of music in the past, but the ‘Man with the Mike’ got it right this week. Not so much the Tom Jones number when the visitors took the field...

No, I was thinking of ‘You ain’t seen nothing yet…’ after Quins scored.  True, we hadn’t.  Or how about ‘Momma told me not to come…’ at the end of the match?  Not a particularly career-enhancing selection, perhaps.  This week’s match was not Harlequins’ finest hour – but why..?

My automatic Microsoft grammar-checker keeps trying to tell me ‘You ain’t seen nothing’ should be corrected to ‘You haven’t seen anything’ - which sounds about right, although I don’t suppose Bachman Turner Overdrive (the band whose hit song it was) would be very impressed. 

BTO, BTW

After a while somebody said “Can you remember anything good they’ve done?” which stumped all of us for a while, until we realised the bloke was still talking about Bachman Turner Overdrive, rather than Quins.  This started us off racking our brains to try to recall if BTO were just ‘one-hit wonders’.  We couldn’t remember but, thinking of last week at Virginia Park, it certainly looked like Harlequins had been.

The best journalism is always well researched, so your intrepid writer has surfed the net to find out whether ‘You Ain’t Seen Nothing Yet’ should, with the benefit of hindsight, have been titled ‘You’re Unlikely To See Anything Again’. 

I won’t tell you where I found it (unless they’re prepared to pay kwin the £200 advertising fee, why should I?) but if you go to www.ariverinsouthamerica.com you’ll find there’s a BTO album available called The Collection.  I initially assumed this was a reference to someone passing the hat ‘round for the now-penniless former rock gods, but it turned out to be a CD laden with other BTO hits.  Well, possibly they were hits.  There were certainly lots of other songs by the same band on it – and I couldn’t believe how relevant were some of the titles.  For example:

‘Welcome Home’.  Yeah, right. 

‘Not Fragile’.  Is this a wind-up or what?

‘Don't Let the Blues Get You Down’.  Hmmm.

If you think the humour’s painful, folks, wait until we start on the rugby. 

PerryGo’s Positives

There was scarcely a ray of sunshine to write about in the entire Harlequins performance.  In fact, so dire was it, there’s a real risk that the match video will be given an X-rating by the British Board of Film Censors and some of the younger squad members won’t be allowed to watch it.  ‘Prof’s Positives’ is unlikely to need a More... link to click on this week...

Actually, there are a few positives.  I though Nathan Williams maintained his consistent form; Jim Evans once again showed how quick he is for a second row forward, in scoring a good try; and Nick Duncombe played pretty well.  I think that’s it.  Oh, and Ace avoided a yellow card.  Sorry, Prof, just stole all your material.

Speaking of Nathan Williams - either it was Kit Stormont chasing him around the field in the last 10 minutes for an early post-match interview (thinking the rugby had finished perhaps..?) or one of the Quins medics, checking he was still OK to carry on.  Or had Mark Evans sent on a minder, to make sure none of the opposition touched him for the rest of the match?  Looked like he was struggling with an injury, which, if true, was a brave effort by the full back.

At time of writing, I have yet to see the coaches’ comments, but I can guess… 

Ring of Confidence

Mark Ring will be beaming all over his face, frustrated at not having taken the scalp of his old mate Paul Turner’s new team at their home venue, but at the same time knowing that his team had the better of the match.  What a shame he has to be content with only a moral victory.  If the Cheesemakers had had a frontline kicker (even a backline kicker might have done…) they would have won the game by a proverbial mile.  

Mark Evans, meanwhile, will probably run with some of the old football-clichés – you know, ‘all credit to Caerphilly’, ‘raised their game against us’, ‘didn’t let us get into gear’ etc.

What I found quite shocking was not so much the poor start – inevitably, it was going to be hard to get up for this game, human nature being what it is (even if, you might rightly say, as professionals that shouldn’t be an issue).  No, what shocked me was that Quins seemed almost powerless to sort themselves out and get a grip on the game.

Make no mistake; we started out with our first-choice team on the pitch, allowing for injuries.  That was the strongest we had.  And, whilst you could say we finished with a bit of a patchwork quilt out there (how delighted scrum-half Matt Powell must have been to get the chance to play blindside flanker…) it was a fully-pro Zurich Premiership team, littered with internationals, against a semi-pro Welsh League side who haven’t won a competitive match this season.  Ouch!

Not only could the visitors have kicked their goals and won, they also could – and should – have scored more tries.  I lost count of the opportunities they created.  So sparse was the Quins’ defensive line at times that I wondered whether we had run out of fit players and maybe there were only twelve Harlequins on the pitch.  The drift defence had drifted all the way back to the changing room, perhaps?  On one occasion, Caerphilly had a two man overlap available to choose from, both sides of the midfield breakdown point.

Looking at the speed the visiting backs were capable of moving the ball out, and the pace they injected, you could have been forgiven for thinking the green and white team was the one with the professionals in it.  Credit to full back Sione Toipulotu, who I thought put in a powerful performance, breaking through some flimsy defence and looking dangerous a number of times.  He’s the sort of player people might be talking about if his name wasn’t completely unpronounceable.

I wasn’t counting, but I would say Caerphilly created many more scoring chances overall than Quins.  The statistics must make sorry reading.

They’ll Improve After the Break…

Whoever gave Harlequins their half time roasting forgot to switch on the oven.  I was sure a few ripe and well-chosen words from the coaches would bring out a Quins’ team fired up for a persuasive performance in the second period.  Instead, even before the rest of PerryGo’s party were back from the Debs Bar with the half-time drinkies, we’d managed to concede another try!  That was quite an achievement – the service in the Debs Bar is pretty quick.

I really don’t understand our selection philosophy for this game, either.  We were in a position to rest a few important players (defending a 73-20 lead shouldn’t be beyond the Quins team of current vintage, although a few seasons back you couldn’t be too sure…) but chose not to.  Were we keeping them match fit by giving them half a game?   Do our corporate sponsors – or the Bic Biro Bowl people – require us to start with our strongest team?  And if they do, who decides what our ‘strongest team’ is? 

Surely, even within any such constraints, we had a chance to blood a few more players to the big time?  In fairness, we did so with Seb Fitzgerald at fly half (which I was pleased to see) - but then he picked up a knock in the first period, which necessitated Ben Gollings reprising his role from the previous weekend.  Maybe ‘player registration’ for this competition was the problem.

We had rung the changes by the third quarter, of course, primarily to protect Jase, Nick and Dippy from further risk of injury.

In any event, for most of the match, whichever players were wearing the multi-coloured jerseys, it seemed it was the Harlequins’ team that was playing for its pride, not Caerphilly - even though they started off the match the other way around.  You know, it was strange but I actually found myself wanting Caerphilly to pull it off and win the match.  Yes, it is a bit weird, isn’t it?  I guess I’ll get slated for that.  But did anyone else feel the same way..?

Thankfully, that flock of birds seen circling the Stoop turned out to be seagulls and not vultures after all…

West Country Wobbles

As one of the message-boarders reminded us soon after the match had finished, our next home opponents Bath put in a pretty dire performance too, against mediocre Italian opposition at the Rec. 

On the other hand, Bristol Skodas - our next league game, away on Sunday – overturned all the pundits’ predictions, to beat French team Montferrand in the Grown Ups’ Cup, which will put them in good spirits.

Let’s look on the bright side - Bristol is closer to Wales than it is to the Stoop, so maybe we’ll play more like we did there than we did here…

And, for anyone who’d like the full set of lyrics, and chords, to ‘You Ain’t Seen Nothing Yet’, here’s a link.    

http://www.geocities.com/bettyloukaraoke/youaintseen.htm

Pay particular attention to the third line of the chorus: “Here's something that you never gonna forget…”

See you in Bristol.