Now, lets move onto forward passes, and les Blues fullback re living his Joe Nameth* days, slipping a nice forward pass to support, leading to the second Froggy try.  Bitter about the reffing, who me??  As I said above, if you are good enough, you can win an international test match that is controlled by a schoolboy grade referee.  The Blacks just weren’t.

Why the fuck was this poncing little poofter controlling this match at any rate?  There are some good referees in this RWC, and this bloke wasn’t one of them, and isn’t one of them.  Biased calls, I think so, it was almost blatant at times.  I think a Frenchman could have pulled out a gun and shot an All Black and not conceded a penalty in that last ten minutes.  Offside lines, what are those?  Last feet, well, there are 62 on the paddock, which ones shall I get behind, those All Black halfback ones look handy, and I think the Ref is using those at any rate for his line.

Enough Ref bashing – suffice to say, there is a shit sandwich winging its way to England right now, lets hope the lilttle prick has enough grace to eat it…

Lets now start some All Black bashing. 

Why the hell put the brown brothers on the wings and then not use them?  Sivivatu, who?  Rokocoko got busy and tried to get involved, but Siviv, FFS, if he can’t look interested in a RWC quarter final, when can he?  To be fair, which I sometimes do try to be, perhaps the All Black backline should have used him a bit more a bit wider. 

The whole backline in fact looked a bit scared to use the ball, clammed up, went into their shells, almost looked frightened to try anything in case they made an error – well, how the hell have you been playing for the last four years you plonkers!!  Take risks, score tries and win games.

The forwards battled themselves to a standstill.  The French stats called them making something like 130+ tackles.  100 of those would have been from the All Black pick-and-goes.

Lineouts were smart, scrums strong, loose forwards accurate (but for McCaw in those early rucks, but now, after the 80 minute performance of that whistle blower, perhaps he was shafted there too – probably not, but after that performance, fucking hell, why put a fucking apprentice in to a world title bout), basically the forwards played themselves to a standstill.

There can be no blame placed on those forwards for this loss, not in my book anyway, they did all they could to lay the foundation for the win.  The choke starts out in the ‘margin deciders’, the blokes who should decide how much you win by after the forwards lay the platform for the win.

So, the chokers, number nine to fifteen.  Those 1B5 exercise books that have all your plays in them, the try scoring moves, the match winning ploys, did you leave them on the bus?

OK, Lucky did a few individual things well, but as a unit, it looked like they had not been introduced before the game, hell, it didn’t not look like they had been introduced until half time, and then with the players coming and going so damn quick, it was hard to remember who was who anyway. 

So forwards OK, backs, shite, Ref even worse, and the French magnifique (excuse spelling, my Frogolian is a bit rusty, you know what I mean)!! 

After the first spell where they thought that they would just kick the bladder out of the ball, they decided to hold onto the damn thing, and run at the All Blacks.  It worked, much easier to play rugby when you are not chasing All Black counter attacks all day.  Much easier to defend the minutes and minutes of pick-and-goes from the fatties in close, as opposed to chasing after the speed merchants out wide.

And wasn’t that French defence huge.  Don’t worry about them being a touch offside, the tackles had to be made, time and time again, and they were.  It was, as I misspelt above, magnifique!

So well done France, and well done England – one of these two will be facing the Boer juggernaut in a fortnights time, probably.  Unless the Boers get the complete PistonWristedGibbon whistle blower that controlled this match, then fuck knows what will happen…