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Monday, August 16, 2004

NRL Expansion A No Go 

Been busy as a monkey in a fruit tree these last few days. How's a man supposed to go to a friends for a gathering of drunk gambling eaters, travel for miles to a 6 a side soccer tournament, teach 30 classes a week, get fitted for wedding photos clothes, go jogging, watch the olympics, send out wedding invites by the hundred nicely folded, stuffed in envelopes and boxes along with a book, and blog at the same time?

The answer is he doesn't. He just waits till one is finished and then very quickly starts the next.

Well the big news of the day for yours truly was that the NRL have decided against expansion and say they will look again next year with a view to adding one or more teams in 2007. Looks like a crafty move as even though the Gold Coast and Central Coast bids have implied it's all over for them FOREVER if they don't get accepted now, they may be able to hang on one more year for another crack. Although the NRL will need to send out very favourable signals over that time or else I feel they won't bother hanging in there. There's only so long you can string people along for.

The Southern Orcas on the other hand most certainly are not going to collapse if they are told to wait a few more years so expect to see them in the NRL in about three-five years.

Kind of stupid though as they would easily have the playing strength as it won't be long before there are 100 NZ born or developed (or with parental ties at least) on NRL squads. It could get to the crazy point where most of the players are eligible for NZ and Aussie stops breeding the best altogether (well to a point anyway). It would be nice if we had another team to send our up and comers to apart from the Bulldogs and Storm (who have about a dozen NZ players running about between them).

Anyhows, interesting rumour bennyasena has heard there. You do have to wonder what the hell they have been playing at lately though. I mean when was the last time NZ went four tests for a total of four tries? It might be worth checking out but I can't remember a stretch like that off the top of my head. Maybe it's not so far back as it seems.

Olympics have been a hard watch in Korea. So far I've been bombarded with Korean badminton, table tennis, judo, volleyball, basketball, hockey and god knows what else and been stuck on the internet trying to monitor our progress although....

I did just see the New Zealand v Korea womens basketball game live on tv. Cool watching it with my Korean wife. I never knew she could be such a sore loser. Turning the tv off, bad mouthing our players, sitting in front of the tv so I couldn't see, trying to change the channels, scratching my eyes...

Our sailors seemed to do quite well on Day two after a pretty ordinary opening day I thought. Lets put it this way, on day one I saw a lot of double figure placings while on day two we were inside the top 10 most of the time. In these races there are a lot of competitors and you have to fight the elements and get a little luck so you can win a medal simply by consistently placing in the top ten and never finishing in the top few or winning a race.

Our dressage team were doing ok with (sorry forgotten the name) sitting in second spot which is good for NZ as we are better at cross country and show-jumping) and apart from that it's been mainly losses with the odd victory here and there in match sports. Still I think we've been doing pretty good so far.

Right then, Im off to count commas. Muhahahahaha. Thanks for the link Mr. Brown. 210 today and counting. Going to beat our other highs of just over 200 on three other occasions (all coming from the same direction).

Comments:
I've checked. it seems we have to go back to the end of 1993 through into mid 94 to find a four match stretch where we scored just three tries.

Actually went went 18 months for just 6 tries over that time, but we didn't play a hell of a lot of opposition and it was all top shelf (ie. England, France, South Africa and Australia). Managed to lose 4, win 2 and draw 1 in that stretch.
 
"Badminton, table tennis, judo, volleyball, basketball, hockey and god knows what else" sound pretty good compared to hours upon hours of pretentious tossers farting about on horses, which is what we were stuck with here last night.

Can't help but feel the horses do 99% of the work ... are the riders even "athletes"?

If so, how about adding gallops and chariot races (Roman, I know) to the Olympics?
 

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