Results tagged “Rugby” from Birmingham Post - Sport Blog

Gareth Taylor finds positives in Saturday's 15-9 defeat at London Welsh and feels the benefit of the squad's pre-season preparations.
But the Moseley captain also admits his men need to be fitter if they are to successfully adapt to the law changes having lost their shape at crucial junctures at the weekend.

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It's that time of year again. Wimbledon is over, the rain continues unabated and the strawberries rot on the plant in the downpour. Ah the British summer.

Except, of course, the twice weekly two-hour long heat waves that miraculously appear between 7-9pm every Tuesday and Thursday when most over-weight, unfit rugby enthusiasts are embroiled in what is widely known as pre-season training.

It should really be called pre-season draining for there is no other way to describe the sensations associated with the unwelcome return to physical exercise. My personal favourite is the giddy feeling associated with rising vomit and overheating heads that feel as though they are going to explode. The puke usually wins.

Amidst all this widespread misery, however, there are a few individuals who have never been happier. They are the suppressed sadists, frustrated personal trainers and wannabe sergeant majors of the world or - as they are otherwise known, the conditioning coaches.

Like most self respecting torturers they spend a considerable amount of time devising their strategies. They begin with a starting point of effect - 'Make the buggers sick' - and construct the cause around it. Here are my five of my least favourite pre-season routines.

I can't claim to have met all the mal-adjusted psychopaths in the sport so perhaps you'd like to add your own.

There have been some pretty harsh things written about the England players and management during the tour to New Zealand, described in various national newspapers as disastrous, calamitous and disgraceful - in some cases all three.
I will leave the off-field shenanigans to those who know more about the circumstances of the alleged incident. My only comment is that it will be sad if through a combination of the cult of celebrity and their own inability to deal with the attendant fame, rugby players go the same way as footballers and become front page fodder.
On the field England were beaten twice - and soundly. The concession of nine tries and very little idea about how to attack the All Blacks is a pretty damning indictment of the current coaching regime.

If I ever possessed the desire, or indeed the intellect, to become a lawyer I would base my specialism on the old Barber's Maxim that suggests no matter what happens to the economy people will still need their hair cutting.

The same principle applies to rugby union and litigation. As long as there's an oval ball and H-shaped posts they'll be some club or player that needs a brief. My children would never go hungry.

And so it proves again this year. While the climax to the National One season came several weeks ago the standings have still not been finalised. The players have packed up their kitbags and gone on holiday but the suits are fighting with the vigour one would expect from a relegation threatened team defending its goal-line.

Two West Midlands clubs are at the heart of the action. The fates of Pertemps Bees and Coventry hang in the balance. The blood, sweat and tears shed over the course of eight months and 30 games is rendered insignificant when compared to the cases argued by the club's hired legal guns.

I was at the recent replay of the Sam Doble Memorial Match at Billesley Common and - accuse me of naivety - I was pretty disappointed with what I saw.

I didn't expect the star-studded British Lions XV that turned up for the first game in 1977 and didn't go thinking it'd be anything other than a knockabout in the sun.

In fact I left feeling it hadn't been too bad an afternoon with some entertaining rugby, excellent performances and more old faces than an early edition of a Who's Who.

But having bought a DVD of the original match my sense of loss became acute. Forget the fact Phil Bennett, Gareth Edwards, Gerald Davies and JPR Williams weren't present on the Common, by comparison the modern version was still sterile.