An Eds Diary - 25th November 2003

By BrianC
August 12 2004

We lose our first home game of the season against Newcastle. England win the Rugby World Cup. The reaction to this in the media is remarkable.

An Ed’s Diary – 25th November 2003

London Irish 15 – 19 Newcastle, our first home loss this season. My overriding memory of the game is of the awful conditions. It had been raining heavily for the previous 48 hours and continued to do so right through the game. Given the conditions it was never going to be a pretty game. So it proved to be with plenty of handling errors by both sides. Indeed given how awful the weather was it was a remarkably good game.

The first fifteen minutes of the game was our undoing. We conceded the softest of tries under the posts after five minutes and a penalty not long after that. Coming back from a ten point deficit in that weather was always going to be an uphill struggle. We did in fact manage to take the lead 15 – 13 midway through the second half but let things slip after that. We were also victims of an inept refereeing performance, how Newcastle avoided having at least one player binned amazes me.

This was my first trip to the Madejski in almost two months. It was so good to see so many of the family again. Perhaps I enjoy the whole experience more than others because I only get to about a third of our games in a season.

England have won the world cup and deservedly so. The final was tense, it went into extra time and was won 30 seconds from time by a Wilkinson drop goal. The day before the final as quote of the day I put up Shakespeare’s Battle of Agincourt speech from Henry V. I expected this to get some reaction and it did. This ranged from threads entitled ‘Proud to be English’ to ‘Last refuge of a scoundrel’.

What has been quite remarkable has been the general response throughout the country. On Monday morning I bought two broadsheet papers. I was not surprised to see that the sports sections were full of the triumph but was quite taken aback to see that the news sections of each paper had several pages devoted to the story. The number of comparisons to the 1966 soccer world cup is striking. If the RFU and the clubs can harness this opportunity it could do a lot of good for our sport. I might just try to write an article on the subject.

The site has continued to be busy, with six days left in the month we are on 208k hits. I don’t think we’ll manage to overhaul last May’s record of 262k but we won’t be that far off, probably somewhere in the region of 255k. This is not at all bad given that it has been a 30 day month with 10 of those days being Sat and Sun which always have lower stats than weekdays. In the coming months we have European and Six Nation weekends so I would expect figures to drop off a bit. It may well be March with the St. Patricks game and all that that will see us threatening the record again.

Next weekend we face Sale at home. This will be the first time we have played the same team twice in the ZP this season. Let’s hope the weather and our performance improves.