The Good & The Bad: Quins v Wasps
By Battering Ram Winger
December 29 2009
So, another Grand Day Out, no Wensleydale. Or victory. FWIW...
THE GOOD
1). Strettle's Try
Looks like he's back on form going forwards, anyway!
2). Robshaw
He's like an Energiser Bunny, he never stops
3). Good use of the subs bench
To fix problems.
THE BAD
1). The Match
Garbage as a spectacle barring a couple of brief flashes from either team. Set piece disasters all round for both teams, missed tackles, misplaced passes, the woeful kicking out of hand and off the tee, dropped balls, the guy in front of us turned round at the end and said he had more fun listening to the comments of despair emanating from me, my aunt and her husband (Wasps fans) than he did from the match.
2). Simpson's Injury
Looked self-inflicted as he went at Care, but no one likes seeing the oxygen come out. Percival one handedly tossing him aside can't have helped either. Mind you, Simpson got a bit of a schooling at the back fo the ruck and some of his passing was atrocious (as was Care's).
3). The Big Game
Not my seat at the Stoop. Another home advantage squandered in the name of marketing. All those people not giving a damn about the (admittedly poor) spectacle and amusing themselves with Mexican waves. The smoke from the fireworks obscuring half the pitch. The farce with the bird and the match ball. The X Factor karaoke massacres (the chap with the afro had a set of lungs on him given his size, I'll give him that). The terrible, horrid food (barring the faithful Jolly Hog back at...The Stoop). The awful beer. The total lack of atmosphere. The horrendous crowds afterwards. The soulless bowl of Twickenham. The cold toilets (nice and warm in the Members' Bar toilets, ZBMB and all). The flim flam. Being miles away from the action. The everything, frankly.
We were lucky to get a bonus point. Still, happy, happy, joy, joy! We'd better beat Leeds convincingly.
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In all probability we wouldn't have scored, but I'm sure I wasn't the only one hoping for another Stade moment. No chance, not with that ref.
And you can't complain about the atmosphere and then whine about the X-Factor guy - he got the crowd going way more than any of our players managed.
'The Bad' makes me not so ill - and I still feel like C R A P !!
You found significantly more BAD than GOOD, which seems correct.
As a TV pundit it was a disappointing result and our unforced error rate cost us dearly.
Looking at the generalities of our performance, the loss was more down to our errors, than down to their stunning intelligent game plan.
Wasps had some great individual moments but the net result was down to us - on balance Stretts cancelled out his personal error, Cips missed more kicks than we did so the one point margin was a little generous to us on the day.
We were pinged a bit more, but were not made to pay because Cips was way off and should not have started.
The one point was probably about right but had we implemented our game plan? accuratly we could have won.
The disappointment is that we still seem to be 'work in progress', which after last year is a step back ( IMHO )
Conclusion, WIP but we need to get it sorted pronto, the squad is good enough, the team is good enough, we are no longer carrying injuries, but we have the 6 nations looming.
Time to settle down lads and earn your corn.
Stretts was the best example last week - dont take any thing for granted.
for me that was the biggest difference between us. Wasps chased every thing down, we let them - was it over confidence ?
If so get the worry beads out !
on on quins
I agree about squandering home advantage and hope we don't repeat this next year. However spme of our play was so poor it wouldn't have mattered where we had played!
I'm really disappointed in Quins this year we seem to have gone back a long way. I was used to us being rubbish but, having had a season of being quite good, going back to being cr*p is quite hard to take.
all that pomp of the big game is a joke get your rugby sorted first its not good enough
I, like you, put the rugby first but without the money a pro club has nothing.
on on quins
That was one of the main bad points of the game for me. Some of the forwards were pretty slow to get to where the action was compared with their Wasps equivalents, leaving our backs to do a lot of rucking.
The other main 'bad' for me - Martin Johnson has broken Ugo.
Yeah, the England coaching set up seem to manage to do that with horrible regularity.
At Wasps, we remember Mark van Gisbergen coming back mentally in pieces. He's only just getting his old form back.