80+ column : February 19

WRAP OF A WRAP

Hello and welcome to our latest 80+ column where I generally harp on things outside our normal remit, namely the latest match involving the Leinster/Ireland men’s team.

For our latest wrap pod we harped on Leinster’s 11th win out of 11 in the URC, with Rich Mifsud from Gibraltar and Ciarán Duffy from Bray doing their usual bang up job helping me do so.

We’ve been using a timer on the Zoom calls for the past few weeks to help keep the show under an hour and it has been working really well, especially since by a complete coincidence the app puts the clock right where I have the Harpin logo on the videos so nothing needed to change.

ICYMI click here to check it out on Spotify or you’ll also find us on Apple and most major platforms.

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THREADS PULLED

Made another change to our platform lineup, after adding the Substack channel something had to give. 

Mastodon had already made way for Discord, so we decided the next in line was to be Threads; to be honest I never really understood what I was getting from that platform anyway.  

But the Substack looks very useful indeed, I’m trying to use it to get myself actually writing again, including what I hope will be a weekly article named “Broken Play” which I’ll scribble on Saturday mornings for the foreseeable.  I am also restoring our “Throwback Thursday” feature where I’ll be trawling through the Harpin archives going back to 2008 for an old post which somehow relates to Leinster/Ireland’s next match.  With us playing in Cardiff this weekend you can probably imagine what bit of history I’ve chosen for the first one, but to confirm your suspicions you’ll have to actually click into our Substack on Thursday morning to find out!

Just to be clear, I have this Substack account as a FREE subscription so if you could take a look and maybe even subscribe you’d help me out a lot, cheers.

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BREAKING NEWS

UPDATE : this Ross Byrne story broke as we were posting, we’ll harp on it for our preview Friday

FRONT FIVE

A selection of eye-catching egg-chasing quotes & links from around the rugby media landscape

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OFF THE BOIL

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SWEET HOME CHICAGO

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BRING YOUR A GAME

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THOMOND THOUGHTS

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RE-LEASH A JAGUAR

HARPIN ON…LIONS TOUR – STILL WORTH IT?

For our bonus chat this week, our panel looked at the Lions Tour in the professional era.

Here’s the lead-in question…

“It’s a Lions year and two games into the Six Nations the talk about possible starting XVs and who’s ‘on the plane’ are already happening throughout the ruggersphere.  But for right now, we’re going to revisit a angle that we’ve been harpin’ on going way back to 2013 when we had a guest post from long time Babbling Brook message board poster curate’s egg titled “Lions: more ‘meh’, than miaow”.  Basically the question being asked is whether or not the Lions Tours are still relevant in the professional age and the questions have come from more and more people as we have gotten closer to the latest tours since then.  Starting with yourself Ciarán, are the Lions a concept worth continuing?”

BTW – we chose to steer clear of the ‘British Empire’ Lions argument in the video mostly because we figured the comment section would cover it pretty well and sure enough within half an hour we got the first one in, here’s a sample…

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IRELAND SQUAD UPDATE

With Doris and Kelleher listed as doubts since Monday’s update I took the approach whereby we do have enough cover not to risk them, this includes Tadhg Furlong who can get minutes off the bench for Leinster against Cardiff if needed.  I have a feeling Simon will stick with Sam and Bundee in the starting lineup but I for this selection I switched those for rotation’s sake and as you can see I have opted for what I call “The Porter Protocol” where Church puts in a full bore 30m shift allowing AP to see out the match.

caveat : I have no “ITK” a la Thornley

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TROLL PATROL

Now it’s time for Troll Patrol where we ‘detain’ a social media commentator and charge them with gaslightery and general online mayhem.  

It’s very important to remember that it’s not just so-called anonymous “keyboard warriors” who can be trolls.  In fact I find that term is most often used by the journos, probably to disguise the fact that they can often be the worst trolls themselves.  

Take this article from Stephen Jones.   I’m serious, please take it and get it as far away from me as possible!!!  Seriously though, maybe the sub editor has a lot to do with the choice of headline but having suffered SJ’s work in the past I’d say it’s a pretty accurate reflection of what he’s on about in the article itself.  No, I didn’t actually read it, nor would I want to.  I got enough from this headline to know it ranks right up there with Off The Ball’s nonsense I mentioned in this week’s Front5 video.

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Women’s Six Nations

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U20 Six Nations

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Celtic Challenge

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All Ireland Leagues

WOMEN’S AIL

MEN’S AIL 1A

MEN’S AIL 1B

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LEINSTER SCHOOLS SENIOR CUP

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SVNS

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Super Rugby Pacific

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Premiership

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🔝🐱🐴

ProD2

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RWC2027 QUALIFIERS

The RWC2027 tournament has expanded to 24 nations so with four extra spots up for grabs it makes for a fascinating qualifying process.

Rather than post the latest results and fixtures here however, I’d like to defer to the excellent work of frequent Harpin’ contributor Ciarán Duffy who has been keeping close tabs on the qualifying process over at his own site Post to Post Sport.

Follow this link to see how the Road to Australia is progressing..

Japan League One

Major League Rugby

Harpin Prediction League

This is the 4th season of our Superbru prediction league among Harpin’ pod contributors.  

Kristian is the reigning champion, but the real competition is in avoiding finishing last, which means you must wear The Jersey of Shame.  I had to wear it the first year, while Keego has had the honour the past two seasons.  As you can see our resident stats expert Rugby Kino is leading the way but we’re only passing the halfway stage, and we’ve also added a Cup (or Mug) competition to make things interesting – I managed to overcome Jay in the first quarterfinal, with Conor leading Rich with one outstanding match left in Round 11.

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NEXT BATCH OF HARPIN’

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