Monday, July 02, 2012

Top 10 HoR posts 2011/12

The main reason Harpin On Rugby exists is so I can chuck in my two cents on Leinster & Ireland's performances every Monday morning.

Now the season is over and there's no more cents to chuck (and I can't even blame the Ulster Bank for that!) it's time to look back over the campaign and see which writeups generated the most hits.

Yes, I know this is a personal indulgence and don't worry, I'm not expecting you to follow all the links and read all the articles again...I guess this post is mostly for my own benefit so down the line I can look back and have a sense of not only how I saw the 2011/12 campaign, but how the readers reacted to it.

So starting at 9am I'll be counting down from 10 and sharing with you the posts that you thought were most worth the time skiving off work to read...
The last “warm-up” before the squad for the World Cup was announced and Ireland's first appearance at the Aviva Stadium for the season. We started brightly and let the French back in to it, something that's becoming a habit when we play them it seems. It was also the day we lost Felix Jones to injury plus Declan Kidney finally got the message that Tomás O'Leary was not Ireland's best scrum-half.
Even after the memorable win over the Wallabies, this was still a do-or-die encounter for us in Pool C the way the numbers added up. So being Irish of course our pre-match build up was frought with doom and gloom. But luckily all the Italians could muster was a spot of treachery in the forwards and we were able to comfortably dispatch them. This post reminds me of the week that came after it where Declan Kidney & the entire Ireland setup seemed to take their eye off the ball.
Hard to believe the season began this early but it did! And what an anti-climax of a kickoff it was. With just three minutes left the score was just 6-3 in our favour. Not sure if the crowd was even awake to see the game's only try! At least on the following Monday morning HoR readers were interested enough to make the writeup the 8thmost popular of the season! Oh, and here's a fact that may interest you...Paddy Wallace both began AND ended the season as Ireland's starting 12.
Certainly not a day Irish fans will want to remember, though it's worth noting that it was also the day of the Fabrice Muamba incident so the word “perspective” was there to be much bandied about afterwards. While everyone else was banging on about the collapse of the scrum, I was more concerned about how we came out for the second half in a contest we very well could have won. This was the day I began to lose the will to defend Declan Kidney.
You may think this would be further up the list, but it seems the more popular writeups rely on non-Leinster fans checking them out and I doubt any of them had any intention of going near this one! Though the All-Ireland nature of the final made for an excellent build-up, in the end the match as a spectacle was very similar to last night's Euro2012 soccer final in Kiev.
  1. Sunday, April 29, 2012 Clermont-15 Leinster-19 : “NOT FOR THE FAINT-HEARTED”
Simply thinking about this match gives me palpitations. Even though this was arguably Leinster's best display on French soil since “that” win in Toulouse we still came within a Wesley Fofana fumble of crashing out thanks to a combination of a crazy drop-goal attempt from Eoin Reddan and being completely out-foxed in the lineouts.
The 2ndmost recent writeup made it as high as fourth on the list. The way things stand now I can't see how we'll ever have a better chance to beat the All Blacks and although in many ways we can say “we wuz robbed”, I wanted to be clear in this article that this display far from redeemed the coaching staff in my eyes.

Not a match that would make many Leinster fans' top three from the season, but in terms of hits it must take its rightful place. I reckon it's just about worth it as it represents the incredible mid-season unbeaten streak Leinster enjoyed from September 17 to March 23 and each week I had to avoid making my writeups a “gush-fest”. And although we positively annihilated Cardiff on their two visits to Dublin, this match, like many throughout the course of the streak, was not without its good luck for Joe Schmidt's men.

After waking at 6am to wearily watch our World Cup wishes get wiped out by Warren's Welsh whirlwind in Wellington, we had a shot at instant redemption in our very next Test encounter to kickoff the 2012 Six Nations. There was a bit of concern during the buildup that Declan Kidney didn't appear too willing to chuck out the RWC gameplan and try something different but as long as the right result was achieved on the day, those concerns would have gone away quickly. Sadly though the penalty that gave Leigh Halfpenny was pretty much universally acknowledged by neutrals not to have been warranted, the fact that the Welsh got to within kicking range so easily was one of many facets in the performance that raised question marks over the squads preparation. I used this writeup to highlight the fact that with the one exception of Cardiff 2009, Declan Kidney's reign as Irish supremo has been haunted by Gatland at every turn.

If I told you my writeup that generated the highest amount of hits was a one-point win by the Ospreys at the RDS, you'd be forgiven for thinking that it was the RaboPro12 final. But actually it was the other one, which ended the long winning streak and some would say gave Leinster the dose of reality it needed to prepare for the bigger battles around the corner. I think the reason the final didn't even make the top ten was that Leinster fans were so stunned they largely stayed away from the ruggersphere afterwards! The main reason this particular post tops the lot is that someone posted a link to it on a Welsh rugby forum. Many of the commentators from across the Irish Sea clearly went looking for spiteful comments from yours truly but one did say the piece was “rather magnanimous given the circumstances”.

So that's it. No doubt this format had you in great suspense all day wondering which writeup was first, right? What's that? Hey, no need to be so harsh! ;-)

I just thought I'd do something a bit different on a Monday...from tomorrow, I'll be going back to introducing you to the excellent team of writers I'm putting together for this HoR2 blog over the coming weeks...there's three more Roots & All clubs to reveal, contributors on all sorts of rugby-related topics like betting, refereeing and even the Lions 2013, plus loads more.

So stay tuned to Twitter & Facebook for the links as they are posted! Thanks for following this countdown today. JLP


© JL Pagano 2012
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Taken by JLP from RDS press box on Nov 16, 2019