Harvey... ain't that a hoot ? Typical Yankee ingenuity. Oh, you might call it arrogance, but when it comes to gamesmanship, salesmanship, plain old hype, you can't beat the Yanks.

Hrothgar... I've been trying to get some of my buddies into rugby by having them over for beers, munchies and explanations of the games. I'm no expert, but I try. A couple of them downright refuse to enjoy it because of the latitude given the refs. They can't seem to accept that X may be acceptable play to one ref and not to another. Or that there are differences geographically. The worst is when one side is penalized for X and the other other side, a few minutes later, is simply warned for X, depending on the degree of X.

Yankee football leaves very little, if any, latitude to the refs. So much so that sometimes it gets in the way of the game. Many of the relatively new "players' safety" rules are sometimes enforced so stringently that the games suffers - afterall, it has been called "smashmouth" for years. The fact that there are now "video challenges" allowed (each side has three per half - I won't get into the details) on certain ref rulings makes ref'ing a very stressful job.

Anyway.... I see that my weekly game of rugby has been replaced by "Equestrian". Only way that would be exciting is if they loosed some hounds and had several riders at once.