Fitzgerald Stadium. It’s not owned by the GAA 
It would be the irfus call so no chance
My bro is was there with the Connacht supporters, God love him.
Absolutely hilarious. We sll were laughing at cirk for the same gaff. Wouldnt expect less from a shower of thick cunts like munster rugby
I am
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Harlequins - Leicester on BT3; entertaining stuff so far. Nemani Nadolo is a some block of a man now
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Waratahs look to have ridden out the Crusaders comeback here, ten up against 13 men for (most of) the last ten
Edit: try Crusaders
Massive effort here from the Irish side to avoid the wooden spoon. Battering the Scottish line with minutes to go and 6 points down. The tension is unbearable.
A few of these wans would swallow the ball before actually getting it over the line.
Fucking incredible tension. Into OT. Ireland camped on the line. Women strewn all over the place. The fucking nerves lads.
We’re over, its down!!!
Its a one point game.
We need the extras.
Its fucking on lads!
Enya Breen, they’ll be making fucking elevator music to you, ya little ride you.
An unmissable kick, but jesus lads, theres no easy kicks.
Enya is lining it up. She needs to follow the flow.
She does it! Sail away, sail away!!!
Fucking scenes. Lads, this is incredible. We have avoided the Wooden Spoon. These scenes will top anything an Irish woman does this weekend. Incredible. Fuck you you shower of caber tossing kilt wearing cunts.
Enya
Enya
Enya!
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Anyone post Neil Francis article today. Thanks.
RUGBY UNION | NEIL FRANCIS
Munster have the ability to see off Toulouse but do they have the support?
Neil Francis
Sunday May 01 2022, 12.01am BST, The Sunday Times
The 2006 Heineken Cup final between Munster and Biarritz was a very decent game of rugby but its legend paled into insignificance when it was compared to the ingenuity of Munster fans in their ability to find tickets, accommodation and flights.
I had left it late and ended up flying to London and driving down to Cardiff such was the frenzy. One fella was smart enough to think outside the box. In 2006 you probably had to pay extra for sat-nav to get the best of the hills and dales of west Wales. There was also a payment plan in place in case you exceeded the stipulated mileage allowance.
“No sat-nav then?”
“No”
“No extra mileage?”
“No, just the keys please.”
The punter had hired a camper van and the van did not travel one inch as it was only 1,500 metres from the Principality Stadium. The boys — four of them — had a bed each for €50 for the weekend, none of this €500 a night that the Cardiff hotels were charging. Nobody put a stipulation on not leaving the premises, and the proprietor had no issue letting them stay in the compound. Give that fella a job on Munster’s coaching ticket.
The demand for everything associated with game was frenzied — but would it be the same now?
Prior to that final, the semi-final in Lansdowne Road against Wasps in 2004 was another great occasion. A full house, but a Sunday game, I wouldn’t really be working at it. Would I sell my press ticket? It was one of those days on a glorious spring afternoon that if a bus ran you over after the match you would not complain too much to Saint Peter, such was the sense of the occasion and the quality of fayre.
Wasps took the honours after being down 32-22 with 20 minutes left. You could have sold the game out twice over. Wasps brought their full allocation over. Nobody was tempted by those crafty feckers ringing their ticket office for any spare. A full house and an atmosphere that sparkled and fizzed — what a game.
Ticket sales for Saturday’s quarter-final, right up to yesterday, were stodgy at best. This is Toulouse that Munster are playing. Five times and reigning champions. Top 14 champions, too. A team featuring half a dozen France 2022 grand slam champions. Surely the urge to unseat them would be irresistible?
Van Graan, left, will want some silverware for players like O’Donoghue
The challenge is where Munster want to be after a lamentable 12 or so years. Joan of Arc famously rallied her troops at the town of Vaucouleurs, a 17-year-old girl leading troops into battle: “I am not afraid — I was born to do this.” Where is the rallying call? Who is leading the charge? Toulouse are there for the taking. A little bit of planning and belief and it is there for Munster.
Ulster must be sick after leaving the competition in the manner that they did. Dan McFarland really has done a good job there. They haven’t got the monkey, in the form of Leinster, off their back, and they lose to Connacht far too often, but they go to France, and they win there. They are accustomed to winning domestically — to the point that they expect to do so. A win against Toulouse in Toulouse is a big achievement, and while they rode their luck, their fortitude galvanised them in the trickier moments, and the sporting gods smiled in their favour. Robert Baloucoune also scored a hat-trick.
Toulouse looked a little jaded, and the fabled Antoine Dupont and Romain Ntamack lacked the match sharpness that stood them so well throughout the Six Nations. The illustrious Ntamack, for whatever reason, has not really been himself this season. Maybe Matthieu Jalibert’s injury woes made Ntamack ease up. Great players always look forward but need to feel pressure from behind.
You never got the sense that Toulouse were going to Belfast to sweep Ulster away and show that that loss in Toulouse was a blip.
In rugby, however, you just can’t shadow trail runners. Dupont is the best trail runner on the planet. He sees the path coming like a chess grandmaster, and sometimes travels 50 metres to be on the shoulder of the last pass. It is a great intuition, and there is nothing teams can do when he bursts on to what is normally an inside feed to finish. Dupont, for his winning effort in Belfast in the 75th minute, despite an erratic night, just happened to be in the fly-half slot and had to pinch himself to see that it was Marty Moore in front of him 10 metres from the line. A quick pull on the afterburners and he scooted past the prop for the winning try. Nothing of note for the previous 74 minutes — you can say that is the sign of champions. They tread water for 75 minutes, and then they gut you.
Toulouse just look a degree off where they should be at this stage of the season. They lost to Toulon last week in front of a 60,000 crowd, and had another tough match against
La Rochelle last night. At the time of writing, Toulouse were sitting in sixth place in the Top 14.
They are ripe to be turned over, and Munster might just remember their lines here. What is important is a sell-out crowd. Where are those people who begged, stole, and borrowed to connive a ticket? Where are the fellas booking into a camper van in Dublin? If Munster are put in a position where everyone travels and there is a full house, then a team that has been sleepwalking into another close season of indistinction might be either embarrassed or encouraged into a performance that is in them.
Get a 30,000 crowd at the Aviva and that gives hope and encouragement to Toulouse. Get a full house, and Toulouse might not be thinking any more that Munster are a busted flush with a lame-duck coach. I know we are in the third decade of professionalism, but a match such as this really requires a full house and a sense of occasion if Munster are to progress.
That first requirement is essential. The second is that a game plan to trouble Toulouse has to be dreamed up. Over the past 20 years, Munster have had some decent coaches, and while Johann van Graan has received a fair bit of criticism for his team’s failings, he could point at his win ratio of 69 per cent, which is higher than that of Declan Kidney at 64 per cent, but still a distance off Rassie Erasmus’s 77 per cent. The difference, regardless, is that Kidney won the important games and had his teams primed to win.
In those two Heineken Cup final victories Munster played the smartest game they could, and executed it with the sort of zeal that crowned them champions. Van Graan’s teams have got to semi-finals and either produced their worst performance of the season, when it required their best, or were ruthlessly exposed by superior teams even when their limited game plan went as scheduled.
It’s hard to know whether the coach overthinks things. Van Graan’s background is as a video analyst, not someone who can dream up total football. So, when it comes to the vital games against a superior side, Munster seem to withdraw into their shell and play a pretty one-dimensional game. A prescriptive game of box-kicking and territory-based rugby, which reflects the coach’s dour personality. Is there
any chance that in the final two months of his Munster career he might give it a whirl, given that what he has asked his team to do has been patently wrong?
Munster have enough quality across the park to get a job done against Toulouse, who are bereft of momentum, and the body language in Belfast more represented relief than exultation after the final whistle. I have a feeling about this, but they’ve got to have a full house first.
Any Lunsters left out there?
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This one
A colleague who had a son on the team was there, and at one point went to the men’s bathroom. When he walked in, at least seven of the players were snorting cocaine.
The sang-froid displayed by these 16 and 17-year-olds was shocking. They continued to snort the powder right in the middle of the room, with the coaches, teachers and rest of the parents outside blissfully unaware of what was going on just a couple of metres away.
That is all I can say about that incident, apart from the fact that my information is first hand, and it is true.
If some rugby schools are doing cocaine, are not the GAA schools and football schools of Ireland doing it too?
I refer to schools in that way because it is their athletes who are taking cocaine — the very people who should not be touching the stuff. This does not mean that their other students are free from suspicion.
Nor are the girls’ schools untouched by the cocaine scourge. The Kinahans’ foot soldiers don’t distinguish between the night clubs or the school yard — they go anywhere there is a market.
Some schools know there is an issue — a number of them employ companies to send sniffer dogs into the locker rooms and the comomon areas during the academic year. There is a merry-go-round of troublesome kids who are caught with cocaine or other drugs, and expelled. They get a second and a third chance with other schools, to which they are sent for a fresh start.
Several rugby clubs are known for having a “marching powder” tradition. There is one club in Dublin where literally the entire squad is using cocaine, and has a supplier on board. The amateur game is a hotbed for cocaine, and while it is merely prevalent here, usage is rampant in the UK. The Top 14 club competition in France is thought to be one of the drug dealers’ favourite markets.
Are we to assume all our GAA clubs and soccer clubs are completely free of cocaine too? If not, what word do we use here — occasional, prevalent, rampant?
How cocaine exacts a terrible toll on Ireland’s youngsters
It is 1987 and I am travelling home from the Rugby World Cup. I have been on the island of Oahu in Hawaii for a few weeks, and this is my last day. I have had a fantastic time. There is a party going on in a Korean bar in the Waikiki district. It is late as I walk to a table where two revellers are relaxing. On the table is a tray and there are four lines of cocaine neatly set out on it.
“Wotcha doing, lads?”
“What does it look like, you big dumb Irish f***?”
As this was the 1980s, I took the insult as a compliment. No need for months of therapy to recover from the slight. “Go on, Irish, have some.” A crisp rolled-up twenty was proffered and a nod of encouragement.
I was drunk enough and certainly stupid enough to try it but the calm in my refusal surprised even myself. This was a life-changing divergence. You don’t get a chance to think these things through: it is down to belief or instinct. You can try cocaine for the first time only once, and after that the choices are no longer your own.
If you try it once you would most definitely try it again if the opportunity presented itself, and I was certain I did not want to go down that road.
Moments later a friend popped out to us and snorted two lines. He had been taking pretty much everything that was on offer that night, and the mix set him off like Zebedee from The Magic Roundabout. He ran out to the car park and started running over cars, setting off alarms. I rang him a couple of days later from Los Angeles. He would not function properly for weeks afterwards. It was a salutary lesson for both of us.
I have never smoked or taken drugs. The reluctance is not a generational issue — there were people taking cocaine and opioids a century ago. A reluctance to get caught up in a sordid drug existence precluded most people from engaging in it. Drug-taking somehow became fashionable in the Sixties and Seventies. Now it has reached the point where many people will not think twice about taking cocaine, in particular children. It is on that basis I have to write about it.
As an athlete, you have to be stupid to get caught taking cocaine. It can be out of your system in the space of a day or two. A urine or blood test won’t pick it up after that. A good hit on the Friday night followed by a dope test the next day will get you. But why on earth would you risk taking some a day or so before a game? Well, sometimes you are not in a position to refuse your own urges.
In schools rugby it does not matter because, by law, you cannot test a 17-year-old at a game unless their parents are with them and consent. I have had plenty of drug tests after international matches and rarely got a useable sample away within 90 minutes or so. What parent would hang around for that?
If the schools or clubs want to be sure, there is a way. Cocaine stays in the hair follicles for three to six months and sometimes longer after being ingested. Some companies, particularly in America, ask prospective employees for a lock of hair as part of the terms of employment. It isn’t always something stupid that you have written on Twitter or Instagram that will disqualify you from the position. The practice has died away a bit, given the number of candidates who were testing positive. Maybe the coke fiend is still the best candidate for the job.
What is profoundly disturbing is that many children and adolescents find that the body beautiful is something they aspire to, and this is why cocaine is so popular. If you are male and you are out for the night, why would you drink seven or eight pints when the net result is a hangover and an inability to work out the next day? That beer also goes directly to the bottom line, your gut, and that is anathema to any self-respecting youngster who craves a sculpted body.
Cocaine is an appetite suppressant, which would make it especially attractive to some girls. You get the hit but not the heft. At what cost though? What price the euphoric high and the feeling of invincibility? Do our children know the trade-off? It is obvious that some simply do not realise how dangerous the drug is.
For the athlete, cocaine is deadly. It is one of the strongest vasoconstrictors on the planet, tightening up blood vessels and restricting the flow.
Play a game or do a workout after taking cocaine, and the chances of a heart attack or arrhythmia (an abnormal heartbeat) during or immediately afterwards are high. Continuous use as an athlete is looking for trouble.
What I am about to say is sensitive but someone needs to say it. Have any of our children died on sport fields, or a short while afterwards, as a result of taking synthetic drugs or cocaine? A lot of these children die from congenital heart defects, arterial abnormalities or myocarditis caused by a viral infection. But I do wonder if any have died because they had ingested cocaine. Could we guess at a percentage? Healthy children, sometimes the fittest guys on the team, fall over and breathe their last and we do not always really ask why.
Our children cannot take mind- altering, mood-changing drugs that dramatically alter the delicate chemistry of a young adult’s brain without severe consequences. Depression is often the cause of suicide. It can, of course, be caused by many factors, but what percentage of young adults become depressed as a result of taking drugs? To me it is never the other way round — our children don’t get depressed first and then start taking drugs.
Teenagers and twentysomethings are hopelessly ill-prepared to deal with the lows that automatically come after cocaine use; the anxiety, restlessness, increased irritability, paranoia and full-blown psychosis. Adverse psychological and physiological effects are almost guaranteed. Because they cannot tell their parents, sometimes their families find out only when they discover their child at the end of a rope. Yes, these are tough words to read but they are begotten by the grim reality of what is going on all around us.
What about mature athletes? In American NFL and Major League Baseball, it may be easier to assess the state of the game by asking the question: who is not on cocaine? In the NFL I have a suspicion that the strong and devastating symptoms that are attributed to chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE) are not exclusively due to that progressive brain condition. A huge percentage of former players are drug addicts and display symptoms that can be attributed to long-term drug abuse. When these players kill themselves, the post-mortem and toxicology report are highly informative — yet everyone still points to CTE.
More than ten years ago, the former rugby internationals Justin Harrison and Matt Stevens were found to have taken cocaine while playing for Bath RFC and, along with a few others, seem to have engendered a cocaine tradition in that club. Bath was a powerhouse in the Eighties and Nineties and then it was turned into a drug den. I don’t think it has fully recovered from the scandal.
A few years later in Paris, Ali Williams, the All Blacks lock, and James O’Connor, the Australian outhalf, were arrested on the street for buying cocaine from a dealer. In an era when it is like ordering a takeaway, when a courier will come to your house and give you as much cocaine as you like, it seems tawdry that rugby superstars would lower themselves to buying from a street seller. That is the level we are at.
Yes it was going on in my time but cocaine was nowhere near as popular as it is now. Of the nearly 200 Irish professionals, I wonder, have any tried it? What goes on in the off-season? A lock of hair in July might tell a lot.
Meanwhile outdoor concerts are back. How much cocaine was used at Croke Park last weekend? Every year the festivals usually produce a couple of fatalities — all we can do is hope and pray it is not our son or daughter. I have lost a number of friends and acquaintances through drug use, primarily involving cocaine. When I say lost, I mean they had strokes or heart attacks or they overdosed. Some killed themselves. Others I “lost” are still alive but their lives are ruined, their brains are scrambled, they are different people from the ones I used to know, and I have no interest in being with them any more. I am sure I am not the only person to experience this. It goes a long way towards explaining why I hate the drug, its culture and the people who bring it to this island and the rest of the world.
I have no ready solution to the problem. Shaking a stick at the government and blaming it for inadequate this and substandard that is a waste of time.
I was in Singapore years ago, a civilised and safe country where crime levels are low. Singapore executes murderers and drug dealers. It hangs them. Opinion polls suggest that up to 95 per cent of the population support continued use of the death penalty. Singaporeans are happy that their women are safe and that drugs and all the misery they entail are kept away from their children.
I am not advocating the death penalty here. But if you asked whether I would prefer to see drug dealers or some of our children at the end of a rope, there would only be one answer.
In another 30 years, it will be chaos. Wake up.
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Gave up halfway but that’s classic Franno. An article full of lies and misinformed bullshit. 16 year olds openly doing coke in a pub jacks and a fella taking weeks to come down after 2 lines 
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