I need to be able to check the functioning of the -More- feature. That means I need a longer post, so here comes some rugby stuff. If you don’t want to know the result of the England-Australia game, don’t click.

I was having lunch with a friend of mine on Thursday and we both agreed that if England wanted to start winning games again then they needed to win them ugly. They had to revert to what I called the “Bill Beaumont’s Arsenal” approach (that’s “we only ever win 3-0”, it’s an English soccer joke). Fortunately for this side, Brian Ashton seems to have come to the same conclusion. There were occasional flashes of talent from Billy Whizz and Sackey, but for the most part the English team did what they do best: dominate the scrum, dominate the breakdown, and hit so hard that you win the ball in contact. It isn’t pretty, but it works.

And that puts England into the semi finals, from which point all things are possible. The likelihood is, however, that they’ll face the All Blacks next, and that won’t be quite as easy as facing the Wallabies. That is, assuming that the mercurial French don’t manage to pull of a miracle. The trouble with the French is that they just might. You never can tell.