Spiffsson wrote:Shan wrote:Actually just looking there and Fitz has had 120 starts and 32 tries which is 3.75 starts per try while Madigan has 82 starts and 24 tries which is just 3.4 starts per try. Therefore I now propose we move Madigan to the wing if we want to win the RWC.
Given the straight, head to head choice, I'd even have Quiffy on the wing ahead of Fitz. I am totally mystified about Joe's Fitz love-in and have given up trying to understand it. He has had umpteen chances to impress for Ireland and so far, has not. Yet Joe persists with him despite the claims of several better wings. Just off the top of my nog, here are the wings I'd rate ahead of Fitz :
Bowe
Trimble
Gilroy
Zebo
Earls
McFadden
Daverage
Matt Healy
My aunty Madge in her chicken-feeding wellies
You see Spiffer's, herein lies the conundrum. Shan, a man known both here and in his own mind, as one who possesses something rare on your island. An almost English sense of fairness
, he on yin haun grudgingly confesses that Young Gilroy may be better than overblown gobshite, Fitzgerald, yet maintaining a solid front saying that not only is FibberJoe more infallible than Pope Frankie, but is not influenced by extraneous malignant forces, to wit the Dublin press.
Is it any wonder that when a man of such famed lack of bias can find himself mired in this weird dichotomy, that the common poster finds himself spinning in a whirling morass of doubt battering his senses and finding this more confusing than the thought of the apparent lack of definable dimensions of the universe or the precise location of "heaven"?
I submit the following for consideration. We all know that the statistics behind apparent "home advantage" in terms of results is odd. There is no rational explanation for ..... Let's say Zebre horsing ye Nordies in pastaland, but we know it happened. Similarly many refs are accused of being "homers" yet with one obvious exception
we don't believe them deliberately biased. My own interpretation is that they simply cannot block out the effects that a home crowd bring to their decision making.
The last bit is important in my own thinking on the FibberJoe/Fitzgerald dichotomy. I can accept Shan's absolute assurance that FibberJoe is straight down the line honest and not consciously influenced, so I put to the class that he is swayed by the white noise of repeated boosting by Thornley and his ilk of Mexicans.
That has to be, there is no other explanation. Maybe, just maybe, Pope Frankie still leads the infallibility champion hurdle by half a length from Shan, with Snipe making a late run on the rail. G'wan
