I Smell Like Cheese

So one of the many stereotypes surrounding any number of nationalities, is that of smell.

Indians smell like curry, the French smell like Garlic, Koreans smell like Kimchi, Japanese smell like fish, English smell like dairy products, americans smell like obesity.

I am conforming to stereotypes right now; for some reason I smell like cheese.  I had a shower last night, and as it's not bollock-melting (yet) I'm not sweating either.  I honestly don't know why I smell so awful, but the second I get home, it's another shower and clothes washing.

Anyway, of the news.  I played for Tokyo Gaijin yesterday, against Waseda Old Boys.  Waseda are a university here in Japan, their old boys aren't old, but simply ex-students.  They're all really young, in fact.  If we won, we'd go through to the semi-final.  If they won, they'd go through.  An important factor to remember is that they are all Japanese, and we are primarily foreigners.

In any other country, exiles are treated with respect.  London Welsh, London Irish and a host of others were influential enough to be part of the top tier divisions.  Even if none of the teams have any affiliation with their original nationalities now, they did at some point and yet they still succeeded.

In Japan, if a Japanese team loses to a foreigner team, it's ritual suicide time.  Therefore, the referee was once again horrendous.  He did his best to ensure the Japanese team went through.  Boy, he did his best.  The penalty count would have been roughly 20 to the locals, 7 to us.  I obviously don't know the exact count, but in all honesty I'm probably being kind to the referee.  I think a ratio of 1:4 is more likely.

The quality of refereeing in Japan is appalling.  Racism rocks!

Anyway, I had a howling first 20 minutes.  The kind of first quarter that makes managers take people off the pitch.  I turned over a couple of balls, I dropped two high kicks, I broke their line only to pass into touch.  It was the kind of nightmare start no one wants.

I was very much the barometer for the team, because we gave away penalty after penalty.  We let in a try and a number of goal kicks.  We were basically two tries down after 20 minutes.  If the referee weren't a racist prick, we'd probably be down a handful of points.  As it was, we were down a bucketful.  It was like mandara all over again; a racist referee deliberately giving the home team a massive advantage, so that the locals didn't have to commit hari-kari.

After the 20 minutes mark, things started looking up.  They put a couple of kicks in behind us, but they ran dead.  I got the ball a few times and made a few breaks.  They all fizzled into nothing, but I was making ground.  Our scrum annihilated theirs.  To the point where it was wheeling before their scrum half had put the ball in.  He delayed as long as possible, the referee let it go of course.  It was 90 degrees before the ball was in, but the ref let them play on.  Our scrum was perfect, yet we had 3 penalties against us for being foreigners.  Their scrum kept popping up under the pressure, their number 8 wasn't bound once.  Their flankers were on our side of the scrum when we rolled through them.  Not a single penalty against them.  Unbelievable.  I hope someone at the JRFU is reading this, because it's not good enough.

You, person from the JRFU, why is the national team so bad?  Could one of the (admittedly many) factors be the awful refereeing?  I think the fact that no referee has ever seen a game of rugby before, certainly doesn't help.  I'm not asking for professional level refereeing; I'm just asking for some semblance of sanity.  Or maybe read a book about refereeing.

Oh, and stop being racist.

That last bit might be difficult for Japanese referees, I admit.

Anyway; I made a few line breaks in the first half, and we went over to give some form of parity at half time.  We were still behind, but the fact we'd scored made a massive difference.  The team started playing with ball in hand, and we threatened every time we put a few phases together.  We kept knocking on, and making stupid handling errors in the first half, but the second half was much improved.

I managed to smash a guy.

I don't know if I've mentioned this before, but Japanese love to cheat.  They love the dirty shots.  I was on the floor getting up, in full view of the referee who was looking at me, when one of the opposition kicked me in the nads.  It was deliberate, it was in full view of the referee who was looking at me and the guy who did it; and he shrugged.  He fucking shrugged.  That referee is a piece of shit.  Fuck him.  Cunt.  Unsurprisingly he didn't get any cheers at the end of the match, and he didn't walk through the tunnel.  Typically the referee will get some kind of plaudit at the end of the game, even if he did terribly.  For him not to get anything is indicative of how loathed he was.  He's an asshole.  Fuck that guy.  I wonder if he would like to be kicked in the balls and have no repercussion for the other player?  That boggled my mind, and my testicles.

Anyway, of the cheating.  A player kicked the ball through, in the act of kicking I hit him.  Before he'd actually kicked the ball, or I'd actually touched him, he was shouting with his arms raised (you have to imagine the comedy of dropping the ball to kick it, and immediately raising your arms, it's really difficult to do) that I'd impeded his progress.  The whole event was so farcical as to render it impossible for the referee to yellow card me, but it was surely on his mind.  I winded the cheating piece of crap, so the moral is that if someone is about to hit you with their shoulder, don't raise your arms thereby exposing your rib cage.  Twat.

I managed to stop a couple of players who broke through the line.  I didn't miss a tackle all game; it seems to be something of a standby that when I have a poor attacking game, I am relatively solid in defence.  I pulverised a guy who made it through the line, he stayed down for a while.  I dearly hope it was the guy who kicked me in the gonads in front of the referee, or even better it was somehow the referee, but I doubt it was.

We scored, and from the kickoff one of our locks put me through a gap.  It was glorious.  With all the mistakes I'd made up until that point, it was great to finally be making yards.  I want a yards gained count, like they do in the professional leagues.  Anyway, I left a guy face down in the dust after stepping him just like Jason Robinson does in this clip (20 secs).  It felt great.

I got smashed a few times, my left knee now hurts just like my right knee does (they dive at your knees in order to dislocate or break knees/legs, I told you they were dirty cunts) and all I can hope is that it's not ligaments.

The same lock put me over the try line, I beat one guy on the outside, had a couple tackling me as I fell over the line.  It was only a couple of metres, and I probably should have passed, but I got over anyway.

In the end it was a comfortable 30 odd points to 12 or so; but that referee.  What a colossal dickhead.

I'm still recovering from the flu, and I used up all my energy in that game.  I fought to get back into it, from a horrible start.  I made a lot of mistakes, and I pushed and pushed to get something to happen.  It's probably why I made so many mistakes.  But by the end,　everything was happening naturally for both me and the team, and we were deserved winners.  We should have won by 50, but the locals enlisted the help of bent officials so what can you do.

Next week is the semi-finals, and I hope to have fully passed the flu's and diseases.  I'll hit the gym starting tomorrow to get my energy levels back up; swimming and whatnot will help.  Unfortunately I've knackered my finger, so weights will be a chore.  What must be done, must be done - I guess.

On the way there, and on the way back, I recorded video of the train journey.  On this camera an hour and fifteen minutes of video is 32 gigs, and after encoding the video (adding a song and changing the codec) it came to 8 gigs.  I uploaded it to youtube, and you can see one of the most relaxing videos in the world, right here.  I went on the (really expensive) penis shaped bullet train (pictures to come) on the way back, because I was shattered and needed to be home A.S.A.P

That is all!