Anatomy of a try:
I wanted to take a quick look at Mike Haleys try that sparked the come back last night.
It was a strike move from a lineout straight from the training ground.

The lineout starts with a nice throw from Rhys, a good lift from Kleyn and brilliant dummy move from Josh Wycherley to draw Clermont into committing to the maul defence.
A few things to note for later Murray standing at 1, CJ's position and POM taking the ball in the air.
As POM comes down Josh goes for the maul drive, but Peter drops the ball to CJ who standing back pivots to give a lovely soft pass to Rhys on the peel.
Murray has stayed at the front of the lineout to keep Clermont active and further sell the maul.
As Rhys hits open field, he has a number of options open to him, CJ back inside, De Allende flat, or Coombes and Earls coming short.
He gives a nice flat pass to De Allende coming hard back inside towards the 10 channel.
Instead of hitting a crash ball up. De Allende shows great soft hands to pop the ball up to Coombes who has peeled off the back of the lineout to run a fantastic support line. Earls is on his inside shoulder as he takes it on.
De Allendes run inside has attracted a lot of attention from the Clermont line and Coombes now going back outside is afforded a soft shoulder and a few extra yards as he hits it up.
Farrell, De Allende and Earls secure the ruck as Coombes makes yet another brilliant heavy carry.
Murray gets lovely clean quick ruck ball to use as the Munster forward come around the corner from the lineout.
CJ has got so far around corner he is able to to run a line back inside and take both the A and the B defender out.
POM runs a deeper line and Murray's pull back pass puts him away as he hits the space between two defenders.
POM hits the gap committing both defenders and then pops a lovely soft pass to Haley who is running off his shoulder and the out sprints the cover defence to the line.
The level of accuracy, the ball handling, the support lines, the work off the ball to distract defenders is just brilliant.
The handling especially of the forwards, the gain line wins and the options each player on the ball has creates the space.
Work rate off the ball and detail.
Look at Farrell dragging defenders to the ground to take them out of the line as Coombes goes to ground.
Haley gets the ball from POM with Kleyn (both in the pod that won the lineout) just behind running the cleaning line just in case.

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I just finished Eric Adler's The Battle of the Classics, and wanted to say something about Joel Christiansen's review linked below. I am not sure what motivates the review (I speculate a bit below), but it gives a very misleading impression of the book. 1/x


The meat of the criticism is that the history Adler gives is insufficiently critical. Adler describes a few figures who had a great influence on how the modern US university was formed. It's certainly critical: it focuses on the social Darwinism of these figures. 2/x

Other insinuations and suggestions in the review seem wildly off the mark, distorted, or inappropriate-- for example, that the book is clickbaity (it is scholarly) or conservative (hardly) or connected to the events at the Capitol (give me a break). 3/x

The core question: in what sense is classics inherently racist? Classics is old. On Adler's account, it begins in ancient Rome and is revived in the Renaissance. Slavery (Christiansen's primary concern) is also very old. Let's say classics is an education for slaveowners. 4/x

It's worth remembering that literacy itself is elite throughout most of this history. Literacy is, then, also the education of slaveowners. We can honor oral and musical traditions without denying that literacy is, generally, good. 5/x
Trump is gonna let the Mueller investigation end all on it's own. It's obvious. All the hysteria of the past 2 weeks about his supposed impending firing of Mueller was a distraction. He was never going to fire Mueller and he's not going to


Mueller's officially end his investigation all on his own and he's gonna say he found no evidence of Trump campaign/Russian collusion during the 2016 election.

Democrats & DNC Media are going to LITERALLY have nothing coherent to say in response to that.

Mueller's team was 100% partisan.

That's why it's brilliant. NOBODY will be able to claim this team of partisan Democrats didn't go the EXTRA 20 MILES looking for ANY evidence they could find of Trump campaign/Russian collusion during the 2016 election

They looked high.

They looked low.

They looked underneath every rock, behind every tree, into every bush.

And they found...NOTHING.

Those saying Mueller will file obstruction charges against Trump: laughable.

What documents did Trump tell the Mueller team it couldn't have? What witnesses were withheld and never interviewed?

THERE WEREN'T ANY.

Mueller got full 100% cooperation as the record will show.