Rob Flude

@DSSteyn @Brendennel Correct. The English still believe that Cueto wasn't out

@Brendennel Sadly, The damage is done. And no recourse for the original clickbait article. The English supporters will believe it like they did when Curry falsely accused Mbonambi of racism. And that claim has still not been proven. But is widely believed as true.

After the clickbait article in the Telegraph that insinuated Bok doping, some sober comments by Khalid Gelant, head of SAIDS. As I stated yesterday the WADA lab in Bloem lost its accreditation, hence tests have to be sent overseas, which increases costs. Thats why there has been a reduction, and no other reason. Clickbait journalism at its worst unfortunately. Good on me mate Mike Greenaway for reaching out to SAIDS.

@grok Exactly as I thought. So this Telegraph article is a complete beat-up and a twisting of the data.

Yes, those are total tests by national anti-doping agencies for rugby (e.g. SAIDS: 127 in 2024; Sport Ireland: 284 in 2023). No adjustment for pro/RTP player numbers per country—WADA reports use raw aggregates. World Rugby adds ~2,182 global tests in 2024 (supplementing nationals; no full per-nation split public). Player pools vary (SA larger domestic pros than Ireland), so raw totals enable volume comparison but not per-capita rates.

🚨 EXCLUSIVE: Decline in South African drug-testing casts cloud over World Cup wins Nation has highest number of convicted dopers in rugby yet sixfold decrease in testing coincided with 2019 and 2023 triumphs @ben_rumsby has more ⬇️ telegraph.co.uk/rugby-union/20…

@grok @grok are those total numbers of tests in a given year? Is this data adjusted for the number of professional/qualifying players in the respective country who are subject to the anti-doping rules?

Public data on exact PED testing frequency isn't uniformly published per nation (elite RTP players typically face 3-8 tests/yr via national + World Rugby programs, plus in-comp). Key volumes from recent reports: South Africa (SAIDS rugby): 127 tests in 2024 (down from 785 in 2015). Ireland: 284 tests in 2023. Scotland: 304 tests in 2021/22. UKAD (England focus): part of ~1,241 total tests recently (rugby historically high, e.g. 800+). World Rugby global (all nations): 2,182 tests in 2024. Limited recent public figures for NZ, Australia, France.

@LibertyCappy The hypocrisy is stunning and brave

Bro just kept right on going and didn't even blink! 😭🤣

This tour has Lions tour 2005 vibes with Baz playing Clive Woodward in the lead role.

@RassieRugby Oom Rassie, how many of the current Irish squad would make the Springbok squad?

👍 This was for the South African supporters in front of the coaches box man!! 👍 = Thank you

@bensmithrugby You named a South African (SFM) in the list of those unlucky to miss out. I'm just so pleased you're making progress - albeit slow - in your recovery from SDS (Springbok Derangement Syndrome)

Bielle-Biarrey with 8 tries in the 6N deserving, but Antoine Dupont with 7 try assists equally deserving but due to voter fatigue doesn’t get a look in. The dead-heat Boks, who finished with the same record as the All Blacks in the Rugby Championship, get three wild nominations. None of these Boks produced more than Ardie Savea, never mind that their best player Sacha F-M, a guy who actually wins matches, isn’t picked. Ox Nche with 0.07 carries per minute and 0.09 tackles per minute, plays about half the minutes every game. Never in a million years should a loose head be in the running. Will Skelton, on his limited time with the Wallabies, was more influential than all three of them.

When the BBC reported that transgender women’s milk was just as good for babies as breast milk.. And they wonder why nobody takes the legacy media seriously anymore.

Melbourne, Australia, "Wrong country if you want to abuse women". Drew Baldridge, a Nashville based country music artist, recently performed here and describes a shocking incident one night at a McDonalds in Victoria. While the government floods the country with third world immigrants who have no respect for anyone, much less women, it's good to see some true blue aussies are fighting to protect our way of life.

@elonmusk This fair share LIE has gone on too long We have a spending problem not a tax problem In 2020 top 1% US taxpayers paid record-high 42.3% share of federal income taxes higher than 37.3% share of taxes paid by the entire bottom 95% Top 1% paid $87B more in taxes than the bottom 95%

(Warning: long rant) My liberal friends are completely oblivious about how radicalizing the last week has been for tens of millions of normal Americans. Zero clue. I’m not talking about people who are “online”; I mean regular, everyday Americans. “Normies.” People who scroll through Facebook posts and Instagram reels from the Dutch Bros drive thru line. Political moderates who have water cooler chats about Mahomes touchdowns and Bon Jovi concerts, not Twitter threads or Rachel Maddow monologues. Millions of them. Tens of millions. They’re logging on, they’re engaging, and they’re furious. And I’ll be candid: They blame you guys. They blame the left. Regardless of whether you believe it to be justified, they think you’re the bad guys here. And they are reacting accordingly. I can already hear some of you racing toward the comments to start screeching in moral indignation, so I’m going to be blunt: Shut up and listen to what I’m telling you. Your movement will lose any semblance of relevance if you don’t develop some small measure of self-awareness, and—absent someone force-feeding you bitter medicine—you guys collectively lack the humility to do this on your own. Here are the facts: Fact 1. Tens of millions of Americans started the week seeing a 23-year-old blonde woman—a young woman in whom virtually every parent watching pictured their own daughter—stabbed in the neck by a career criminal. These people then found out the murderer had been released from jail 14 times over. Fact 2. Two days later, tens of millions of Americans watched a video of Charlie Kirk get murdered speaking to college students. Millions of these people knew who Charlie was; millions of them didn’t. Upon seeing the video, however, these normal Americans from across the land and across the political spectrum agreed that he was the victim of a terrible, fundamentally unjustifiable crime, and their hearts broke in sympathy for his family. Good people who had never even heard the name Charlie Kirk before wept. Fact 3. Immediately after seeing the footage of a peaceful young man get shot in the neck, these same people logged onto Facebook and Instagram (remember, we are talking about regular Americans, not perpetually online Twitter or Bluesky users) and saw some of their local nurses, school teachers, college administrators, and retail workers celebrating this horrific crime. Not just defending it, but cheering it. These are all facts. You may not like the implications of these facts, and we can certainly debate the underlying causes thereof, but, indisputably, they are nevertheless factual statements. Here’s what it means for you, the Democrats reading this: These normal, middle-of-the-road, non-political citizens just become politically active. They realized that politics cares about them, even if they don’t particularly care about politics. After watching Iryna Zarutska and Charlie Kirk both bleed out from the neck, they think their lives and the physical safety of their families—the bedrock of human society, the foundation of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs—depend on political activation, whether they desire it or not. These people are now sprinting—not jogging, not walking, but racing—to the right. Because they blame you guys for everything that just happened. When they see footage of Decarlos Brown stabbing a Ukrainian refugee to death, they don’t see just one demon-possessed man. They picture every university administrator, HR bureaucrat, and DEI apparatchik that ever lectured them about systemic racism, the “carceral state,” or the need to release violent crime suspects without bail in the name of social justice. They then think back to conversations they’ve had with their cop friends—their buddy from high school who quit the force after getting tired of being called a racist, their friend at the local YMCA who vents about having to release career criminals because Soros-funded prosecutors aren’t willing to file charges—and they realize everything the left has told them over the last five years has been utter bullshit. And they blame you. Because, even if you count yourself as a moderate Democrat, your party supported the district attorneys, city council members, and mayors that let fictitious concerns about mental health and racial justice supersede very real concerns for their family’s safety. When these Americans see blood erupt from the side of Charlie Kirk’s neck, they don’t see just a martyred political activist. They think of every extreme leftist they’ve ever met who (1) calls anyone to the right of Hillary Clinton a fascist and (2) constantly jokes—“jokes”—about punching Nazis and “bashing the fash.” They realize that there really do exist people who wish to see them dead for their moderately conservative political beliefs, their Christian faith, and even the color of their skin. They ask themselves if the violence visited upon Charlie might one day show up on their own doorstep. And they blame you. Because, even if you’re just a center-of-the-road liberal, you lacked the courage to police your own ranks. You let modern-day Maoist red guards run loose across every facet of society, and what started with social-media struggle sessions has now turned to 30-06 bullet holes. When these Americans log onto social media and see their neighbors justifying, celebrating, glorifying murder, they realize that some who walk among them are soulless ghouls at best, literally demon-possessed at worst. These people—whether they faithfully attend church every Sunday or only attend with relatives once a year, on Christmas Eve—start talking about things like spiritual warfare. They implicitly understand that no normal human casually celebrates the mortal demise of a peaceful person. And they blame you. Because, even if you condemned Charlie Kirk’s murder, they probably haven’t seen you condemn those in your own movement who cheered it on. They view you as complicit in allowing heartless fellow travelers to celebrate death, and it repulses them. For all of these situations, what has your response been? Nothing but bullshit. In response to Iryna Zarutska bleeding out on the floor of a train, you post bullshit statistics about reductions in reported crime, when everyone who’s ever been to a major urban center in the last decade knows that actual crime has skyrocketed, only for victims not to waste their time reporting it to cops that don’t have the manpower to respond and prosecutors that seek to downgrade as many felonies as possible to misdemeanor citations. In response to a 31-year-old man taking a bullet to the neck in front of his family, you post nothing but bullshit whataboutism. > “What about January 6th?” (Honest answer: After you let Liz Cheney spend two years operating a star chamber in the House, combined with countless other failed attempts at “lawfare” against Trump, no one cares anymore.) > “What about Mike Lee making a dumb joke on Twitter about some guy in a mask in Minnesota?” (No one outside of Utah, DC, or Twitter knows who Mike Lee even is.) > “What about Paul Pelosi?” (That’s not comparable to Charlie Kirk getting shot, and we all know it. And, again, Paul who?) > “What about regulations on assault rifles?” (That’s not going to get you very far when one of these killers used a knife and the other one used a common hunting rifle.) In response to teachers, healthcare workers, and thousands of other liberals cheering on Charlie’s murder, it’s nothing but more bullshit and misdirection. > “It’s not THAT many people celebrating!” (Yes, it is. Everyone has seen it on their Facebook and Instagram feeds.) > “I thought you guys didn’t support cancel culture.” (We don’t cancel people over their opinions; we’re more than happy to see people lose their jobs—especially their taxpayer-funded jobs—for actively cheering on murder, though. If you can’t see the difference, that’s your own shortcoming.) All bullshit. Not even smart bullshit, but stale, mid-grade, low-IQ bullshit. Ordinary Americans see right through it, and they don’t like how it smells. You probably don’t like hearing this. But you need to hear it. Because I’m right, and, as you reflect on this, you know I’m right. The ranks of my political movement gained millions of righteously angry new members this week. We have a mandate to ensure these crimes never happen again, and that’s exactly what we are now going to do. If you want to keep a seat at the table as we do so, you’d better clean house and start policing your own.

@ashleykpieterse @bensmithrugby I think the knock-on was the disallowed try by Smith, but they bleated about that because it was from a lineout more than 2 phases before the try. Can't make this stuff up! I was referring to the forward by Tele'a to Barrett. Either way, 12-11 to 🇿🇦😀

@robflude @bensmithrugby I think the All Black try in the 2023 final came from a knock on, not a forward pass, but yeah, pretty much right.

Andrew Hastie is most likely Australia’s next Prime Minister. Something tells me he won’t be getting the same affectionate hugs from NZ PM Chris Luxon that Anthony Albanese received. Last week Mr Hastie launched a stinging attack on the Net Zero policies of the Australian Labor govt. Sadly, almost every criticism he makes applies to Chris Luxon’s govt as well. New Zealand has one politician who speaks similarly to Mr Hastie, but he’s not anywhere near as direct. NZ First’s Shane Jones is restricted in what he can say because he’s a member of the governing coalition. However Shane needs to listen to this speech from Mr Hastie and give a NZ version at the next coalition meeting. Directing it to the Blue Green National party and its UN besotted leader Luxon. Someone has to stand up for regular New Zealanders too! This is a little longer than my usual videos at 3 minutes 47 seconds. However its well worth a watch. If only one New Zealand MP could stand up in the house and speak these same truths.

"Our first ever proper Hawkstone commercial and for some extraordinary reason, it’s been banned." - JC

Consider me shocked that ALP can't manage a chook raffle let alone a budget or stick to election 'promises'. But nah, keep voting for personality over policy, see where that gets us. Dutton was hardly ideal and his policies were very average, but you can't deny we'd be better off

When you lie on your resumé...

Touching stuff from Billy Slater. 🫶

@CaptSpringbok @BrendonWessels Isn't it cos he lost a bet with Naas? I vaguely remember it may have been as his beloved Sharks lost the Currie Cup final to the Bulls in 2002?

@BrendonWessels Heyyy, don’t diss a Smirnoff Ice! Those were great! 😂😂😂

Some great snippets of Darren Scott, Naas Botha, and Boots & All! #rugby