Dave 'Bruce Wayne' Dumville

The double life of the man from the Mail. There's a brief glimpse one minute forty five seconds in, and then from two minutes fifteen seconds the secret identity is fully revealed as the man we previously knew as an England supporter goes proper loopy. And to think I sat in your house watching England vs Scotland at Euro '96, copping it large from you and your old man as Gazza scored that goal and (prompting an even bigger celebration from you...) Seaman saved that penalty.

As this was BBC Scotland, there's also some of the best commentary you'll ever hear in your life, the Jock version of "Your boys took one hell of a beating", except this time it was a team saving their reputations from taking a hell of a beating, saving themselves from being forever remembered as being unable to beat a team from a country whose population is smaller than the capacity of the ground the game took place in.

MD32

Happy birthday Max! Apologies for the lateness - camera issues and then waiting for a suitable event. As it turned out, a 'suitable event' turned into what's being described as one of the greatest ever finals play-offs, and like Gillingham in 1999 against Many City (as opposed to the year later against Wigan) it didn't turn out well.

There are match reports here and here, but as is the case with these things, reading it doesn't do the game nearly enough justice. The Tigers finished the regular season 3rd and the top eight teams go into a properly convoluted finals system called the McIntyre Final Eight System, that meant they played the team who finished sixth, which was the Sydney Roosters, who are the team of the Eastern Suburbs (where I live), who loads of people hate as they're seen as a bit of a Chelsea, coming from a posher area with a higher percentage of 'what what what' casual fans, as opposed to the West Sydney teams who are 'working class man-of-the-people clubs'.

Tigers should have won the game by about twenty points but they're famous for self-destructing and they pissed it away in legendary style last night, letting the Roosters equalise with zero time remaining on the clock after only needing to run down the clock with six tackles and thirty seconds left, and then after twenty minutes of golden point extra time made a horrible pass mistake which was intercepted and run home for the win, after about three solid chances where they should have won it themselves. Properly end-to-end, tearing your hair out, "it's the hope that kills you" stuff that left Tigers fans stunned and Roosters fans going mental.

There's no segregation at games here and there were a few Roosters fans near me that were giving it the big one and were on the verge of getting killed by loads of pissed up Tigers fans, coppers were lurking about near them. We were in the area that was designated as the Tigers home end, but it's a voluntary scheme and you can sit where you like. I was cracking up, 'cause if it had been in the UK there would have been about four folk beaten to death by angry mobs just in the area where I was sitting.

This round is the 'qualifying finals' - two teams go out, two get a bye, and the other four go into the semis, two go through from this round to play the two who got byes, and the winners of that round play in the Grand Final. If the Tigers had won they'd have got a bye to the semis as the Panthers, who finished above them in second, lost to the Canberra Raiders. As it is The Dragons, who finished top, need to beat the Manly Sea Eagles (who finished eighth) otherwise it's the Tigers who go out this round along with the Warriors, who finished in the bottom half of the draw and then lost to Gold Coast Titans, so they don't get another life. If Dragons beat Manly then the Tigers will play Canberra in the next round. Whilst there's no chance the Dragons can go out even if they lose, a win will see them get a bye so obviously the incentive to win is there, though arguably not as much as Manly as it's straight knock out for them.


Update: The Dragons wiped the floor with the Eagles, so the Tigers play the Raiders in Canberra next week.

School days

I'd like to think this blog was read by millions and that whilst I don't have to go to work because I make so much from advertising on the site, I go because it gets me out the house.

Unfortunately it's not, which is why I probably met more than half of you reading this twenty years ago this week.

I was at the school a couple of days, knocking about with the other new lads in Alpha 2 (Anthony O'Neill and Martin Watts spring to mind) until we had our first German class of the year with Van Der Fleet, which is when I knocked you all bandy with my fantastisch Deutsch.

Straight after the class I remember being swamped by a load of you asking me all sorts of questions, the most important of which was obviously "Which team do you support?" As I'd just seen them draw with Hearts in a friendly at Tynecastle a couple of weeks before, and they had the likes of Gascoigne and Lineker fresh off the back of a fine Italia 1990 campaign, I said Spurs, and as Danny had yet to fully discover the golden path that led to Priestfield, he was the one that celebrated the small victory of having the new lad support the same team as you. Unfortunately he tried to double up on the second most important question: "Where do you live" and when I said Hempstead, asked if that was the top end, via Maidstone Road. I'd discovered it wasn't, it was mid-'Stead, via the woods and the 'love tunnel' under the link road. This meant I soon walked to school with Mick of a morning, who was more concerned with the fact that I'd been living in his road for the past three months without appearing on the French family radar in any significant fashion.

I was appearing all too often soon enough though, as my time-keeping was shit-house even then and meeting at the top of the road at ten past eight normally meant Mick knocking on the door at quarter past to see if I was coming or not, whilst my mum wrestled with my nine-month-old baby brother.

I solidified my reputation about two weeks later when I got a "DT" from Wooton and had to pick up litter with Grievsy and Godfrey for an hour after school - after a whole lesson of being called Wiggy (Handa being weirdly lairy in Wooton's class) he lost it and belted me with a DT for an innocuous "Ah nae danger pal!" to which the whole class pissed themselves laughing and he thought it was some cruel in-joke that deserved a harsh punishment. Did I ever mention I had to steal the note he wrote about that incident from Harvey's office in the sixth form? Four years later I'm idlly flicking through my confidential file (He was tops Harvey weren't he?) when that 'report' from my first few weeks at school is still there. I was getting ready to do UCAS forms and all that caper! The Wiggy prick wasn't going to sabotage a glorious higher education so I nicked it, ripped it up and chucked it away later on.


Happy days!

(I'm glad we never had mobile phones in our day.)