Goal kicking at the world cup is shocking.

England, Argentina & now Ireland.

Go USA!

Its very odd,

I wonder how James Hook and Morne Steyn will do,

perhaps if the conditions are poor for kicking, we will see a lot more kicks to touch?

SA will kick all their penalties after seeing Wales's defence against England.

Despite what Gatland says I fear Wales will go for fancy lineouts & bugger them all up. I think the game will be close but Wales will make mistakes & Steyns boot will win it.

It`s all a cunning plan,only All Black kickers get the right ball,all the rest a fixed one,Carter kicked most of his plus a poster,Slade his one shot then they switched the ball.
If you think i`m joking try and get a copy of The Boot [don Clarkes biography] and read of the tricks teams pulled to negate his kicking.

Wilkinson was moaning bofre the England game that the ball prssur is affected by the closed roof and that they woudlnt have any time to practise and get used to the effect.
Sounds ridiculous but hed know a lot more about handling balls than me.

There's definitely a curse or at least something wrong with the balls they're using. ALL the decent kickers have had some terrible misses. I know the weather hasn't been great down there, but england were playing in an enclosed stadium yesterday. Very strange...

Wilkinson has said after the game it was only [b[his[/b]fault. He has mentioned before about changes to balls effecting kicking but nothing this time

EDIT: added 'his'

Peter Seabiscuit Wheeler wrote:Wilkinson was moaning bofre the England game that the ball prssur is affected by the closed roof and that they woudlnt have any time to practise and get used to the effect.
Sounds ridiculous but hed know a lot more about handling balls than me.

makes sense. I was alluding to the effect of the closed roof on the flight of the ball earlier.
The air in a contained space will be different to air subject to normal outside conditions. Akin to kicking a ball inside a hall where the are is completely still.

So you would need to practice in it is the point.

I say there's a curse....it's not affected Steyn for South Africa...

Apparently the ball is the same type they used in the 6N and 3N. Bad batch?

I thought Gilbert balls were standard world wide,what needs checking is Ball Pressure pre -match of ALL the balls.Dunedin may have been the exception but other kickers had problems too elsewhere.
Maybe it levels the playing field,instead of sitting back and playing for penalties.
Teams are going to have to go out on the field,play the game in front of them.THINK before acting instead doing the mindless over coached robot bit.

Cari wrote:I say there's a curse....it's not affected Steyn for South Africa...

Perhaps the South Africans have put small pieces of metal in the balls and all their fans in the crowd have large magnets?

emack2 wrote:
Maybe it levels the playing field,instead of sitting back and playing for penalties.

Teams are going to start committing penalty offences all over the place knowing that there's a good chance they won't be punished for it.It will ruin the games as foul play won't be punished.

whats the most irritating is the fact that the Saffers still manage to get the penalties over. ITS A CONSPIRACY!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

What did Australia kick, about 50%..? that's well above average for us!

welshy824 wrote:whats the most irritating is the fact that the Saffers still manage to get the penalties over. ITS A CONSPIRACY!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Penalty - singular

asoreleftshoulder wrote:

emack2 wrote:
Maybe it levels the playing field,instead of sitting back and playing for penalties.

Teams are going to start committing penalty offences all over the place knowing that there's a good chance they won't be punished for it.It will ruin the games as foul play won't be punished.

If the kicking doesn't improve, I think this is a very good point. Psychologically, if the ball isn'g going between the sticks, then penalties are going to increase.

None of the big kickers - Steyn, Wilkinson, O'Gara, Sexton, Carter have said anything though.

That's cause its mainly just fans that are moaning gits. The players get on with it.

Steyn nailed all his kicks didn't he? (all 3)

He did miss a drop goal

Does that count?

Could it just be the additional or different pressure of the event? All these kickers play mountains of high pressure rugby, but the first weekend of the WC probably provides some extra nerves for most players.

if there's something wrong with the balls then no one told the guy from Namibia, and that Steyn could kick a brick.

Pot Hale wrote:None of the big kickers - Steyn, Wilkinson, O'Gara, Sexton, Carter have said anything though.

O'Gara has said this morning that he and Sexton thought the balls were fine but pressure is affecting the kickers. It really is amazing how many easy kicks were missed by normally reliable goal kickers though.

I'd say in the case of Sir Johnny it was something we've seen before. He is normally close to perfection when it comes to goal kicking but it has been seen before that when he does have a bad day, he has a REALLY bad day

I reckon the new balls haven't been 'kicked in'. The players haven't been allowed to practice with the match balls before hand apparently

Ok I'm going to sound stupid here.

Are we talking air pressure or pressure of playing in the world cup ?
I have heard people mention air pockets etc that's why I ask.

I heard that the players have had the world cup balls for a year before the tournament!

air pressure/psi if the balls arn't kicked in properly then they travel/float on the imbalance.

Air pressure around the ball and conditions will effect it more. but in a stadium with a roof that factor shouldn't been marginalised.

Wilco said he thought he was striking them well enough.

Mind you, even Mr 100% Patterson missed

Cari wrote:I heard that the players have had the world cup balls for a year before the tournament!

but not the actual match balls.

If these are brand new then that's a problem.

Probably best to wait until the next round of matches as nervous players will not be at their "norm". However if the percentages remain low then there could be something in it, but I would guess that the players would adapt anyway if there is a sligh difference.

Worrying for the respective teams that some of their kickers are off though, regardless of the cause!

aucklandlaurie wrote: if there's something wrong with the balls then no one told the guy from Namibia, and that Steyn could kick a brick.

when he grew up on the farm, he practiced kicking rocks.

Just for those with a sense of humor.

PDV's newest anecdote from the game vs Wales.

“It was a Gilbert ball before he kicked it but the G was gone after he kicked the ball,” de Villiers said of one of full back Frans Steyn’s long-range punts in the swirling Wellington winds on Sunday night.

Here is some more of our "infamous" coach

And still on the weather in ‘Windy Welly’, “well this is Wellington, where you can get five seasons in one day. Some places you only get four, but here you get five”.

He was philosophical about the refereeing on Sunday night, as a winning coach can afford to be.
“You get it wrong sometimes and you get it right sometimes and I think you have to go sit down and see how many times you got it right and how many times you got it wrong.

“It would be unfair if you got it three times wrong and 10 times right to say it wasn’t very good.


“But as a coach you sit there and you think, ‘that’s hard done against us’, but then you look at it again and say ‘no, it was not as bad as that’.”

He said teams flooding the breakdown were making it harder for referees to determine who is offside, while he had also noted the calls from referees at this tournament for players to stay longer on their feet.

“But then again, being South African, we like to go through people and not around them, because it’s shorter.”

He also revealed teams no longer confine their pre-match analysis to opposing players.

“What’s worrying at this moment is that you have to start analysing the referees too. That wasn’t part of the game 10 years ago, five years ago. Now you have to analyse his character, all those kind of small things.”

He said his team deserved the win because of their defensive effort and the contribution of the bench players who came on in the second half.

“I think that is the way to go, you can have something up your sleeve. If you don’t have that you become as ordinary as everybody else,” de Villiers said.

He said Wales had thrown “the kitchen sink” at South Africa but had failed in what he argued was the toughest first-round match in the toughest pool to win.

“I’m so glad I’m not the Welshmen this morning to think that I have to face Samoa this week,” he added.


hilarious

I see nothing wrong with what P Divvy said, Samoa is probably the tougher fixture and Wales will be sore.

The other things he said sounded like he made jokes about the weather etc.

Actually that was pretty lucid stuff from P Divvy. I think he´s been told to tone down his comments and has told he can´t use Charlie Sheen as a personal life coach anymore.

"Nice" bit of IRB spin on the new balls here

of COURSE they call it "overwhelmingly positive" when Wilco fails to land 4 kicks on the trot and two more. That was their goal to begin with