Score:

Trinity 30
Malone 10


Trinity gained five valuable points and a good win for their efforts on a cold but beautifully clear sunny winter’s day in College Park on Saturday.
The game was played on a gluepot of a field with a near frozen area in the Pavilion corner which is shaded by the trees. Trinity started brightly putting their Ulster opponents under pressure. But it was Malone who opened the scoring with a penalty by their out half Pentland.
Trinity scored their first try when, after some impressive ball carrying by the forwards, the ball was spread wide by the backs for Full back Andy Wallace to glide over in the corner for a well executed try.
After several phases near the Malone line Trinity out-half Dave Joyce kicked a drop goal. Minutes later Malone got their only try when they drove a line out from close in. The score was dubious to say the least as they looked short of the line and held up, and the smiles of the Malone boys walking back to the halfway line told the story.
Just before half time Trinity struck again when hooker Mark Murdoch charged up the middle to set up a quick ruck sucking in several defenders on the half way line, the ball was quickly moved through the hands to outside centre Conor Colclough who shimmied and dummied his way on a 40 metre break to deliver perfectly to prop James Gethings (what was he doing there?) who received and passed the ball in two steps (honestly!) and put the rampaging blindside flanker Alan Mathews streaking away into the corner for a fine try.
16-10 up at half time Trinity knew they had to control their discipline at the breakdown as the penalty count was high in the opposition favour, and was the major contributor to Malone staying in touch on the scoreboard. This they did and the visitors never really got into the Trinity third of the field in the second half.
Trinity scored in the opening minutes of the half when from a counter attack #8 Brian Coyle uncharacteristically sidestepped his way through the first line of defence before passing to centre Conor Mills who carried the ball deep into Malone territory, the ball was recycled quickly and moved wide to second row Scott LaValla who broke free out wide and into the Malone 22.  James Gethings was involved again when he charged for the line, from the ensuing ruck Scrum half Mick McLoughlin put Mark Murdoch diving over midway between the goalposts and touch line with a reverse pass.  
23-10 up, Trinity had to go for the four tries and bonus point, but the Visitors defence looked up to the task and as the game moved into the dying minutes Trinity looked to be losing their way. Trinity out- half Dave Joyce had other ideas and from a maul close in, he weaved his way inside the drifting defence to sprint over under the posts to cap a impressive personal performance including scoring in all four possible methods try, drop goal, two conversions and one penalty.
This was a highly committed performance by the students who played some good attacking rugby considering the conditions. They now take a ten day break from action when they play promotion chasers Bective in Donnybrook on Wednesday 10th February 8pm Kick off.

Dublin University and USA Eagles international Scott La Valla last week made his debut for The Ulster Ravens. La Valla is no stranger to Ulster; he captained the USA team during the U19 Rugby Would Cup which was hosted by the province in April of 2007. At 6’5” and weighing 110kg his bulk and speed has caused Ravens coach Gary Longwell to introduce the Eagle into the Ulster setup.
From Olympia in Washington, USA, the 21 year old has represented the USA at U19, 20s and Senior level winning his first cap for the Eagles against Argentina in the Churchill Cup last summer. At present Scott is an under graduate at Trinity where he has played for the 1st XV for the past two seasons in the AIB League.
Commenting on Scott’s selection, the Ravens Manager Gary Longwell said, “We have a very good working relationship with Trinity and Scott has been highly recommended to us for possible inclusion into our Academy system, so we are taking this opportunity to have a look at him in action. He has been involved in training with us this week and has fitted in very well.”
It was a wet and soggy Navan that greeted the Leinster A and Ulster Ravens as they took to the pitch at 6.30pm, the Ravens playing into the wind in the first half.
Despite being down to 14 men for large parts of the game, the Ravens managed to hold the Leinster men out to claim a notable and well deserved 9-0 victory away from home.
There were a number of excellent performances to record. Up front the pack went well with Willie Faloon, Scott La Valla and the front row trio of McAllister, Kyriacou and Macklin catching the eye.
La Valla made some very solid tackles, he had an impressive appetite for work, and with this being his first Ravens start his contribution certainly deserved applause.
This was a useful work out for the Ravens ahead of the British and Irish Cup rounds, which get under way again next week.
LaValla’s performance has raised speculation that his debut may not be the only time we will see the athletic lock in the white of Ulster. For now though his Trinity team-mates will be glad to have him by their side in their next outing in Donnybrook against Bective this Wednesday night.

Ladies and Gentlemen. Roll up, roll up. The greatest show on turf is upon us once again! The Super Bowl, for one night only, the visible from space extravaganza and finale of the American football season. The behelmeted behemoths that take to the field on the first weekend in February every year show that it is maybe not sport that the people want to see, but the entertainment that goes along with it. Did you know that the average amount of on field, ball in hand action seen in each Super Bowl amounts to a meagre eleven minutes? That is to say, seven hours of television coverage could easily be condensed into a twenty minute slot after the news!
The boxing/wrestling-esque entrances, half time mini-concert and hyperbolic celebrations will have come to an end by the 7th of February and the Super Bowl’s day in the global sun will be over for another year. What is most striking however is how much the face of sport has changed due to the presence of the NFL final on the calendar. The Super Bowl is now in its forty fourth year and is one of the most viewed sporting events on an annual basis. The television spectacular that the game has become has indeed taken some of the dignity from the sport. The music, pyrotechnic displays and exuberance heralded by the event is more a part of what the Super Bowl is known for, instead of the tactical plays, crunching tackles and powerful running.
I will not lie, I love the Super Bowl. No 9 a.m. tutorial can stop me from staying up until four in the morning to see if the Indianapolis Colts or New Orleans Saints capture the Vince Lombardi trophy. However, in recent years other disciplines have copped onto the commercial power of sports. The Super Bowl made the sporting world look up, over and beyond full stadia. Manchester United has more fans in the Far East than in England. Korean men and women pay ever escalating prices to have Wayne Rooney’s name emblazoned on their backs. Even cricket, that last bastion of sporting stiff upper lip attitude, has turned its eye to the global stage. Since the establishment of the Indian Premier League, players have been attracted with stratospheric wage packets to play for the representative teams of Delhi and Mumbai. These are but two examples of how the world of sport has been transformed from the heart of the locality, to the centre of business.
The Super Bowl of course, isn’t to blame for every overpaid footballer in their respective leagues or each pouting athlete on billboards across every continent. However, it was behind the impetus for the development of sport as a global brand and medium. You no longer need to have “world” in the name of the championship to make it global. This has had many effects on sport as an entity. The dignity of many disciplines has been compromised because of the need to entertain. Lengthen breaks for advertising purposes, shorten playing to ensure more exciting games. It tells us many things; sport in the 21st century cannot survive without television coverage and huge inputs of money from foreign investors. Does it also say that sport, in its various forms, has lost more than a modicum of dignity? Is it so consumed with its own spectacle that it has forgotten how to conjure up the magic of old? Competitions such as the FA Cup provide these glimpses of magic, whether it is a lowly team taking on the role of heroic giant-killer, or Premiership sides slugging it out like two heavyweight boxers. The stripped down, back-to-basics honest glory of the FA Cup is every sports fans dream.
The positives and negatives of global brand sport will take up column inches upon column inches for many years to come. It has benefited many sports enormously over the past twenty years. The way in which their general popularity has increased due to commercialisation should be lauded. However, the dignity is slowly seeping from this noble pantheon. In a world where people would rather watch a gesticulating man falling uncontrollably to the turf, than a young hopeful steadily rise through the ranks of his respective discipline, we must understand that there is a hefty price to pay for unparalleled commercial access and television coverage.

Once a year, the rest of the world turns on its television around midnight and pretends to understand the incredibly complex rules of what it calls “American” football. This consumption of American culture is, as usual, largely done wholesale and without question. We are told that the Super Bowl is important; hence, it is important. Thus, we watch it until we get too tired, or until someone complains that literally only 10% of the duration of the game is spent in actual, admittedly quite explosive, play. Having cherry-picked the Super Bowl over, say, the World Series of baseball or the Indy 500, we presume its paramountcy. But dig a little deeper, and there is a whole alternate universe to discover.
For every beer-swilling, beef-eating, truck-driving alpha male who gets a kick out of seeing a twenty stone linebacker literally bark at his opponents with the intention of foreshadowing a tackle so hard that the long-term effects on the brain are still largely unknown, there is a more sensitive soul. A person who looks back fondly on when the word “dog” referred to man’s beloved canine companion rather than his belligerent, shadowy sporting foe. For these people, nature channel Animal Planet have created the Puppy Bowl.
The format is simple. Puppies are placed in a model stadium with, amongst other things, football-shaped toys. If they bring the ball into the endzone, a “puppy touchdown” is awarded. If they cock a leg on the pitch, a penalty is understandably called. For 120 minutes, the puppies run wild. Unlike the heavily strategic stop-start play of the human counterpart, the Puppy Bowl is a very fluid affair, relaxing to watch while still retaining the ability to escalate into dramatic struggles, races or even fights almost instantaneously. For those who think the Puppy Bowl is soft - no penalties are awarded for instances of rough play, even biting.
There is an age-limit of four months for participants, who are drawn from a variety of rescue shelters. As well as ensuring that no puppy has a distinct size advantage, this age-limit prevents annual will-he-won’t-he retirement sagas such as that of forty-year-old Minnesota Vikings quarterback Brett Favre. Each puppy is a rookie, so enthusiasm, effort and natural talent are the determining factors, rather than the punch-counterpunch strategy of NFL coaches.
Of course, there are no actual teams in the Puppy Bowl, so strictly speaking, no-one wins. Do not let this dissuade you from enjoying the spectacle and the consistently high standard of play (in both senses) on display. If you should feel the need to watch the action on YouTube, watch out for Bandit, a strongly-built Husky-mix expected to dominate proceedings and perhaps pick up the coveted Most Valuable Player award.
For those gentlemen who feel that watching puppies play with toys for two hours in some way challenges their orthodox masculinity, there is another alternative. Since 2004, the Lingerie Bowl has aired on Pay Per View during the Super Bowl’s halftime show. The game is essentially full-contact seven-on-seven American football (the real deal is eleven-a-side) played out by teams of women in shorts, sports bras and regulation helmets and shoulder pads. The entire purpose, supposedly, is to appeal to the same crowd who watch women have mud fights for the WWE Women’s Title on the undercard of wrestling pay per view events, but the actual play is surprisingly authentic.
Unlike the Puppy Bowl, which drafts recruits wherever it can find them, the Lingerie Bowl is actually the final of the Lingerie Football League, a touring concern which dubs itself “real fantasy football” and plays its games in stadiums around the United States on Friday nights, setting itself up as a legitimate alternative to college football on Saturday night, and the NFL on Sunday, Monday and Thursday. The victors in the Western and Eastern conference meet each other for violent American football action that someone, somewhere must find erotic. This year, Los Angeles Temptation and Chicago Bliss beat out the likes of San Diego Seduction and Miami Caliente to earn the chance to compete for the crown.
Of course, this is Ireland, and avoiding the Super Bowl is about as challenging as trying to stay pale in winter. If puppies or aggressive women in sports bras aren’t to your tastes, and you’re absolutely sure you don’t want to see the America’s fastest and strongest compete in the world’s highest stakes chess game, you can always just go to bed.

The full effects of the brutal tackles and head-on collisions in American football have not been given much recognition. Alexandra Finnigan reports.

Having spent my third year on an Erasmus exchange in an American university in California, I was naturally exposed to the phenomenon of American football. 
At first, I thought the game rather dull with its numerous breaks and pauses. I compared the American footballers to our brave rugby players who bare the cold in shorts and shirts rather than head-to-toe padding and protection.  It was only when I was watching a California home game and witnessed the Berkeley tailback (Jahvid Best) being flipped over a defender and fall five feet to land on the back of his head that I realized how dangerous football could be. 
American football is a collision sport. A defensive player must tackle an offensive player using some form of physical contact, whether that is knocking or pulling him down.  Despite the obvious rules and guidelines that go along with defensive play, concussions are commonplace and in the years 2000-2005, 28 football players died from direct football injuries and a further 68 died indirectly from “non-physical” dangers such as dehydration.
In 1981, the United States President Ronald Reagan commented on the contact aspect of the sport: “[Football] is the last thing left in civilization where men can literally fling themselves bodily at one another in combat and not be at war.”  Despite the fact that the average life expectancy of a footballer is 55 years (20 years less than a member of the general public) the National Football League, or NFL, is a $7 billion-a-year enterprise and  football is the most followed and most prosperous sport in the US.
Over 100 million people worldwide watch the Super Bowl and many religiously follow one of the thirty-two teams that compete at NFL standard.  This sport is a money making business and terrifyingly, the effects of the physical brutality of the sport are hushed up.
The head-on tackles that are commonplace in American football are becoming more dangerous as players grow in strength, speed and weight.  Thirty years ago, the average offensive lineman would weigh between 270-280 pounds.  In 2010, it would be nearly impossible to find a first-class blocker up front who weighs less than 300 pounds.
The chronic head injuries are just one of many serious physical issues connected with this sport.  Frequent concussions have been proved to cause permanent brain damage and in some cases, dementia.  Kevin Guskiewicz, chairman of the Department of Exercise and Sport Science at the University of North Carolina has performed tests on more than 2,000 former NFL players and has published his results which state that there is a direct correlation between a player’s concussion history and later-in-life clinical depression, early-onset dementia and cognitive impairment.
In 2006, former Philadelphia Eagles star Andre Waters shot himself and it was later held that his suicide came about as a result of depression which, according to experts, was brought on by brain damage that he had sustained whilst playing in the NFL. It was reported that the 44 year old had the brain tissue of an 85 year old man.
Experts say that one of the most frustrating aspects of concussions in football is the silence surrounding them. Football is connected with a “play with pain” mentality which discourages players of all standards and ages from speaking out about their barely visible head injuries to coaches or team doctors. Players often choose not to disclose their injuries as doctors on the payroll of professional teams have a conflict of interest in deciding whether or not to return a player to the field. Speaking up about a head injury could potentially hurt a player’s contract and in a business where athletes are used like marketable beef cattle, deemed disposable and worthless if they cannot play, it is better to keep quiet. 
In a 2007 interview Pete Kendall, a former Jets lineman queried whether important decisions should in fact be made by team-employed doctors.  He stated, “The doctor who is supposed to be looking out for you is also the same guy who may put you into a game that the team has to win.  You’re mixing business with medicine.”
Players should feel comfortable and secure enough to know when to take themselves out of a game if they have suffered a concussion. However the macho element that epitomizes American football means that wounded players are urged to toughen up and stay on the field despite serious risk of long-term injury. In The Dark Side of the Game, Tim Green, a former defensive end for the Atlanta Falcons speaks up about the pathos, the horror and the abuses that go on in football.  He describes the gruelling training caps and the lengths that some players go to, to get out of them.  He mentions the violent players and the team doctors who put injured players back in the game telling them, “If you ain’t cheatin’, you ain’t tryin’.” 
With the advancement of sport technology, helmets and protection are continuously improving and some claim that technology will someday render sports completely safe.  But what’s the point? For most serious athletes, sport is about pushing performance and physical endurance to the limit. If the offensive player is wearing a technologically safer helmet, this means you can tackle him twice as hard. If you up the protection, you up the violence. As Frank Gifford, a Hall of Fame former American football player said, “Pro football is like nuclear warfare.  There are no winners, only survivors.”