It was sooo good to see Russell with a guitar, on a stage, singing a song with so many memories associated with it!

And no, sadly I didn't get to the Shamrock Fest in spite of attempting a mad dash at the last moment. Events and bad timing worked against me. I would have loved to see all that gorgeous hair, watch those 'moves' and to sing my heart out on those two great songs but unfortunately I missed out...sniff...

Thanks for all the Souths articles. I feel so badly for Craig. It is such a shame that it looks like it's a worst case scenario injury. I guess it's somewhat of a stalemate about what can be done. As one article said "But there is no provision under the code for a charge to be made against a player for an alleged cheap shot." and as Wing said ""You could make a rule but then how do you police it?" asked Wing, who is yet to see a replay of the tackle. "Sometimes it's a good tackle but sometimes it can go horribly wrong. How do you make a call on something like that?" so I guess that's where it stands.

Let's take the humanity and the 'right and wrong' out of the equation for a second and boil it down to financial terms. If a goal of the League is to make money and money is made by giving fans a reason (like seeing a Craig Wing, SBW or any other exceptional player) to buy a ticket to a game then if they don't do something to police and protect marquee players that draw attention and income then they are only shooting themselves in the foot. In wider terms, if teams can't be competitive and continue to attract big TV revenue for broadcast games and the ratings are affected, then both the NRL and the media outlets suffer.

Our NFL put in rules to help prevent injury to its quarterbacks after too many were going down, out for a season. This could be viewed as trying to protect a team's source of income as well as safeguarding the players themselves.

Gee, that's potentially great news about BigPond streaming some games! Is there any indication to whether it's sooner rather than later to get the whole thing up and running?

Thanks for the caps and thanks to Lynda for the video. I take only a small bit of consoation that my late arival would have surely had me standing in the next zip code and I probably couldn't have seen a lot but it would have been great to hear! Off to look at those hips swaying to the music again...damn, I'm jonesin' for Tofog bad...