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First, a massive congratulations to England for battling away to earn a place in the final of the Webb Ellis Trophy (a.k.a. Rugby World Cup). This was a fantastic achievement for a team that's not really played that well for quite a while, including a crushing defeat by South Africa in the group stages of this competition.

Trying to watch rugby in the US is like trying to find a pot of gold at the end of a rainbow. The only option you have is pay per view. Fortunately I was in Africa and the UK for the group games so I got to watch those fine, but find myself shelling out $25 for each of the remaining games (the England ones anyway - I'm not paying to see the others).

After the match, I was obviously ecstatic and was really looking forward to the post match interviews, but I didn't make it that far. I have no idea where the feed was coming from or who selected the commentators, but we ended up with a Paddy and an Aussie. The after match analysis consisted of two whining idiots that seemed to be very bitter. The Irish guy kept going on about the fact that Ireland have beaten England over the last four years so if we will the World Cup we should give it to Ireland. The Aussie said that England had cheated through the whole tournament to get where they were. After about 10 minutes of this mindless conversation (seemingly independent conversation) one of them said something about the fact that they should say something positive about England as they'd won and the other said no, they couldn't think of anything.

Now, I freely admit it wasn't the most interesting game I've ever watched. It's the semi final of the World Cup between two rival nations - it's not going to be a spectacular event, it's going to be a hard fought battle. I also admit that England did well to hold the French off and slow the game down sufficiently so that we could win further taking the sparkle and creativity out of the game. But, we went in with a plan, executed it perfectly and won the game - against the host nation. There were a lot of things you could have commented on that England did right to win the game.

After the comment about not being able to think about anything positive to say I turned the TV off as I was in too good a mood to listen to a couple of miserable whining gits. It seems odd that you would want to work in commentary if it's going to upset you that much.

Still, we're in the final. It's going to be an incredibly difficult game as we have to play South Africa again. On current form, you have to fancy South Africa, but lets hope we learnt something from that defeat earlier on and maybe, just maybe we can spring a big surprise.