1
'You are literally stirring a monster' - How a 135kg Munster man mountain 'popped' Joe Marler's ribs
By Online Editors
A former teammate of Joe Marler has told a brilliant story of how a young Marler, eager to impress early in his career, bit off more than he could chew playing against Munster. Harlequins secondrow Olly Kohn and Jordan Turner-Hall were recalling their historic win over Munster in Limerick in the European Challenge Cup. The visitors had been written off before heading to Ireland in 2011, going in as massive underdogs to the rugby fortress that is Thomond Park.
Kohn takes up the story: "One thing that really stands out to me that day, early on the game, you had this 18, 19-year-old young Buck in Joe Marler, who no one really knew about.
"He had one of his horrific haircuts. But he had this ridiculous attitude: really, really aggro. Really aggressive. No one knew who he was and he had a mohawk.
Marler was up against 6'5, 135kg Munster tighthead Tony Buckley, the heaviest player to ever lineout for Munster.
"He was up against this absolute beast in Tony Buckley, who was a ginormous man at tighthead. So the scrum pops up (I'm behind Marler) and Marler was just like 'I'm going to go for this guy. At the moment I'm not a particularly great scrummager technically, but I'm just going to go for him'. So he gets in his face and just gives him some real good chat.
"I'm like 'you're literally stirring a monster'. Next minute Tony Buckley goes down and gets in the perfect position and just pops every single one of Marler's ribs up. You just hear 'brrrrrup'. Marler hits the deck and is in all sorts of problems. Fair play to him, he carries on, but that was a mistake."
Marler responded to the story on Twitter, jokingly pointing the finger at Kohn. 'I blame the lack of support from behind...'.
Harlequins became, at the time of the game in 2011, only the second team to win at the stadium in European competition in 16 years. Marler, of course, has gone on to a stellar and colourful career for Harlequins and England.
Trending on RugbyPass
2
Jake White: Ireland, Australia and Wales have the same problem
3
David Campese names his Springbok world player of the year winner
4
Let's be real about these All Blacks
5
Latest Comments
Stephen Larkham, Mick Byrne, Scott Wisental, Ben Mowen, Les Kiss, Jim McKay, Rod Kafer.
There are plenty of great Australian coaches who could do a better job than Schmidt.
Go to commentsThis piece is nothing more than the result of revisionist fancy of Northern Hemisphere rugby fans. Seeing what they want to see, helped but some surprisingly good results and a desire to get excited about doing something well.
I went back through the 6N highlights and sure enough in every English win I remembered seeing these exact holes on the inside, that are supposedly the fallout out of a Felix Jones system breaking down in the hands of some replacement. Every time the commentators mentioned England being targeted up the seam/around the ruck or whatever. Each game had a try scored on the inside of the blitz, no doubt it was a theme throughout all of their games. Will Jordan specifically says that Holland had design that move to target space he saw during their home series win.
Well I'm here to tell you they were the same holes in a Felix Jones system being built as well. This woe is now sentiment has got to stop. The game is on a high, these games have been fantastic! It is Englands attack that has seen their stocks increase this year, and no doubt that is what SB told him was the teams priority. Or it's simply science, with Englands elite players having worked towards a new player welfare and management system, as part of new partnership with the ERU, that's dictating what the players can and can't put their bodies through.
The only bit of truth in this article is that Felix is not there to work on fixing his defence. England threw away another good chance of winning in the weekend when they froze all enterprise under pressure when no longer playing attacking footy for the second half. That mindset helped (or not helped if you like) of course by all this knee jerk, red brained criticism.
Go to comments