Given that I was expecting a tonking, you’d think I would be quite pleased with that result.

Do I have to write this?

Well, that was really quite frustrating in the end.

Moving on…

Ask, and ye shall receive…

And we’re back… Oh, goody! A controversy to begin with. (Where ‘controversy’ has its modern meaning of ‘a confected talking point hyped up by media companies desperate for eyeballs’.) My take? The Gloucester player knocked the ball on (sorry, forward – it’s not called “knock-on” any more, apparently) in the tackle1. Controversial, eh? Moving on… There have been a lot of words coming out of the coaching team about a change in style this season – about wanting to be more expansive and adventurous.

Well, that was a fun day – heading up to Heywood Road first thing for the women’s game, then dashing off to the Trafford Centre to catch the men playing later in the afternoon. It’s been a busy week for me following those two games, so this is going to be a quick recap of them, more for the sake of publishing something than to do any in-depth analysis.

Well, we’ve spent the summer dipping into the amuse bouches of the Lions in Australia, England in the Americas and the pool stages of the women’s World Cup. But now, it’s time to sit down at the banqueting table for the real deal: the return of the PWR and the Premiership.

When I was a nipper… Having spent nearly thirty years of my life banging on keyboards in an effort to persuade various computers to do what I want, not what I said, I retain a somewhat geeky interest in computer-related developments. It probably comes as no surprise, then, that I find the AI explosion over the last couple of years fascinating (while retaining a degree of scepticism over its usefulness).

I walk this empty street, on the Boulevard of Broken Dreams... I had hoped to write one more match report after this one, but it was not to be. I’ve been sitting on this for a few days, and I think I’m still too emotionally drained to write a full report. We were outthought and outplayed. Leicester exploited our biggest weakness: a propensity to fall apart in the face of an ultra-aggressive defence.

Well, I can definitely skip the glute exercises at the gym tomorrow.

That’s more like it. Third is ours to take, and second remains possible, if only technically.

Well, that was incredibly disappointing, and yet, somehow, utterly inevitable.

Four down, three to go…

Called it: “From this point on, fear nobody; least of all Harlequins in two weeks.”

I bloody love these trips to France: good food, good wine, fabulous company…

Never in doubt…

Fin(n) who?

Well, it was a win… just.

Just shy of a year ago, Alex Groves had open-heart surgery to fix an aneurism, having been told that he could die if he played rugby again without it.

Well, that was not unexpected, but while it was not as bad as I’d feared, it still hurts. What makes it worse is that I think we could have won. Bath ruthlessly punished a couple of moments of inattention and we did ourselves no favours by once again buggering up promising attacking positions. Can we have a moratorium on blaming the ref when we get embarrassed by an opposition move?

Dunham Massey, Cheshire, UK

Altrincham, Cheshire, UK

From the sublime to the ridiculous; from the ridiculous back to the sublime. This is the Way of the Shark, young mudskipper: learn it well.