{"id":7708,"date":"2025-09-28T18:43:05","date_gmt":"2025-09-28T18:43:05","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/?p=7708"},"modified":"2025-09-28T18:43:05","modified_gmt":"2025-09-28T18:43:05","slug":"sunday-28th-september-2025-day-2022","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/2025\/09\/28\/sunday-28th-september-2025-day-2022\/","title":{"rendered":"Sunday, 28th September, 2025 [Day 2022]"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Yesterday is the day to be dominated by the final of the Women’s Rugby World Cup with the kick off at 4.00pm. This means that I shall probably have to depart for my regular Saturday church commitment when I leave the house at 5.30 but hopefully the game will have been won and lost by that time. Having said that, in rugby as opposed to football, the final result may be determined in the dying minutes of the match and of course that could happen today. I searched the TV schedules in vain to discover when the ‘Bronze’ final (between France and New Zealand) is scheduled to take place but eventually discovered that it is to be broadcast on the BBC i-Player live in the middle of the day so that is another must for me this weekend. I allowed myself the luxury of a little lie-in until nearly 7.00am this morning and then got busy on the computer before I started my daily routines. Eager to find the originals of the ‘living alone’ articles which was a subject of discussion yesterday, I managed to relocate them again and this time I have them bookmarked so that can be run off as needed. I have one or two friends who may be particularly interested in these articles so I wanted to ensure that I had one or two spare copies to hand. I also organised a train ticket to Worcester for a little trip I am going to make in two weeks’ time to visit a friend for a coffee. Meg and I used to travel to Worcester quite regularly and we used the park-and-ride system which was excellent for us. But now this service has been stopped as the local authority thought they could not afford the maintenance on the park-and-ride site so this service was terminated. This must have been one of the worst cost-cutting decisions ever taken because it means that people like Meg and I would cease to visit Worcester and to contribute a little to the local economy by spending money there. Meg and I had found a delightful little outlet down in a ginnell which led into a small square and where there was the most wonderful cafe with home-cooked food and, as I remember, a stupendous fish pie on Fridays. But, as Jon Cleese said in a favourite line (on mine) in ‘Fawlty Towers’ when his wife, Sybil was furious at Basil’s tendency to have a flutter on the horses and Basil retorted to the effect that ‘That is another avenue of pleasure denied’. In the morning, I intend to visit my local Wetherspoons<\/em> to meet up with my Saturday friends. They have been refurbishing the kitchens in the hotel which means that normal catering has been disrupted for about the last 15 days which has not pleased us regulars very much but hopefully, normal service will now be resumed. The Wetherspoon’s<\/em> prices are ridiculously cheap because I tend to have an egg-and-bacon breakfast muffin with limited mugs of hot chocolate (from a machine) at the princely sum of \u00a32.79 (which was half the price of the Waitrose cafe before it closed).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I walked down the hill into town and coincided with my two lots of Wetherspoon’s<\/em> friends that I normally meet on a Saturday. The refurbished kitchens having opened, I could indulge in my favourite egg-and-bacon muffin and then embarked on my chats. I the course of the morning I received some welcome texts which means that I can probably pop over and have a few minutes with my Droitwich friend before she has a couple of weeks off work to go on holiday to see her family. When I got home, I cooked myself a curry and tried out some of the newly purchased Thai curry paste which I bought the other day which was really interesting. Then I watched the New Zealand ‘Black Ferns’ women’s rugby team secure a much-deserved victory over the French in the Bronze match play off for the 3rd place. The ‘Black Ferns’ went well ahead by half time and had scored four tries to the French one, but the French had a resurgence in the second half and strove valiantly for a comeback. But the better team undoubtedly won and the New Zealand speed and ball handling showed off rugby at its best. What was interesting about this match is that there were players on both sides who were at the pinnacle of their careers and because they would probably not be selected for the next World Cup. Consequently, this would be the last match of their international career and when they were pulled off by their coaches to be replaced by fellow team members, they received massive applause from the very appreciative crowd. The same thing will happen again, of course, when England play Canada in the final in some minutes time. I managed to watch the whole of the first half and all but the last fifteen minutes of the second half but by this time England and were well ahead. I went to church and then came back and watched the last 15 minutes of the match on the BBC iPlayer with England winning 33:13. Canada played somewhat less well than in their semi-final win over New Zealand whilst England saved their very best performance for the last match in the series and won out deserving winners. This would certainly not be the last occasion when a semi-final provides a better match than the final itself but the England performance today was hard to fault. The England team did not display the elegance and running style that we associate with the ‘Black Ferns’ but they displayed massive strength and superiority in their mauls and scrums, speed in the rucks and the breakdowns and accuracy in their kicking game. Whilst the England team did display some weaknesses at various points in the competition, then these seem to have successfully addressed by the coaches and the back-room staff which all contributed to the superior performance on the day. I quite enjoyed all of the celebrations that take place at the end of a competition such as this and I think that commentators and spectators are agreed that the women’s game has come on tremendously and the games have been played in a really good spirit which is great to see and you do not necessarily see in the men’s game and certainly not in soccer.\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Yesterday is the day to be dominated by the final of the Women’s Rugby World Cup with the kick off at 4.00pm. This means that I shall probably have to depart for my regular Saturday church commitment when I leave the house at 5.30 but hopefully the game will have been won and lost by […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7708","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7708","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7708"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7708\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7709,"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7708\/revisions\/7709"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7708"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7708"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7708"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}