If you ever needed a more dramatic example of just where you can end up in the professional game, take a look at this video. It’s as far removed from the Waterford All-Ireland heroes of the late 1950s and 60s as you can possible get.

Again, because the professional era allows people like Sky to hijack the TV rights to these games and prevent us from watching our own provinces from competing with coughing up some cash to prop up the whole monstrous experiment of overpaid players, you can’t find this in English on YouTube, which is why this one is in French. But it goes through the series of two necessary replacements because of injury, before the Harlequins people decided to re-introduce their star kicker Evans into the match with five minutes to go.

Having used up all their substitutions, however, they went for a blood substitution by getting Tom Williams to pretend he had a blood injury to his mouth. You can see him winking to the sideline staff as he’s taken off. The French commentators in this piece note that the English are better at creating drama than kicking the ball and the grand plan doesn’t work as Evans kicks wide. Poetic justice for a team led by the master cheat whose charge Neil Back was also congratulated for cheating in the Heineken Cup Final in Munster in 2000, when all the world saw him steal the ball from Stringer in the scrum.

“My Father: A Hurling Revolutionary, the life and times of Ned Power” is out on paperback at the end of November 2009.  Click here for further information, pre-order and excerpt.