Stat Blather And Rugby Football

I sat opposite a young woman on a train this week, and to my delight she pulled out one of our books to read. (You can read an extract from the same book here - if you enjoy it, the whole thing is available from our website, Amazon or all good bookstores.)
If you run Penguin or Headline this must happen to you all the time, but it's rare for us and it was a bit of a thrill. It's always nice to clap eyes on an actual customer.
We get some feedback through this blog, of course. Most of our readers are from the UK, but we get a lot of people visiting the blog from the USA, Canada and Australia. Less frequently, we get people from other European countries - mostly France, Germany and Ireland.
We get the occasional readers in more exotic locations. In the last week, I imagine because of the interest in Nightjack, we've been visited by people from, Chad, Colombia, Estonia, Iran, Japan, New Zealand, Russia, Saudi Arabia, South Korea, Spain, Taiwan, Tonga and Uzbekistan.
More specifically, we've had visits from the Univerza v Ljubljana and the Universiteit Utrecht (plus several British universities), a number of British police forces, the House of Commons, several national and regional UK government departments, someone from the Australian government and a company from Arlington, Virginia, which specialises in analysing 'humint' for the CIA. Bizarre.

But I can't concentrate much on books at the moment, to be honest.
There's nothing in sport like a Lions tour (except an Ashes series) and it plays havoc with my concentration - I'm spending far more time at planetrugby than I really ought to.
Eight years ago I was lucky enough to follow the Lions across Australia - a series we lost, thanks in my opinion to Nathan Grey's swinging arm on Richard Hill in the second test.
(I was there again two years later when - for English Lions supporters, at least - revenge was very sweet.)
I've always feared the Boks would repeat the All Blacks' 2005 3-0 whitewash, so this time I'm watching from the sofa, with copious bottles of Abbot Ale and a cushion to hide behind.
That said, if the Lions can hold the Boks in the scrum, win some line-out and turnover ball and get it out to the backs ASAP, who knows?
It's great to see Simon Shaw get a test start - I think he should have played last week, possibly instead of O'Connell. And I'd have gone with James Hook at 10 (he's not even on the bench), and Shane Williams on the wing (on the basis that class is permanent) because WE NEED TRIES!

Posted by Dan