Jharal Yow Yeh: the Brisbane Broncos player who gets injured in this video, and the noise you make when you land wrong and snap your ankle so badly that a sock is the only thing keeping us from seeing your leg guts.

The injury took place in a round 4 National Rugby League match between the Broncos and the South Sydney Rabbitohs*. I can’t provide a lot of in-depth analysis, because every time I try to do that with rugby I end up horribly wrong (examples: “That’s not rugby, that’s Australian Rules Football!” or “That’s not rugby, that’s curling!”), but I can say with confidence that the only thing grosser than an ankle shard protruding through your skin is how rugby enthusiasts on YouTube respond to jokes about it:

Yeah, the theater joke the guy made is way worse than what you said.

[h/t The Last Angry Fan]

*That’s how people in anime say “rabbit”.**
**It’s also the original name for Trix cereal.

I need you to understand that headline.

“Having a gay stroke” isn’t British slang for hooking up with a guy, at least not here. I’m talking about a literal gay stroke, wherein you rapidly lose brain function due to a disturbance in the blood supply and when you come out of it you’re a homosexual. That’s what happened with Rugby player Chris Birch (pictured above, left) when he pulled an Afro Ninja.

Chris Birch, 26, told the UK’s Daily Mail that after he awoke from a stroke he suffered after trying to do a flip at the gym (and failing, and breaking his neck): “It sounds strange but when I came round I immediately felt different.”

“I wasn’t interested in women any more. I was definitely gay.”

“I had never been attracted to a man before — I’d never even had any gay friends. But I didn’t care about who I was before, I had to be true to my feelings.”

Of all the sports blogs in the world, With Leather is the one I’d least like to see be homophobic or fill itself up with antiquated notions of what makes a “real man”. And who the hell knows how the human brain works? People can a stroke and wake up without the ability to speak, or think straight. They can get shot in the brain and end up communicating with Ritz Crackers. Knowing that who you love and what you find attractive is essentially a function of the brain, it’s not beyond the realm of possibility that if your brain is moving, that function could get switched in the move. The paragraph where he makes sure to explain how before the stroke he had never been attracted to men and didn’t know any gay people is concerning in its inclusion, but whatever, if this version of Chris is happy then we should be happy for him, right?

And then you read a little more, and it sounds a lot like this guy backflipped onto his head and used it as a really badly-timed excuse to come out without being judged.

“I started to take more pride in my appearance, bleached my hair and started working out. I went from a 19st skinhead, to an 11st preened man.”

Seems like he’s got those classifications ready to go, doesn’t it?

Sometime after that he went to the Daily Mail UK and posed for photos holding a hair dryer, because the notion that wanting to have sex with a man makes you disinterested in sports and super into hairdressing isn’t the most stereotypically new-money thing you can do. I’ve got an itch that makes me resistant and unsure of anyone who tries so hard to be a stereotype of ANYTHING, so here’s the most reasonable way I can conclude — no matter who Chris is and no matter how this happened or why, I hope that he can find what he’s looking for and, eventually, stop feeling like he’s got to keep proving what he is.

If anyone ever complained that we don’t feature enough rugby stories here, I would explain that it’s because we don’t get rugby and therefore don’t like writing about it. In fairness, though, it is cooler than soccer and we write about that on occasion, so it’s only fair that we find a little rugby news here and there.

Well news be damned, because we instead have an instructional video, which is helping me understand rugby in an entirely new light. Like the kind of light that makes it difficult to stand up for the next 20 minutes or so. Seriously, all sports need more instructional videos like this. If every sport followed this example, video games would become obsolete because every able-bodied young male would be outside trying to kill the next guy to impress oiled up girls.

To be fair, video games wouldn’t become entirely obsolete because we’d still have marijuana and college. But we’d sure have a lot more athletes running around. Hell, imagine if we applied this method to teaching math and science. The future would be a beautiful place.

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Anderson Silva defeated Yushin Okami at UFC 134 without even really trying, but the weekend’s best fight took place in Australia on Friday night between the Melbourne Storm and the Manly-Warringah Sea Eagles. Melbourne’s Adam Blair and Manly’s Glenn Stewart went toe-to-toe after a little push and shove, a little push and shove, a little push and shove, WHACK from their teammates and it is all you want a rugby fight to be.

The announcers and slow motion replay made it sound and look pretty awesome (and it looked like two T-Rexes trying to claw each other in the face), but not everyone enjoyed it.

“It certainly wasn’t a good look for our game,” said Melbourne coach Craig Bellamy.

Like anything else that happens in the world, YouTube is divided into two camps: Camp one says this is normal and should be expected from a sport where rule one is to beat the sh*t out of each other, and camp two says “thugs” or “thuggery” or some form of weirdly-veiled cultural insult. Judge for yourself.

[h/t Off the Bench]

Rugby Australian Rules Football is the most awesome thing in the world that I know nothing about. That honor used to go to the Marianas Trench, but I ended up learning a lot about it in the seventh grade. Anyway, I don’t think you have to know anything about rugby footy to appreciate this video of Nic Naitanui clearing an entire group of human beings to catch a ball. Imagine if Blake Griffin jumped a car for a slam dunk, but jumped the middle part. The Mark of the Year candidate took place against Carlton at Etihad Stadium in Round 14 on Sunday, and yep, that is absolutely right.

Also like the Blake Griffin dunk, the fan comments on the YouTube video itself are a great mixture of “this was great” and a deep explanation of why it wasn’t, including “he just jumped onto other peoples’ backs”, proving that no great deed goes un-meh’d. I think we should always look to enjoy the accomplishments of people who do what we can’t. You could give me a thousand tries to use a living man as a plateau with which to reach a flying rugby ball and I would miss it 1,005 times.

Fun Fact: The bottom of the Marianas Trench is further below sea level than Mount Everest is above sea level.

Meh.

[via Hot Clicks]

I’m not going to pretend to know the first thing about rugby. Back in college, I got super drunk with the women’s rugby team and that’s about the extent of my knowledge. I am, however, quite a fan of watching unnecessary sports violence, so I can declare with confidence that Northampton Saints wing Chris Ashton had his face rocked by Leicester’s Manu Tuilagi in a recent 11-3 Leicester win. Tuilagi received a yellow card for his aggression, but his punches at least marked the first time that the name Manu was associated with anything macho in sports.

Video after the jump, as well as some very special guest commentary on rugby.

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