Japan gave the rugby world the story of the opening weekend of the Rugby World Cup with perhaps the most surprising result in the history of the sport. It was only Japan's fifth win against a tier one nation in their history, having previously beaten Wales and Argentina.
And it was deserved. Japan out-thought South Africa, out-fought them at the breakdown, in the scrum, and at lineout time - and the Boks had no answer. Granted, the Springboks looked a little rusty having not played in over a month, but this wasn't a flukey victory for the Japanese.
But that hasn't stopped some frankly stupid excuses circulating as to why South Africa lost.
It's those pesky seagulls again.
That's right, those nuisances are back after harassing the public by the port tunnel prompting Liveline to have been overrun by concerned citizens. Apparently, hundreds of seagulls have been disrupting the South African training pitches by hitting them with blitzreigs of poo.
The story goes that an army of rogue seagulls weren't too pleased that the South Africans had entered their territory, and were determined to fight back. Thus operation "Bok shit" was launched, as the seagulls pelted the team and the pitch with their droppings.
As always, twitter had some great hot-takes:
Pesky seagulls plague South African Springboks training ground with POO http://t.co/jjbTCz7xhm. They played crap too.. #MIB
— VizualizeIt (@VizualizeIt) September 19, 2015
Because it's obviously much more likely that seagulls are the real reason why South Africa lost, and not the fact that they were out-played by the Japanese.
Those pesky seagulls: a menace to bins, and now professional rugby teams it seems.
For South Africa, they now face the seagulls in a re-match next weekend to try and regain their supremacy and qualify for the quarter-finals.
