The News Review:
- Wales Rugby Review of the Year
- Evans expects big things from ‘big game’
- Lapasset mission to have rugby in 2016 lympics
- Bath show their class to go top of rugby Premiership
- New Zealand was top of the rugby union world in 2008
Wales Rugby Review of the Year
Walesnline United Kingdom
It began with our rugby nation’s usual inferiority complex insecurity and ‘blame culture’ raging around after Wales’ early exit from the 2007 World Cup. The repercussions and recriminations flew around as 2008 dawned. Everything was wrong from the academy structure to the number of overseas players plying their trade here to the standard of the Magners League. But help was at hand – Welsh rugby’s latest messiah was beginning a remarkable redemption.
Evans expects big things from ‘big game’
The Press Association
Quins attracted a restricted capacity crowd of 50000 for Saturday’s ‘Big Game’ against Leicester which was a record for a single regular season Guinness Premiership fixture. Evans said: “We were capped at 50000 which meant we sold out a week in advance. I wonder how many we would have got. We didn’t have a walk-up and we didn’t have last-week sales which are usually in five figures.
Lapasset mission to have rugby in 2016 lympics
Independent UK
Bernard Lapasset gets on his bike. After his daily cycle in the foothills of the French Pyren-ees near the family home in Tarbes the chairman of the International Rugby Board settled on his three priorities for 2009. Surprisingly for some perhaps the first is to get rugby readmitted to the lympics.
Related from Macmedal: Malaysia’s Wait For First lympic Gold Medal Set To Continue
Bath show their class to go top of rugby Premiership
AFP
They benefited from previous leaders London Irish slipping up as they lost 16-13 to Saracens who showed character in rebounding from last weekend’s 33-24 defeat by Wasps who were at the receiving end of a 31-3 walloping by Sale on Friday. Harlequins returned to their original home of Twickenham and they and opponents Leicester put on a thriller of a match for the record club attendance of 50000 in a 26-26 draw. The hosts produced a great fightback having trailed 16-9 at the break and then falling further behind in the second-half as the Tigers – who last played Harlequins at Twickenham in 1987 when they won 12-7 – clawed their way to a 23-9 lead thanks to tries by Johnny Murphy and Tom Croft while Toby Flood kicked 16 points. However second-half tries by Mike Brown and Ugo Monye’s late effort – his sixth of the campaign leaving him top of the try scoring charts in the Premiership – brought them back into the match.
New Zealand was top of the rugby union world in 2008
International Herald Tribune France
That team is New Zealand and for 20 years the pattern has been the same: three years of calling the All Blacks the best team on earth followed by a fourth asking how it is that they again failed to win the World Cup. In that seemingly unchanging rhythm 2008 a post-World Cup year is the start of a new cycle. n the surface it was almost as good a year as New Zealand could have wanted. New Zealand was eliminated by France at the quarterfinal stage in the 2007 World Cup.