With a whole week without major rugby to enjoy, here are some talking- points to fill the empty hours
WXV, here we come!
The first contest of the second WXV starts in Amsterdam on Saturday. Colombia take on the Netherlands for the right to a place in WXV3. The Tucanes finished last of the eighteen nations last year, so have to face the leading contestants for promotion. The Oranjes have been planning for this match-up for a long while.
Colombia have a new head coach, Luis Pedro Achard from Uruguay, and new hopes. The experience alone of competing in Dubai will have helped them prepare for this coming fixture, though playing it in Amsterdam rather than Bogota seems distinctly unfair.
The Dutch will be without their star player and captain, No 8 Linde van der Velden, who was handed a ban of three games, including this WXV fixture, for a dangerous tackle in a PWR game. If she completes a Coaching Intervention Programme, she would escape the third-match ban, versus Spain.
In the immediate future, the Colombia game takes on much greater prominence.
The Tucanes warmed up on their way by taking on Complutense Cisneros in Madrid. This training game saw them win 46-7.
They are much strengthened since last year by the return of players who were caught up in Pan-American games that prevented their involvement. They remain the outsiders as the Oranjes sit thirteen places above them in the world order. And they beat Sweden last month with plenty to spare.
But you never can tell. That’s what makes WXV so exciting.
Details:
Date: 16 March
Kick-off: 14.00 local time
Venue: NRCA Stadium, Amsterdam
The game should certainly be available on rugbypass.tv
Cliodhna Moloney – back or not?
At the Six nations launch in London Scott Bemand dropped a hint that Ireland might see their best hooker (my verdict, not his) allowed to appear in a green shirt again, after a gap of over two years since her bust-up with the IRFU. Her phrase “slurry spreading” lit up social media platforms.
The union’s man in charge, Kevin Potts, denied that this was the cause of her exclusion. Her ongoing absence has only extended my problems in accepting his statement.
Her possible return is great news for her and for the team. The one curiosity is the very cautious, delaying phrases Bemand uses. ‘There’ll be a time, you never know’; ‘at the minute, it sits as it sits’. A return was no more than ‘potential’.
Since he wasn’t around at the time of the big debate, he must have other concerns which weren’t touched on in detail. For whatever reasons he didn’t include her in his 6N squad.
Schools finals at Twickenham
Some four hundred girls had the chance to step on to the Twickenham turf and play. It was the Continental Tyres Schools day. Thirty schools were represented, players varying from absolute beginners to more experienced operators.
The one unfortunate note was struck by the boys’ winning school, Harrow. Their triumph helps to underline the need to spread the game right across the spectrum. It’s not every school that can appoint so distinguished a player as Roger Uttley to be its director of rugby.
