Exciting winger Lelia Masaga is the most notable omission from the All Blacks side named on Saturday to contest the Tri-Nations rugby championship.
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Preview of All Blacks 2009 Tri-Nations squad
Springboks change ten for final Lions Test
Wallabies’ Tri Nations squad
It’s not often you see Collingwood and Essendon play in front of close to 80,000 at the MCG – with both sides hitting form – and it’s not the biggest game of the week. You could say it’s as rare as, well, two sides going into round 14 undefeated.
Seventy-odd years ago, former Surrey and England captain Percy Fender noticed Don Bradman step away from a short pitched ball on a news reel. It was footage from Australia’s 1930 tour of England. Word got around to Douglas Jardine, that this Bradman may not be perfect afterall.
Timing is everything. Just ask all the other movies that were up against Gone With the Wind for the 1939 Best Picture. Goodbye Mr Chips, Mr Smith Goes to Washington, Wuthering Heights and The Wizard of Oz would most likely have won in any other year.
Roger Federer reached a record 20th Grand Slam final and a seventh straight Wimbledon title match with a 7-6 (7-3) 7-5 6-3 win over German veteran Tommy Haas in the semi-finals on Friday.
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Murray targets US Open after Wimbledon heartbreaker
Majestic Federer storms past cannonball Karlovic
Roddick ends Hewitt’s Wimbledon campaign
AFL chief Andrew Demetriou has admitted Sydney isn’t ready for a second team but the city is getting one anyway. That’s according to Swans coach Paul Roos, who has revealed details of a conversation he had with Demetriou on the subject this week.
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Barry Hall considering quitting Swans
Preview of AFL round 14 AFL matches
Time the Swans dealt Hall some tough love
If Mitchell Johnson wasn’t spearheading Australia’s pace attack in the Ashes, chances are he could be standing on the mound as a Major League Baseball pitcher.
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McGrath fires Lee into action
Two good reasons why England will win the Ashes
Lessons from Worcester
This is what we know, or think we know, about Lote Tuqiri’s sacking by the ARU. He was sacked on Wednesday. The police are not involved in investigating any matter regarding the sacking. The ARU denies emphatically that the sacking is part of a witch-hunt to get rid of Tuqiri.
To be fair to Con Constantine, the great ogre of Australian club football, he does make a good point about the propriety or lack thereof in Football Federation Australia’s role in poaching Gary van Egmond from the Jets to the AIS and the national under-17s.
Mike Hussey’s return to form in the tourists’ clash with England’s second string should silence the critics who were beginning to doubt him. One of the more surprising elements of the Ashes build-up has been, from both sides, the criticism levelled at Hussey.
You might not have felt it, but there was a definite shift in the AFL this week. It might have been a minor one, but it was unquestionably there: the beginning of the end for what is known as the outside player. The omission of Nick Stevens rammed it home.
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Fremantle’s decision this week to hand a one-match internal suspension to veteran Dean Solomon has raised eyebrows, with some onlookers labeling the ban harsh and part of a new hard-line approach from Dockers coach Mark Harvey.
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With the prospect of a cracking Tri Nations coming up, and a Lions series almost wrapped up by a Southern Hemisphere nation for the third time in a row, can we now look towards the world’s premier rugby competition?
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Channel Nine sideline commentator Tim Gilbert made the comment that the Roosters are fielding the youngest team of any side in the NRL this season. But judging the way they played in the opening half of football on Friday night against the Dragons, at least the future looks bright.
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William Webb Ellis, rightly or wrongly, is the name associated with the beginnings of rugby union. In the town of Rugby, England in 1823, Webb Ellis, “who with a fine disregard for the rules” began to run with the ball in hand at Rugby School, thus gave the world the game we all love today.
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The Socceroos are ranked sixteenth in the world. It’s hard to believe they are sitting one place above football pretty boys, Portugal, a team who are struggling to make South Africa next year, even with the best player in the world in their side.
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Rugby can be a frustrating game to watch. Teams spend an age fighting for the ball, only to lose it on their first possession. And even the most promising of movements can end in a penalty or turnover.
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Ahead of Saturday’s official announcement of the All Blacks team for the defending of the Tri Nations and Bledisloe Cups, a tentative squad has been assembled by the New Zealand Herald and Newstalk ZB.
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The current British and Irish Lions tour of South Africa has confirmed that this tradition of rugby should continue well into the future.
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Tomorrow in Townsville, 200 of the brightest indigenous football talents in our great country take part in one of Australia’s most widespread football festivals involving competitors from all corners of Australia.
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Finally Australia has reached sixteenth place on the recent FIFA Rankings, a personal best for the team. It’s where we deserve to be as we had a great run on our road to the World Cup.
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The 4th of July has immense significance for Americans as they celebrate their victory over colonial forces, thus gaining independence. As a nation, it is probably their most revered public holiday.
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And then there were two. Namibia and Tunisia have emerged as the leading African rugby nations in the current African Cup Rugby Championship, which is also doubling as a 2011 RWC Qualifier series.
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In some positive news for the the embattled club, Wests Tigers this week announced a new sponsorship deal with the aptly named Tiger Airways.
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I don’t think that Lote is necessarily in the top four wingers, so it might be right that he didn’t make the squad. But that said, there are some very interesting issues at play here.
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The Dragons continue to excel now that they have punted their three great pretenders: Jason Ryles, Mark Gasnier, and the worst coach in rugby league history, Nathan Brown.
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What’s in a record? Well, if you’re Greg Bird, a new job, and a tough time getting a visa to play overseas. But if you mean a record like winning the Minor Premiership in the Australian Ice Hockey league, not much.
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A recent article out of the Netherlands named Dutch football as the most successful of the past forty years. With Verbeek and Henk Duut (ex Feyenoord) leading Australia to another World Cup, the Dutch school must be close to being declared Holy Down Under.
