Spiro Zavos’ 2011 Rugby World Cup Diary

This was a memorable Rugby World Cup final. It was a titanic battle with both sides playing with power and passion. It was unbelievably tense. And in the last half hour, the game wobbled over the abyss for the All Blacks after Thierry Dusautoir scored under the posts to take the score to 8 – [...]

The fact about Robbie Deans and the Wallabies challenge to win the 2011 RWC is that his team made the semi-finals of the tournament, a placing that the ARU had allocated as a ‘pass mark’ before the tournament began. An additional fact is that some months before the RWC tournament, Deans was given an extension [...]

An attractive blonde held up a sign at the All Blacks vs Pumas match that caught the attention of the television cameras: “Dan, I can fix up your groin.” At a dinner party on Tuesday night, when we were discussing the fact that Colin Slade had been withdrawn from the squad with a similar injury [...]

For once the cliche ‘Rugby was the winner’ proved to be a profound piece of wisdom after two pulsating quarter-finals saw Wales defeat Ireland and France beat England, with both teams (and especially Wales) playing vibrant rugby with power in the forwards and pace and skills in the backs. The defeat of England is especially [...]

On Saturday afternoon I was scrolling through my emails, filling in time before the Wallabies – Russia matched when a message from the NZRU came on to my screen. Richie McCaw, the message ran, was pulling out of the match against Canada due to a niggling pain in his foot which had had a screw [...]

The Wallaby backs are match-winners. The forwards are not exactly match-losers, but are not dominant even against second-tier packs. That was the impression on watching the Wallabies thrash the USA 67 – 5. This impression may be slightly awry because the watching was done in a crowded bar in Howick, an outer suburb of Auckland. [...]

The Samoan centre Eliota Fuimaono-Sapolu has made a perfectly valid point in his now-infamous twitter about the difference in the scheduling of matches for the Tier 1 and Tier 2 teams: “Please, all we ask is fairness. If they (Wales) get a week, give us a week. Simple.’ The principle of each team having the [...]

Around 2pm in New Zealand on Monday, the news stations carried a story that the young All Black Zac Guildford was having a press conference, along with the All Blacks manager Darren Shand, to explain rumours about a heavy drinking session. My immediate thought was that the All Blacks selectors had found a way to [...]

The magic and the agony of the Rugby World Cup tournament is that it can produce results that defy prediction. The tournament is won on the field in 80-minute contests where underdogs can have their day in the sun. Ireland’s well-deserved and splendidly thought-out victory over a (perhaps overly) confident Wallabies side was also a [...]

Canada and Samoa had to wait until the middle of the second week of 2011 RWC tournament to get into action. But rather than being overcome by the awful tension that mounts when you are waiting and waiting for a big occasion to actually happen, both teams gave energetic and winning performances. Samoa’s 49-12 over [...]