France captain Thierry Dusautoir has the utmost respect for his New Zealand counterpart Richie McCaw, but still plans to wreck celebrations for the flanker’s 100th cap today.
McCaw, who has been voted world player of the year three times, will be the first All Black to reach the milestone when the World Cup hosts take on the French in a pivotal Pool A encounter at Eden Park.
“He has been the best flanker in the world for 10 years now,” Dusautoir said at the French team hotel yesterday. “I think he has one year less experience than me, yet I have only half the caps.”
Photo: AFP
“So I can just respect this guy because he leads the All Blacks really well and he’s still a great player. I’m sad because we are going to waste his party tomorrow,” he added.
Dusautoir scored his country’s opening try and made 38 tackles when they knocked the All Blacks out of the quarter-finals of the 2007 World Cup.
That was one of two stunning reverses in the knockout stages of rugby’s showpiece event, the other came in 1999, that have made the New Zealanders so wary of France.
Photo: Reuters
Dusautoir said the Cardiff match in 2007 was one of the toughest he had ever played in and expected a similar standard today at a stadium where the All Blacks have not lost since the French triumphed in 1994.
“I’ve never played a game like this again, but it was physical and tough mentally because it was a quarter-final at a World Cup,” the 29-year-old said.
“I’m sure that tomorrow[today] is going to be a similar game and I hope we can win again,” he added.
Dusautoir also captained France when they beat a weakened All Blacks team in Dunedin in 2009, experiences which coach Marc Lievremont said would hold his players in good stead today.
“It probably does help the French team, given that there are a few members of this team that have beaten the All Blacks before,” he said. “So they know it is possible to do it. But for the New Zealand team, it probably does not mean so much.”
With the losers of today’s match likely to end up in the weaker half of the draw for the knockout stages, the French have been accused of putting out a weakened side for the highly anticipated match.
Lievremont, who has handed a first start at flyhalf to Morgan Parra, unsurprisingly dismissed the allegation.
“Notwithstanding some of the reports seen in the press, the team really wants to do well in this particular game,” he said. “It is a really important game for us to win.”
Revelations of positive doping tests for nearly two dozen Chinese swimmers that went unpunished sparked an intense flurry of accusations and legal threats between the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) and the head of the US drug-fighting organization, who has long been one of WADA’s fiercest critics. WADA on Saturday said it was turning to legal counsel to address a statement released by US Anti-Doping Agency (USADA) CEO Travis Tygart, who said WADA and anti-doping authorities in China swept positive tests “under the carpet by failing to fairly and evenly follow the global rules that apply to everyone else in the world.” The
Taiwanese judoka Yang Yung-wei on Saturday won silver in the men’s under-60kg category at the Asian Judo Championships in Hong Kong. Nicknamed the “judo heartthrob” in Taiwan, the Olympic silver-medalist missed out on his first Asian Championships gold when he lost to Japanese judoka Taiki Nakamura in the finals. Yang defeated three opponents on Saturday to reach the final after receiving a bye through the round of 32. He first topped Laotian Soukphaxay Sithisane in the round of 16 with two seoi nage (over-the-shoulder throws), then ousted Indian Vijay Kumar Yadav in the quarter-finals with his signature ude hishigi sankaku gatame (triangular armlock). He
RALLY: It was only the second time the Taiwanese has partnered with Kudermetova, and the match seemed tight until they won seven points in a row to take the last set 10-2 Taiwan’s Chan Hao-ching and Russia’s Veronika Kudermetova on Sunday won the Porsche Tennis Grand Prix women’s doubles final in Stuttgart, Germany. The pair defeated Norway’s Ulrikke Eikeri and Estonia’s Ingrid Neel 4-6, 6-3, 10-2 in a tightly contested match at the WTA 500 tournament. Chan and Kudermetova fell 4-6 in the first set after having their serve broken three times, although they played increasingly well. They fought back in the second set and managed to break their opponents’ serve in the eighth game to triumph 6-3. In the tiebreaker, Chan and Kudermetova took a 3-0 lead before their opponents clawed back two points, but
Taiwanese gymnast Lee Chih-kai failed to secure an Olympic berth in the pommel horse following a second-place finish at the last qualifier in Doha on Friday, a performance that Lee and his coach called “unconvincing.” The Tokyo Olympics silver medalist finished runner-up in the final after scoring 6.6 for degree of difficulty and 8.800 for execution for a combined score of 15.400. That was just 0.100 short of Jordan’s Ahmad Abu Al Soud, who had qualified for the event in Paris before the Apparatus World Cup series in Qatar’s capital. After missing the final rounds in the first two of four qualifier