Drew Mitchell and Radike Samo return to the Wallabies after injury for the inaugural Rugby Championship in a squad announced yesterday, which also includes three uncapped players.
Mitchell and Samo missed the June Tests, when Australia were beaten by Scotland before clean-sweeping Wales 3-0, but the pair finished the Super 15 season well, before impressing at recent national training camps.
Mitchell is back after ankle and hamstring injuries and will be a welcome addition to the Wallabies, with only five players scoring more Australian Test tries than the 28-year-old, who has been capped 58 times.
Samo is fit again after a shoulder injury that blighted his Super 15 campaign. The widely traveled loose forward made a remarkable Test return last year after a seven-year absence and ended that year with a Tri-Nations title.
The three uncapped players include two of the most recent Australian under-20 captains — Liam Gill, who skippered the side at this year’s junior World Cup in South Africa, and his predecessor Jake Schatz.
Hard-working NSW Waratahs lock Kane Douglas also earns a call-up.
The inclusion of Gill, plus June newcomer Michael Hooper from the ACT Brumbies, bolsters the Wallabies’ back-up resources behind premier openside flanker and captain David Pocock.
The selections of second-rower Douglas and Sitaleki Timani add size and power to the Australian set-pieces.
The two young locks, along with Rob Simmons, will be mentored by Test centurion Nathan Sharpe. The 34-year-old’s decision to stay on for the Rugby Championship provides an opportunity to chase down George Smith as the second most-capped Wallaby.
Meanwhile, South Africa’s flank Schalk Burger has been ruled out of the inaugural four-nation Rugby Championship and in-form J.P. Pietersen will miss most of the tournament.
Burger, capped 68 times, injured his knee at the end of February, but there has been no progress in his rehabilitation according to Allister Coetzee, coach of his club Stormers.
“The position with Schalk is very frustrating and we are going to get a full assessment shortly from a physician on where it should be taken from here, but you can take it as read that we won’t see Schalk play before the end of this season,” Coetzee told the Supersport.com Web site. “Without even looking at the physician’s report, we are writing him off for the year.”
Pietersen, a 26-year-old veteran of 45 Tests, suffered a fracture of the thumb during the weekend’s Super Rugby final and will undergo surgery today.
Springbok coach Heyneke Meyer has recalled Stormers center Juan de Jongh, last year’s World Cup player and a controversial omission from the original squad, in Pietersen’s place.
The 24-year-old De Jongh made his Springbok debut against Wales in 2010 and has 10 Test caps.
“We decided to pick Juan as he provides midfield cover, an area where we are perhaps a bit thin now that J.P. is out,” Meyer said in a statement on Monday. “Losing J.P. is obviously a massive blow as he’s been playing some superb rugby lately, but Juan has also been in good form for the Stormers and was one of the unlucky players to miss out on initial selection.”
The Rugby Championship replaces the Tri-Nations this year with Argentina joining the existing line-up of South Africa, Australia and New Zealand. South Africa finished last in last year’s Tri-Nations, with just one win in four matches.
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