Fresh off the All Blacks’ World Cup triumph in England, New Zealand’s five Super Rugby teams have started the rebuilding process for the 2019 tournament in Japan with a massive influx of new talent for this season’s tournament.
With several All Blacks either retiring or taking lucrative offshore deals, almost a quarter of the 195 players contracted by the five teams have received their first full-time professional deals this year.
Eleven of the players new to Super Rugby are from the ‘Baby Blacks,’ who won the under-20 World Cup in Italy.
The player garnering the most interest from that team is Auckland Blues’ loose forward Akira Ioane, who made his Super Rugby debut last year, but is already being talked about as a potential end-of-year All Blacks tourist this year.
Ioane’s younger brother Reiko is also at the Blues, who have appeared in the playoffs just twice over the past decade and reached their nadir last year with three wins and 14th place.
While former All Blacks captain Tana Umaga is entering his first season as a Super Rugby coach with the Blues, two long-serving counterparts, the Canterbury Crusaders’ Todd Blackadder and the champion Otago Highlanders’ Jamie Joseph, are stepping down at the end of the season.
Blackadder has failed to add to the Crusaders’ seven titles in his seven years in charge and has a squad shorn of experience with Richie McCaw retired while Tom Taylor, Dan Carter and Colin Slade all ventured offshore.
Joseph has agreed to coach Japan after the season and his side, still unfancied despite winning last year’s competition, will want to prove the pundits wrong again and send him away with a second title.
The Wellington Hurricanes, who were the best side in the competition last year before playing poorly against the Highlanders in the final, will struggle to replace All Blacks’ center pairing Ma’a Nonu and Conrad Smith.
They should still prove tough to beat with a big, mobile pack and explosive backline.
Dave Rennie’s Waikato Chiefs appear on paper to be the strongest side in the New Zealand conference.
Flyhalf Aaron Cruden has returned from a knee injury, while Sam Cane will want to prove the decision to pick him as McCaw’s successor as New Zealand skipper was the right one.
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
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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