All Black prop Kees Meeuws said his team had gone back to basics in their forward play after a year of stagnation and the new regime will make a difference at Saturday’s Tri-Nations Test against South Africa in Christchurch. Meeuws said the renewed focus on improving their set piece under coach Graham Henry and assistants Steve Hansen and Wayne Smith had lifted the All Blacks to a significantly higher standard.
A series of seminars on the classical world, which have been going on for some time now at the University of Bologna, where I teach, has attracted hundreds of students, who listen to lectures and readings from texts with curiosity and enthusiasm. Maybe this is because the classics have always had something to tell us.
Former rebel leader Pierre Nkurunziza has an air about him of a man who always wears new shoes. He struts rather than walks — not surprisingly for a leader who claims to have more than 35 000 men under his command. At the Burundi peace talks in Pretoria this week his swagger was even more pronounced.
When Everton’s first-team squad reconvened for pre-season preparations David Moyes’s players were greeted with specially mounted photographs of themselves positioned above their personal changing-room clothes hooks. It was the sort of touch footballers appreciate. More significantly, the photos represented an olive branch proffered by Moyes.
The United States is no longer a soccer backwater. Contrary to popular belief, the US is a country where the people involved in the game have a sophisticated enough appreciation of it to know exactly where they stand on the bigger stage.T hey are under no illusions about the quality of their own domestic league.
Predictably, there’s an outspoken Scottish codger who thinks Chelsea are rubbish and that sanity (otherwise known as Manchester United) will prevail in the Premiership despite Roman Abramovich’s millions.His name? Alexander Chapman Ferguson, the son of a docker born in grim Govan.
Chelsea fans have not seen the last of the Tinkerman, though he walks in different shoes today. Yet unlike his predecessor Claudio Ranieri – who often gave the impression of a gambler chasing his losses with his numerous and seemingly haphazard changes – Jose Mourinho’s card sharpness is thanks to the minutiae of his pre-match preparations.
No one laughed when, not so long ago, Patrick Kluivert was described as the “greatest number nine in the world”. And yet there were few tears in Barcelona this week, only relief. Though it has been coming for some time, the 28-year-old’s fall from grace has been as spectacular as his cost.
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