NEW YORK, NY- Happy Memorial Day! Each nation has special days to thank those that have made the greatest sacrifice in the name of their county. We at RWU want to thank the American Soldiers that have made that eternal sacrifice… It will be tough to follow that up and just talk about rugby, but we move forward with them in our memory.
We begin by covering both the Amlin and Heineken cup final. We then move on to Super Rugby, where teams have started making moves for the playoffs. After that we whip around to review Tier 3 matches in North America, the Caribbean, South America, Asia and Europe. Add to this, we have all the weeks transactions… and USA Rugby News! With that said let’s dive into the Weekend Rugby Recap:
Ladies first,
The top division of Asian RFU Womens 4 Nations Rugby championship, was fought in Hong Kong this year. WRWC qualified Kazakhstan are your 2014 champions. They dominated Japan to win the title, meanwhile Hong Kong easily dismantle Singapore.
Here are the results:
SAT – 24TH MAY 14
WARC Hong Kong 53 – 5 Singapore
WARC Kazakhstan 49 – 17 Japan
Heineken Cup – The team know as Les Galactiques put together a great performance to win the title as our review shows. Please CLICK HERE for the review.
There was another big European Cup match occurring as the final leg in the inaugural 2-leg qualifiers were played between the 7th placed teams in the Aviva Premiership and the Top14. Qualifying for next years European Champions Cup will be the London Wasps after having defeated Stade Francais Paris over the two legs to win the right to play in Europe, next season.
Here are the results:
Heineken Cup Qualifier
SUN – 18TH MAY 14
First Leg Wasps 30 – 29 Stade Francais
SAT – 24TH MAY 14
Second Leg Stade Francais 6 – 20 Wasps
Amlin Cup – The East Midlands Machiavellian Rugger Nick Hall will be back his review of the all English club final. As for the match-up itself, Northampton finally over came there big game choker tag. After losing 4 straight opportunities to win hardware over the last 4 years, they finally won one. The Saints managed to overturn early Bath pressure to impose their will on the game and extinguish the challenge presented by their premiership rivals.
FRI – 23RD MAY 14
Northampton 30 – 16 Bath
Super Rugby – The RWU Super Rugby Superman, Jamie Wall, has a great recap of all the weekend’s matches as teams began making moves and stating cases for the playoffs. Please CLICK HERE for his review.
Tier 3 – We will begin with the European Nations Cup, which consists of 7 divisions, each with 4-6 teams. The matches determine who will get promoted and relegated form groups 1A, 1B, 2A – 2D, and 3A. Saturday saw the Hungary v Denmark postponed. In a winner take all qualification match for the Rugby World Cup, Germany welcomed Russia. In the match, the Russians were able to use their superior fitness to pull away at the end.
The Asian5N is short for the Asian 5 Nations, which is similar to the ENC but with 5 divisions and 5 teams in each. In the second division matches between Iran survived a fierce challenge by Thailand and Malaysia managed to pull away from Qatar. In the first division, The Philippines were defeated at home by Korea while Japan officially qualified for the Rugby World Cup with a dominant performance against Hong Kong.
In the midweek, there will be 3rd division matches as Guam takes on Laos and China challenges Indonesia.
The SAMC is the same as the two previously mentioned tournaments but for South America and that has 4 divisions featuring 15 teams. The top division of this tournament is sometimes known as the CONSUR Cup. An Argentina side, full of U-20 players, traveled to Chile and demolished the hosts.
The NACRA Championship is the same as the three previously mentioned tournaments but for North America and the Caribbean. It is not as layered as the other three competitions and rather has the weaker teams play qualifiers to get to a stage that it would seem fair to bring in the larger unions. USA Rugby competes in this tournament by sending the USA South Regional all-star team, in order to develop talent and make the competition a much fairer one. This weekend saw regional powerhouse Trinidad & Tobago smash Barbados.
Here are the results:
FRI – 23RD MAY 14
ASIA5N Iran 26 – 23 Thailand
ASIA5N Malaysia 31 – 22 Qatar
SAT – 24TH MAY 14
ENC Hungary – Denmark – Postponed
ENC/RWCQ Germany 20 – 31 Russia
ASIA5N/RWCQ Philippines 22 – 52 Korea
NACRA CH Trinidad & Tobago 34 – 5 Barbados
SUN – 25TH MAY 14
ASIA5N/RWCQ Japan 49 – 8 Hong Kong
SAMC Chile 12 – 73 Argentina
Here is this midweek schedule:
THU – 29TH MAY 14
ASIA5N Guam – Laos
ASIA5N Indonesia – China
Conversion Kick:
Signings/Player Moves: Argentina prop Juan Figallo has left Montpellier and joined Saracens in the Premiership after the Ligue de National Rugby (LNR) prevented him from playing. Figallo has a C3 vertebrae injury that the LNR prohibits a player from playing with, while the Aviva Premiership doesn’t so Figallo was released from his Montipol contract to join Sarries.
USA Rugby News and Updates: USA Eagles Head Coach Mike Tolkin announced the 40 players that will be part of his Denver camp. Click HERE to read more.
Tier 2 and 3 News: Our Romanian rugby rain man, has developed a new tier 2 and 3 news updating website. It collects the rugby news from 675 news sources and posts them there with a link to the original source, covering over 160 rugby nations!
That’s it for now. Feel free to comment below, look for and “Like” our Facebook Rugby Wrap Up Page and follow us on Twitter@: RugbyWrapUp,Junoir Blaber, DJ Eberle, Nick Hall, James Harrington, Cody Kuxmann, Jaime Loyd, Karen Ritter , Jamie Wall, Jake Frechetteand Declan Yeats, respectively.
And until the next time… stay low and keep pumping those legs!
