Monday Round-Up
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Bruce Craig, the chairman of Bath, says his club’s European Champions Cup pool game against Toulon will never be played after being postponed because of the terror attacks in Paris on Friday night.
The match, which was due to be played in Toulon on Sunday afternoon,was one of five games to be called off on Saturday in the wake of Friday night’s atrocities. The decision was imposed on Champions’ Cup organisers by the French Ministry for Sport and the prefecture.
“It is very clear to me that the Toulon match can’t happen,” said Craig, who is based in Aix-en-Provence. “The midweek option is not an option to my mind as that would to the detriment of player welfare as well as the integrity of two competitions, an important Champions Cup game being squeezed in with all the attendant travel issues between two Premiership weekends.
“There is no way we should be letting that happen. You can’t play three high-profile games in a week. In the wider context of what has happened in Paris, this is not a serious matter, of course it isn’t. And I do understand why the decision was taken. But from a rugby point of view, and from the point of view of the competition, this is an issue of significant consequence. There is no place to fit it in. It is a bit of a disaster in that regard.”
“There are simply no free weekends available between now and the end of the season,” said Craig. “It is unacceptable that the international calendar does not take into account the domestic game. We are playing matches right through the 2016 Six Nations championship to get everything fitted in. There are 33 weekends all accounted for and no slack. And why England are going off on a tour to Australia at the end of a World Cup season I don’t know. What is the point? The players will be knackered.
Ospreys fly-half Dan Biggar praised his team's performance as they got their Champions Cup campaign off to a winning start against Exeter.
A 25-13 victory at the Liberty Stadium saw the Welsh region come from behind and also then deny the Chiefs a losing bonus-point on Sunday.
That left in-form Wales international Biggar delighted, especially with Exeter going so well in the Premiership.
"We have to take a huge amount of credit as a team for that performance, especially as the outside half missed a few kicks. It was good to come away against such a strong outfit as Exeter Chiefs with a 4-0 points win," he told EPC Rugby's website.
"We haven't had the results we wanted in the league and so we said that this is a new competition. This win shows how much this competition means to us because we haven't done very well in it in recent years.
"There was a lot of courage, fight and determination out there. It was one of the best performances I've had in an Ospreys shirt."
One thing that was impressive about Biggar was how he shrugged off an off-day with his goal-kicking to put in an excellent all-round game.
"A couple of years ago I might have let those misses affect me, but you can't let anything get to you – once it's gone, it's gone," he explained, with the fly-half finishing with 20 points in the game.
