KeithQuinnRugby
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You are here: Home » News Comment » Recognition is coming at last for our 'Great One' from the IRB Hall of Fame
9 August 2014
This is great and appropriate really; our great All Black, Sir Colin Meads, for years had been a member of the privately owned International Rugby Hall of Fame - but after the IRB opened up its own website in 2006 Colin was strangely, always ignored. This irked a number of reporters in New Zealand (I can hold my hand up here) who asked 'what was going on?'
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'It was a try from the end of the world!' said captain Philippe Saint-Andre of his fullback Jean-Luc Sadourny's match-winning 100metre team try at Eden Park.
VAN VOLLENHOVEN, TOM
Northern Transvaal and South Africa
7 internationals for Sth Africa 1955–56
Acclaimed as a man who might have become South Africa’s finest wing, van Vollenhoven indeed fashioned a reputation as a great try-scoring wing – but it was for St Helen’s at rugby league.
His international rugby career was cruelly brief. After his debut as a centre against the 1955 Lions, van Vollenhoven moved to the wing and promptly became the first player to score three tries in a test in South Africa. In the second test in Australia the next year, he kicked a dropped goal – it was only the second time he had ever attempted one – but his form fell away in New Zealand and while he played eight of the first nine matches, he played only the third test.
The crew-cutted van Vollenhoven was reckoned to be inconsistent, but there was nothing unreliable about him in the matter of scoring tries. In his 19 matches on that long tour, van Vollenhoven scored 16 tries, but was such a natural and instinctive player that selectors found him difficult to fit into a team pattern.
He certainly proved them wrong, or misguided, with St Helen’s.
Why did the Wallaby rugby team only practice in the afternoons at the 1987 Rugby World Cup?
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