Italy have stuttered unconvincingly in their opening matches. But surely this time Baggio will be relieved of the burden of orchestrating vital victories against these minnows, and I can book my seats to worship at the Azzurri’s altar in June 1996 at Old Trafford or Anfield? The best-laid plans .. RUGBY UNION
BY STEVE BALE
Cardiff, the Heineken League leaders, yesterday reappointed their Australian coaching director, Alex Evans, for a fourth and final season, but instead of ending speculation linking him to the Wales team the club only fuelled it.Evans, who was the Wallabies’ assistant coach when Alan Jones was in charge in the Eighties, is already involved with the Welsh Rugby Union through its lite squad of promising young players. With Alan Davies and the rest of the Welsh management likely to be on their way out next week after Wales’s Five Nations whitewash, the respected Queenslander’s has been the name most often mentioned. “It would be unethical and improper to talk about this,” he said yesterday.The complication such an appointment would cause makes it more probable that the WRU would use Evans in an advisory capacity in conjunction with the other widely touted option of promoting the Wales A coaches, Kevin Bowring and Dennis John.This alternative remained open yesterday when Gareth Davies, the Cardiff chief executive, said: “It would be wrong to comment or speculate on what the WRU might want.
If they should want Alex, it would present Cardiff with problems, but I wouldn’t see those as insurmountable.”If the union really did desire Evans as coach, it would first have to pay off his club contract, but even then, although that would restore his amateur status, there would be the problem of making good the income he would thereby lose.Evans himself preferred to avoid a touchy subject yesterday, instead issuing a clarion call for the unity so notably absent in Welsh rugby. “What we want in Wales is for everyone, the whole nation, to get behind the national squad. At the moment they are on an unbelievable low.”n Bath will be without nearly half their regular side for Saturday’s vital Courage League match at Wasps. Their England players Victor Ubogu and Jeremy Guscott are away on business, the wing Adedayo Adebayo is in England’s Hong Kong Sevens squad and the flanker Jon Hall is resting.
The Scotland prop Dave Hilton and the wing Tony Swift are on the injured list.. The Britton family completed a memorable treble at the Rosslyn Park School Sevens yesterday when Wellington College won the festival tournament. Their 27-5 victory over Blundell’s, in a competition predominantly for one-term schools, allowed outside-half Edward Britton to follow in family footsteps.
His father, Mark, was a runner-up in the same tournament with Ipswich in 1965, while elder brother James was in the victorious Wellington team of 1992.Edward was only on target with a conversion in his side’s five-try win over Blundell’s. The Wellington winger Doug Rowe took the plaudits with two tries in the final – one a sprint from the half-way line.”They will remember this day for the rest of their lives,” said Wellington master Ken Hopkins who had taken his side to a victory over Millfield in the Surrey Sevens a week earlier.Welsh successes were few and far between on the first day of the national sevens, but yesterday Birchgrove, Glantaf and Dwr y Felin flew the dragon into today’s junior tournament quarter- finals. Last year’s runners-up, Dwr y Felin, look in the mood to go one better, conceding just 19 points on their way to a last-eight meeting with Berkhampstead.Malsis School managed the biggest win of the day in the preparatory school tournament, a 71-0 victory over St Michael’s, Kent, but still did not qualify for today’s last 16.Results, Sporting Digest, page 39. To encounter Malcolm Reilly in his new home town of Newcastle on the coast of New South Wales is to find a man in his element. Only a few months into his job as coach of the Newcastle Knights in Australia’s Winfield Cup, only the Castleford accent betrays that he was ever at home anywhere else.
