Northampton sign South African lock Van der Mescht
Van der Mescht said that he is "hungry to keep improving" and hopes to now take his "game to the next level"."I have ambitions to play for the Springboks one day, but I know that starts with improving and performing well for Saints – and that's a challenge I'm really excited about," he said.
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BBC News
2 hours ago
- BBC News
Japan v Wales preview, teams and how to follow
Summer tour first Test: Japan v WalesVenue: Mikuni World Stadium, Kitakyushu Date: Saturday, 5 July Kick-off: 06:00 BSTCoverage: Watch live on BBC One Wales and BBC iPlayer; listen live on BBC Radio Wales, BBC Radio Cymru & BBC Sounds; text commentary and highlights on BBC Sport website and app. Japan will host Wales in a two-match series that starts in Kitakyushu on Saturday and will finish in Kobe seven days head coach Matt Sherratt is in caretaker charge again having taken over from Warren Gatland during the Six Nations Championship in February with the Welsh Rugby Union's hunt for a permanent successor are seeking to end a record run of 17 consecutive Test defeats that stretches back to October are coached by Eddie Jones who is starting the second year of his second stint with the Brave have won four games and lost eight since Jones came back, and were beaten by 40 points or more by New Zealand, France and England in though, was the coach when Japan secured their only victory in 14 attempts against Wales in 2013. Where is the match being played? The first match is being played at Mikuni World Stadium which opened in 2017 and is normally home to third division football side Giravanz was the city that took Gatland's side to its hearts in 2019 when Wales chose it as its World Cup training base. Six years ago, the Mikuni World Stadium venue was where more than 15,000 locals packed into so they could watch Wales train, with the adopted home fans producing a rousing rendition of the Welsh national time Wales will play its first Test match at the venue that will host only its second international after Japan entertained Uruguay in 2022. How can I follow the game on BBC Sport? You cam watch the game live live on BBC One Wales and BBC iPlayer or listen live on BBC Radio Wales, BBC Radio Cymru & BBC Sounds with kick-off at 06:00 can follow live text commentary on the BBC Sport website and app, with build-up starting from 05:30 will also be post-match reaction and analysis online and via BBC Radio Wales and the Scrum V podcast. How hot and humid will it be? Wales and Japan will be given water breaks and an extended half-time period to help the two sides deal with the heat and humidity in Kitakyushu on match is being played at 14:00 local time with temperatures expected to reach 33C, while there will also be a high level of will be a three-minute break midway through each half, while half-time will be extended to 20 minutes from the original 15 measures are being taken under World Rugby's updated heat and air quality guidelines, which set out the measures to be taken to support players performing in hot half-time extension is the second most severe reading with the next step being to consider "delaying or suspending the game". Japan and Wales team news Sherratt has made 11 changes from the side humbled 68-14 by England in the Six Nations in eight Taulupe Faletau, prop Nicky Smith, centre Ben Thomas and full-back Blair Murray are the survivors from that record Cardiff Josh Macleod and Alex Mann are handed recalls, while centre Johnny Williams also returns. Scarlets captain Macleod makes his first Wales appearance since November 2022, while Williams' previous involvement came in September Hardy and Sam Costelow form a new half-back partnership, while Dragons lock Ben Carter returns after missing the Six Nations because of Cardiff captain Liam Belcher could make his international debut from the replacements bench if he comes on for hooker Dewi Lake, who skippers the is one of six Wales forwards on the bench including Tommy Reffell and Aron has named an inexperienced Japan team featuring two uncapped players in the starting line-up and another six on the Japan's new caps will be the diminutive wing Kippei Ishida, who Jones said "can be a Japanese version" of South Africa World Cup winner Cheslin Kolbe, while prop Yota Kamimori also starts for the first flanker Michael Leitch will captain the team in his 88th cap, with Japan regulars Warner Dearns, Dylan Riley and Seungsin Lee also in the starting side. Line-ups Japan: Takuro Matsunaga; Kippei Ishida, Dylan Riley, Shogo Nakano, Malo Tuitama; Seungsin Lee, Shinobu Fujiwara; Yota Kamimori, Mamoru Harada, Shuhei Takeuchi, Epineri Uluiviti, Warner Deans, Michael Leitch (capt), Jack Cornelsen, Amato Hayate Era, Sena Kimura, Keijiro Tamefusa, Waisake Raratubua, Ben Gunter, Shuntaro Kitamura, Ichigo Nakakusu, Halatoa Blair Murray; Tom Rogers, Johnny Williams, Ben Thomas, Josh Adams; Sam Costelow, Kieran Hardy; Nicky Smith, Dewi Lake (capt), Keiron Assiratti, Ben Carter, Teddy Williams, Alex Mann, Josh Macleod, Taulupe Liam Belcher, Gareth Thomas, Archie Griffin, James Ratti, Aaron Wainwright, Tommy Reffell, Rhodri Williams, Joe Damian Schneider (Argentina)Assistant referees: Karl Dickson (England) & Luke Pearce (England)Television match official (TMO): Ian Tempest (England).
The Guardian
2 hours ago
- The Guardian
France seeking end to years of hurt and internal conflicts at Euro 2025
'I want people to stop asking me: 'Why haven't France won anything when you're one of the best teams in the world?'' Marie-Antoinette Katoto, like all her teammates, has only one dream this summer: to win the Euros. To do that, though, they have to come to terms with a history of tournament failures with the most recent one coming at the home Olympics last year, when they were knocked out by Brazil at the quarter-final stage. 'We have had opportunities and twice failed to win it at home in France. We have to have the humility to admit that,' admits Sakina Karchaoui, one of the team's vice-captains, referring also to the 2019 World Cup on home soil, when they lost to the USA in the quarter-finals. The list of failures is so long that the word 'finally' is added to any question about Les Bleues' chances. France have only managed to reach the semi-finals of a major women's competition on three occasions: the 2011 World Cup, the 2012 Olympic Games and Euro 2021. Repeated disappointments have taken a toll. 'Since we prepare for tournaments a year or two years in advance, when you arrive at the competition and you get eliminated quickly, yes, at some point it also has an impact on the mind,' says Grace Geyoro. 'It can be exhausting, especially when you see the [quality in the] team we have.' On Saturday, they start their latest mission at Euro 2025 against England in Zurich. It could not have been a tougher opening, the Lionesses having the last Euros in 2022 with a coach who also won the previous tournament, in 2019 with the Netherlands. The Dutch are also in France's group in Switzerland, together with Wales. France have always had individual quality. As far as the 2000s there have been players such as Louisa Nécib Cadamuro, Camille Abily, Marie-Laure Delie, Sandrine Soubeyrand and Laura Georges, before the arrival of Eugénie Le Sommer and Wendie Renard. All of which begs the question: Why haven't France triumphed in a major tournament. 'If we knew why France weren't winning, I think we'd have put things right by now,' says Abily, the fifth-most capped player in Les Bleues history with 183 caps between 2001 and 2017. 'I think there's a tendency in France to see football as an individual sport, thinking more about oneself before thinking about the team. That's what's been a bit lacking in the French team.' Grace Geyoro agrees: 'We've relied a lot on individuals, on the fact that one player can make the difference. Now we need to focus more on the collective, because we can only win together.' The team has often been shaken by internal conflicts, whether it be disagreements with the coach Corinne Diacre or players clashing such as Kheira Hamraoui and Aminata Diallo in 2021. Elise Bussaglia, who earned 192 caps between 2003 and 2019, says: 'The group hasn't always coped well, for various reasons. And it's true that at one point it could have had a detrimental effect on our results.' One of the areas of tension was the disconnect between the players from Lyon, who were professionals at the time, and those from Juvisy (later Paris FC) and Paris Saint-Germain, who were still semi-professional. The current Chelsea head coach, Sonia Bompastor, touches on the subject in her book Une vie de foot, which was published this year, writing: 'We weren't on the same wavelength at all, and we didn't have the same conception of what it meant to be a footballer. For me, losing a match was the end of the world; not for them.' Abily, who is Bompastor's assistant at Chelsea, insists that in her day, the team 'didn't realise' the quality it had. 'I remember that when we qualified for the semi-finals of the World Cup in 2011, we said to ourselves: 'Wow! That's great, we're here, we've qualified!' Bussaglia, who finished fourth with France at the 2011 World Cup and the following year's Olympics, adds: 'There are times when the French team should have at least won a medal, if not the title, and it didn't happen. There needs to be a bit more of a winning culture. But it's not just the federation, it's everyone: the players, the staff, the fans, everyone. Around this French team, there's still not enough desire to win.' Bompastor has also spoken about the lack of interest from the French FA in the women's team in the past. 'Nobody gave a damn about the French women's team,' she wrote in her book. 'We used to go and see Noël Le Graët, the president of the federation, to explain to him that the reason Lyon were European champions was because we'd put certain processes in place, and not because we'd gone off to summer camps with a singing coach [referring to Bruno Bini, Les Bleues coach from 2007 to 2013 who wrote songs for the players]. The only thing that mattered to him was our popularity rating and our good image.' There was a feeling by some players that the French FA was using the women's team to restore its reputation after the catastrophic 2010 World Cup when the men's team went on strike and refused to train by staying on the team bus. A lack of ambition is no longer true today, says Eric Blahic, who was assistant coach to Corinne Diacre and then Hervé Renard (2023-24) and was delighted to see the latter end the 'famous semi-final complex'. 'For years, the girls were told that they had to be in the sem-finals,' he says. 'That doesn't mean anything. Third or fourth is not the same thing. You have to say: the objective is the final.' He also rejects the idea that France have failed to go all the way because of a mental block. 'In 1982, when the French men's team played in the semi-final in Seville, when we led 3-1 and ended up being eliminated, people were already saying that it was mental problems. If that's all it was, the federation would have taken action a long time ago.' Laurent Bonadei was appointed as Renard's successor in August 2024 and since then a full-time mental performance coach, Thomas Sammut, has been part of the team 'to break this glass ceiling'. He has made other changes too, dropping three key players – Le Sommer, Renard and Kenza Dali – just before the Euros, saying that 'if it doesn't work you have to try something new'. Bonadei will also have to deal with Les Bleues' misfortune when it comes to penalties in major tournaments. Bussaglia says of the Olympics semi-final defeat to Japan in 2012: 'At the Olympics, in the semi-final, we were 2-1 down and I missed the penalty to make it 2-2. I'd never missed a penalty in my life but I missed that one.' Blahic, meanwhile, recalls the shootout loss to Australia in the 2023 World Cup, when Kenza Dali missed her spot kick against club teammate Mackenzie Arnold not once but twice as it was retaken. 'All the girls had taken lots of penalties in training, in all different forms, against three different goalkeepers,' he explains. Bonadei prefers to refer to France as 'outsiders' rather than favourites, despite having won their eight last games going into the tournament. 'Confidence is good for developing our game, but overconfidence is the trap that awaits us,' warns Bonadei. In Switzerland there is unlikely to be overconfidence as France have to battle against not only their opponents, but their past too.
BBC News
2 hours ago
- BBC News
Wimbledon tennis champion Arthur Ashe and South Africa: 'The first free black man I'd ever seen'
Fifty years ago Arthur Ashe pulled off an amazing feat, upsetting the odds and becoming the first black man to win the Wimbledon Men's final when he beat fellow American Jimmy Connors - but it was not something he wanted to define his fight to break down barriers around racial discrimination was closer to his heart - and apartheid South Africa became one of his battle grounds."I don't want to be remembered in the final analysis for having won Wimbledon... I take applause for having done it, but it's not the most important thing in my life - not even close," he said in a BBC interview a year before his death in his Centre Court victory on 5 July 1975 was hailed as one of those spine-tingling sporting moments that stopped everyone in their tracks, whether a tennis fan or not, and it is being commemorated with a special display at the Wimbledon was already in his 30s, tall, serene and with a quiet and even-tempered demeanour. Connors, 10 years younger and the defending champion, was an aggressive player and often described as "brattish".Ashe's achievements and the skills and courage he displayed on the court were certainly matched by his actions off it. In the early 1970s, South Africa repeatedly refused to issue a visa for him to travel to the country alongside other US white-minority government there had legalised an extreme system of racial segregation, known as apartheid - or apartness - in authorities said the decision to bar him was based on his "general antagonism" and outspoken remarks about South in 1973, the government relented and granted Ashe a visa to play in the South African Open, which was one of the top tournaments in the world at the was Ashe's first visit to South Africa, and although he stipulated he would only play on condition that the stadium be open to both black and white spectators, it sparked anger among anti-apartheid activists in the US and strong opposition from sections of the black community in South journalist and tennis historian Richard Evans, who became a life-long friend of Ashe, was a member of the press corps on that South Africa says that Ashe was "painfully aware" of the criticism and the accusation that he was in some way giving legitimacy to the South African government - but he was determined to see for himself how people lived there."He felt that he was always being asked about South Africa, but he'd never been. He said: 'How can I comment on a place I don't know? I need to see it and make a judgment. And until I go, I can't do that.'"Evans recalls that during the tour, the South African writer and poet Don Mattera had organised for Ashe to meet a group of black journalists, but the atmosphere was tense and hostile."As I passed someone," Evans told the BBC, "I heard someone say: 'Uncle Tom'" - a slur used to disparage a black person considered servile towards white people."And then one or two very vociferous journalists stood up and said: 'Arthur, go home. We don't want you here. You're just making it easier for the government to be able to show that they allow someone like you in.'" But not all black South Africans were so vehemently opposed to Ashe's presence in the South African author and academic Mark Mathabane grew up in the Alexandra township - popularly known as Alex - in the north of Johannesburg. Such townships were set up under apartheid on the outskirts of cities for non-white people to first became aware of Ashe as a boy while accompanying his grandmother to her gardening job at a British family's mansion in a whites-only lady of the house gifted him a September 1968 edition of Life magazine from her collection, and there, on the front cover, was a bespectacled Arthur Ashe at the was mesmerised by the image and its cover line "The Icy Elegance of Arthur Ashe" - and he set out to emulate Ashe went on the 1973 tour, Mathabane had only one mission - to meet Ashe, or at least get close to opportunity came when Ashe took time off from competing to hold a tennis clinic in Soweto, a southern Johannesburg township. The 13-year-old Mathabane made the train journey to get there and join scores of other black - and mostly young - people who had turned out to see the tennis star, who they had given the nickname "Sipho"."He may have been honorary white to white people, but to us black people he was Sipho. It's a Zulu word for gift," Mathabane, now aged 64, told the BBC."You know, a gift from God, from the ancestors, meaning that this is very priceless, take care of it. Sipho is here, Sipho from America is here." The excitement generated at the Soweto clinic was not just contained to that township but had spread across the country, he rural reservations to shebeens or speakeasies (bars) - wherever black people gathered, they were talking about Ashe's visit."For me, he was literally the first free black man I'd ever seen," said the 1973 tour, Ashe went back to South Africa a few more times. In early 1976 he helped to establish the Arthur Ashe Soweto Tennis Centre (AASTC) for budding players in the not long after it opened, the centre was vandalised in the student-led uprisings against the apartheid regime that broke out in June of that remained neglected and in disrepair for several years before undergoing a major refurbishment in 2007, and was reopened by Ashe's widow Jeanne complex now has 16 courts, and hosts a library and skills development centre. The ambition is to produce a tennis star and Grand Slam champion from the township - and legends such as Serena and Venus Williams have since run clinics Mothobi Seseli and Masodi Xaba, who were once both South African national junior champions and now sit on the AASTC board, the centre goes beyond feel that fundamentally it is about instilling a work ethic that embraces a range of life skills and self-belief."We're building young leaders," Ms Xaba, a successful businesswoman, told the Seseli, an entrepreneur born and raised in Soweto, agrees that this would be Ashe's vision too: "When I think about what his legacy is, it is believing that we can, at the smallest of scales, move the dial in very big ways."Ashe was initially inclined to challenge apartheid through conversations and participation, believing that by being visible and winning matches in the country he could undermine the very foundation of the his experience within South Africa, and international pressure from the anti-apartheid movement, persuaded him that isolation rather than engagement would be the most effective way to bring about change in South became a powerful advocate and supporter of an international sporting boycott of South Africa, speaking before the United Nations and the US 1983, at a joint press conference set up by the Organisation of African Unity (OAU) and UN, he spoke about the aims of the Artists and Athletes Against Apartheid, which he had just co-founded with the American singer Harry Belafonte. The organisation lobbied for sanctions against the South African government, and at its height had more than 500 joined many protests and rallies, and when he was arrested outside the South African embassy in Washington DC in 1985, it drew more international attention to the cause and helped to amplify global condemnation of the South African was the captain of the US Davis Cup team at the time, and always felt that the arrest cost him his used his platform to confront social injustice wherever he saw it, not just in Africa and South Africa, but also in the US and was also an educator on many issues, and specifically HIV/Aids, which he succumbed to, after contracting the disease from a blood transfusion during heart surgery in the early he had a particular affinity with South Africa's black population living under a repressive said that he identified with them because of his upbringing in racially segregated Richmond in the US state of wonder then that Ashe was one of the key figures that South African anti-apartheid hero Nelson Mandela was keen to meet on a trip to New York, inviting him to a historic townhall gathering in 1990 shortly after his release from 27 years in pair met on a few occasions, however Ashe did not live to see Mandela become president of South Africa following the 1994 election, which brought in democratic rule and the dismantling of like Ashe, Mandela was able to use sport to push for change - by helping unify South Africa - notably during the 1995 Rugby World Cup when he famously wore the Springbok jersey, once a hated symbol of apartheid. To celebrate this year's anniversary of Ashe's victory, the Wimbledon Championships have an installation in the International Tennis Centre tunnel and a new museum display about him. They are also taking a trailblazer workshop on the road to mark his Wimbledon title was the third of his Grand Slam crowns, having previously won the US and Australian to many people like Mathabane - who in 1978 became the first black South African to earn a tennis scholarship to a US university - Arthur Ashe's legacy was his activism, not his tennis."He was literally helping to liberate my mind from those mental chains of self-doubt, of believing the big lie about your inferiority and the fact that you're doomed to repeat the work of your parents as a drudge," he said."So that was the magic - because he was showing me possibilities." You may also be interested in: 'I'm not afraid of dying': The pioneering tennis champion who told the world he had AidsArthur Ashe's 1976 interview: 'Fighting the myth''Growing up black' made Arthur Ashe crave control Go to for more news from the African us on Twitter @BBCAfrica, on Facebook at BBC Africa or on Instagram at bbcafrica
