Saints accuse Bordeaux of ‘foul play’ towards Henry Pollock in post-final fracas
Northampton have urged tournament officials to launch an investigation into a post-game fracas involving England’s Henry Pollock after Bordeaux’s Champions Cup final victory.It is understood Saints will make a citing complaint if the incident does not lead to an official disciplinary probe.Phil Dowson, Saints’ director of rugby, said the 20-year-old had been the victim of “foul play” by a Bordeaux player.The meleé was initially sparked by an altercation between the Northampton captain, Fraser Dingwall, and the French international fly-half Matthieu Jalibert, before several other Bordeaux players became involved.Dowson was swift to congratulate Bordeaux on their victory but was clearly unimpressed by what unfolded after the final whistle.
“There was a fracas at the end, there was foul play involved and I have been assured the touch judge has seen it and will deal with it appropriately,” said the former England back-row forward,“Henry Pollock was particularly upset by it because it was uncalled for and out of order and so he reacted,The officials have told me they will deal with it,”Saints’ England fly-half Fin Smith also suggested the French players had previously been riled by Pollock during the game,“They were after him.
I don’t think they liked him.He’ll be all right.I remember they all sort of charged at him and tried to get hold of him.If you have just won a European Cup I’m surprised if the first thing you want to do is start a fight with a 20-year-old.I felt that was interesting.
”Dingwall said he did not think there was bad blood during the game but felt the increasing number of players appealing for decisions was against the “values” of the game.“There were a couple of moments when boys potentially didn’t adhere to those things and that’s going to spark a reaction,” he said.Dowson stressed he was extremely proud of his players for the way they battled on despite a number of injuries.He said George Furbank, driven away on a medical cart after an early collision, was fine but acknowledged the permanent removal of two-thirds of Northampton’s back three inside the first four minutes had had “a huge impact” on the contest.Dingwall said his team were extremely frustrated to have fallen just short: “There was loads of fight and that sums us up this year – unfortunately we just gave them too many opportunities and didn’t win the critical moments.
“It is frustrating when it is such small margins but that is the way this game is,We stayed in there but unfortunately when you play against top teams you can’t give them opportunities,We didn’t fire as many shots as we could have done,It is going to be frustrating to look back on,”Sign up to The BreakdownThe latest rugby union news and analysis, plus all the week's action reviewedafter newsletter promotionBordeaux scored a remarkable 54 tries in their eight Champions Cup games this season, 14 of them by their France winger Damian Penaud who was named player of the tournament.
Penaud scored two of his side’s four tries in the final and is the third Frenchman to win the award in a row, following in the footsteps of Antoine Dupont and Grégory Alldritt.“First of all, we will drink beer and then after that we will think about the Top 14,” said Penaud, whose side are also still in contention for the domestic league title.Meanwhile, European Professional Club Rugby has announced the first World Club Cup will take place in 2028.A tournament featuring the best club sides from the northern and southern hemispheres, to be held every four years, has received unanimous backing from all the sport’s governing bodies.Sixteen teams will qualify – eight from the Champions Cup and the remainder drawn from Super Rugby Pacific and Japan.
The EPCR chairman, Dominic McKay, confirmed before the Champions Cup final that an idea mooted for “the last two or three years” will now be delivered.
Who is calling the shots when it comes to UK wage levels: workers or bosses?
When Eastbourne’s refuse collectors secured a huge 11% pay rise, increasing to 19% for the lowest paid, it seemed like worker power was back.It was early 2022 and inflation was rocketing on its way to a peak of 11%. In a desperate scramble to keep pace with rising prices to protect their incomes, workers across the UK’s public and private sectors took widescale industrial action in a way that brought back memories of the 1970s. What followed was a series of pay deals thrashed out between bosses and employees, with unions often arguing they had been due pay increases for years.Now, a similar scenario is playing out, though this time by stealth
‘New dawn’: first train service renationalised under Starmer begins
Ministers have hailed a “new dawn” for Britain’s railways as the first train services renationalised under the Labour government started operating on Sunday.The 6.14 from London Waterloo to Shepperton was due to be the first rebranded train out on Sunday, its carriages adorned with a union jack and the logo “Great British Railways: coming soon” as part of a publicly owned South Western Railway (SWR).However, the very first renationalised SWR service was in fact set to involve a rail replacement bus: the 5.36 from Woking to Waterloo having to terminate at Surbiton because of bank holiday weekend engineering works
Valuable tool or cause for alarm? Facial ID quietly becoming part of police’s arsenal
The future is coming at Croydon fast. It might not look like Britain’s cutting edge but North End, a pedestrianised high street lined with the usual mix of pawn shops, fast-food outlets and branded clothing stores, is expected to be one of two roads to host the UK’s first fixed facial recognition cameras.Digital photographs of passersby will be silently taken and processed to extract the measurements of facial features, known as biometric data. They will be immediately compared by artificial intelligence to images on a watchlist. Matches will trigger alerts
Live facial recognition cameras may become ‘commonplace’ as police use soars
Police believe live facial recognition cameras may become “commonplace” in England and Wales, according to internal documents, with the number of faces scanned having doubled to nearly 5m in the last year.A joint investigation by the Guardian and Liberty Investigates highlights the speed at which the technology is becoming a staple of British policing.Major funding is being allocated and hardware bought, while the British state is also looking to enable police forces to more easily access the full spread of its image stores, including passport and immigration databases, for retrospective facial recognition searches.Live facial recognition involves the matching of faces caught on surveillance camera footage against a police watchlist in real time, in what campaigners liken to the continual finger printing of members of the public as they go about their daily lives.Retrospective facial recognition software is used by the police to match images on databases with those caught on CCTV and other systems
‘I am free and happy’: Daria Kasatkina has no regrets ahead of first grand slam as Australian | Simon Cambers
When Daria Kasatkina announced that she had officially switched allegiance from Russia to Australia, she picked up her phone soon after to be greeted with whoops of delight from another Australian player, Daria Saville.“I was not telling anyone before it came out,” Kasatkina says to Guardian Australia on the eve of the 2025 French Open. “Dasha called me straightaway and she was so excited. She was so happy for me and I felt so happy because she was super-happy for me.“It was so natural and now we’re real neighbours
Co-driver dies after crash during Jim Clark rally in Scotland
A co-driver taking part in the Jim Clark rally in Scotland has died after a crash on Saturday morning.Dai Roberts, 39, was pronounced dead at the scene near Duns in the Scottish Borders.The driver, James Williams, 27, was taken to the Royal Infirmary of Edinburgh with serious but not life-threatening injuries.The rally’s organisers, the Jim Clark Memorial Motor Club, said the remainder of the event and Sunday’s Jim Clark Reivers rally had been cancelled.The Jim Clark rally is an annual closed-road motor sport race named after the late Formula One champion Jim Clark, who was killed in an accident in Hockenheim, Germany, in 1968
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