Habana out for two months

Toulon – Toulon wing Bryan Habana will be sidelined for two months after sustaining a thigh muscle injury in the European Cup match against Exeter last weekend, club coach Bernard Laporte said yesterday.
The Springbok flyer was forced off the field in the 37th minute of the match after pulling up sharply as he tried to accelerate.
Laporte said that Habana would undergo an operation next week to repair the damage done to the muscle and would be out for at least two months.

That means he will miss the return match with Exeter in Toulon this weekend and the Top-14 games against Montpellier and Racing Metro.

Meanwhile, The Chiefs will change their approach to the breakdown after “suspicious” referees made decisions that saw them penalised heavily in 2013.

Talking to Stuff.co.nz website, Chiefs assistant coach Andrew Strawbridge said that despite his team winning the competition this season, he felt his team had been unfairly targeted by referees at ruck-time.

Strawbridge said some of the rules were “pretty dodgy, very grey” and so the Chiefs had forced the referees to explain their interpretations of the rules.

“In the end if someone is giving penalties against you, you’ve got to adjust,” he said.
Strawbridge said he felt that referees targeted teams that won the competition and said his team needed to adjust to the large amount of penalties that they conceded as a result.

“The referees are a suspicious bunch and they think if you win, you are probably doing something underhanded or untoward, and they double-check everything you do and we came under the microscope because of that.”

The coach said that the tackle was the area of the game that they looked at pretty closely last year – an area they emphasised, and in which aimed to make a lot of adjustments for the 2014 season.

Elsewhere, English Rugby Football Union (RFU) CEO Ian Ritchie is confident that the game has not been affected by spot-fixing.
Ritchie was speaking at a conference where ministers and MPs were discussing corruption in sport. It followed the arrest of six people through an investigation into football by the British National Crime Agency (NCA).

English football club, Blackburn Rovers, confirmed that their striker DJ Campbell was one of the six people arrested.
Ritchie, however, is adamant that rugby is clean.

He told the ESPN scrum website that it was made “very clear” through the Gambling Commission that there are no dubious betting patterns in rugby, not even a sign of it.

He did, however, warn that they must be aware that the problem could arise and be ready if it happens.
He said they’ve put together a rugby integrity unit which will assure they are ready should the problem arise.-Sport24.