The USA are playing Canada in August but they’ve released a 30 player roster for their July tests against Romania and Scotland. Canada are expected to release their summer roster next week sometime.
The Canada Selects team that travelled to Spain won both matches against Spain, 27-12 on June 9th and 27-26 on June 15th. The Rugby Canada posts on social media with photos are included below. More details can be read on the scrumqueens.com website.
Canada looked tired coming out on Day 3 after a big Day 2, knocking off Australia and France. They narrowly got by Spain in the semi-final and lost to Japan in the final as errors crept into their game.
We’ll add tournaments to this list as organizers share posters with us. If you have a tournament, email (editor@bcrugbynews.com) a .jpg of the poster or send us the link to the poster graphic on X or FB.
There are 3 weeks left in the regular season with the top 4 teams in each conference entering post season play. Currently in the West, Houston, Seattle and San Diego have clinched playoff spots, in the East, New England and New Orleans have clinched playoff spots. There were 34 Canadian players in action, 17 starters and 17 reserves.
Island Blue won the final match of the 3 game series against Mainland Gold 22-20, winning the series 2 games to 1. All matches in the series were won by the home team.
It’s time to double back on a couple of stories from last week and dig down a bit deeper. The first story is the men’s 7s team getting relegated from the World Rugby 7s series, the second story is the men’s U20 loss to the USA on home soil. Both are connected through a theme of “what’s happening with the national men’s rugby programs”?
MacDowell Rugby have an ambitious schedule this year which provides a great opportunity for U18 and U16 players to get noticed and on the high performance pathway.
It was a similar scenario to Game #1, Canada dominated the scrums, the USA had the advantage everywhere else. Without Canada’s dominance in the set piece the score would have been a lot worse, Canada’s first two tries were penalty tries courtesy of the set piece. The 3rd Canada try was a kick to the corner from Matt Bennett to wing Spencer Cotie.
The Highlanders have added four more Reserve players since our last update. The quality of the Reserve players announced is increasing and the gap between 1st XV and Reserve is closing. Two of the recent Reserve announcements are top level players in the BC Premier, Nick Blain fullback from the championship UBCOB Ravens team and Brian Ndirangu second row from Westshore, both of these players would be interchangeable with their counterparts on the 1st XV. The two other players are Irish and we’re not familiar with their level of play but likely quite handy. Conall Henchy is a hooker from Trinity College, and Andrew Sherlock is a scrum-half from Galwegians.