Financially-stricken Melbourne Rebels axed from Super Rugby Pacific

  • Private consortium’s rescue plan deemed ‘overly optimistic’
  • Australian club’s last match will be played next month

A legal battle looms between Rugby Australia and the consortium who planned to save the Melbourne Rebels, with the Super Rugby Pacific club to be shut down after 14 seasons.

Five months after the Rebels entered voluntary administration, Rugby Australia broke the news before players boarded a plane to Fiji for the final round of the competition.

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Tony O’Reilly: the Lions cub who earned place in Irish sporting folklore

Before entering business, O’Reilly played rugby for Ireland and the Lions and could have been ‘one of the world’s greats’

Tony O’Reilly has died aged 88 and this week’s business pages will pay tribute to a titan of the corporate world who struck commercial gold with Kerrygold and built a hill of beans with Heinz. It is a sign of a life remarkably well lived, then, that his name will also always have a place in the pantheon of Irish sporting heroes and prompt a wry smile whenever rugby union’s classic old-school anecdotes are retold.

As a player good enough to have been selected as the youngest Lion in history when chosen to tour South Africa as a teenager in 1955, O’Reilly might have reached even loftier heights in the game had his burgeoning business career not intervened at the age of 26. There was to be one last impromptu hurrah, however, when he was famously recalled seven years later to face England at Twickenham.

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Blair Kinghorn: ‘The mentality at Toulouse is that we win trophies’

The Scotland back couldn’t be happier after switch to French club who face Harlequins in a Champions Cup semi-final

It’s been five months since Blair Kinghorn decided to move from Edinburgh to Toulouse mid-season. He’s played 10 games and won every one of them. Toulouse are second in the Top 14, two points off Stade Français, and have a home semi-final against Harlequins in the Champions Cup on Sunday.

Kinghorn has scored six tries and eanred himself a spot in a freewheeling backline that includes Antoine Dupont, Romain Ntamack, and Thomas Ramos. He’s been playing in front of a 20,000 home crowd every other week. And he and his fiancee are settled into their new house, next door to his friend and teammate Jack Willis.

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