All Blacks face yet another tough Selection

Press, 10 November 1981, Page 48

All Blacks face yet another tough Selection

NZPA staff correspondent

Perpignan

An All Black team with its confidence on the rise after the win over the French Barbarians on Saturday arrived on France’s south-west Mediterranean coast yesterday to prepare for another tough game against a careefully chosen French Selection.

The city of Perpignan boasts a side which, along with the neighbouring clubs of Narbonne and Beziers, is noted primarily for the strength of its forward play and the » All Blacks seem destined to face a tough battle up front on Thursday. The three French Selections which the All Blacks

have faced to date have all

lived up to French Rugby Federation president Albert Ferrasse’s description of them as picadors whose task is to soften up the All Black bull before the two test matches.

The last picador, the French Selection at Grenoble, did a magnificent job — from the French viewpoint — in not only beating the New Zealanders but in sidelining five of them for varying lengths of time. There seems little doubt that the fourth picador, with its strong forward pack and largely imported backs, will present further stiff opposi-

tion. The All Black captain, Graham Mourie, believes that the standard of the French Selections faced this year is stronger than those which were put up against he 1977 All Blacks. “The teams are better selected and ' far more motivated. In 1977 there were many good players in the selections but the teams

generally seemed to have a weakness, whether it was a bad set of props or a poor loose forward trio,” he said. Beziers, the French, club champion for four of the last five years, playing a brand of rugby based on forward domination, has already been well represented in the selections which have faced the All Blacks.

Its representative on Thursday will be the prop, Jean Francois Wolff, one of the two French internationals in the side. Wolff, who is only 20 years old, has two caps and toured

South Africa last year and Australia . earlier this year. He props a strong front row also containing Romain Stefanutti, of Perpignan, and Robert Nivelle, of Narbonne. The backs include Didier Codorniou, the Narbonne centre who has been capped 11 times for France but who has already had to pull out of two games against the All Blacks because of injury.

One interesting omission from the French Selection is the Perpignan goal-kicking centre, Jean Marc Bouirert, the central figure in this year’s French rugby cash scandal. Bourrert became the centre of a row when he left the Pia rugby league club to play for . Perpignan last December, just three days after playing for France in a

rugby league test against the touring Kiwis. The defection provoked allegations, denied by Perpignan, that Bourrert had been offered up to $NZ46,000 to change codes and that as a former league player his move had broken rugby union’s strongest regulations on amateurism.

The international Rugby

Board imposed a suspension on Bourrert in March after studying evidence relating to the allegations and instructed the French Federation to investigate the matter.

In a controversial move several months later the French Federation cleared Bourrert, saying that signatures purporting to be his on records of match fee payments had not in fact been written by him. There the matter was terminated because under 1.R.8. rules each individual union investigates allegations made against its players.