Weekend sport wrap

SBS World News Radio: Sport shines brightest when the stakes are high and the stakes are getting higher and higher as the ends of seasons approach.

Weekend sport wrapWeekend sport wrap

Weekend sport wrap

Humiliation.

It's amongst the lowest of human emotions, and something no one wants to be subject to.

But there's few other ways to describe what happened to Australia's national rugby union team, the Wallabies, this past weekend.

In front of the lowest Bledisloe Cup crowd at the venue since Sydney's Olympic Stadium was built, the Wallabies were on the wrong end of an absolute thrashing at the hands of arch-rivals New Zealand.

It was so bad that the final margin - a 20-point defeat, a final score of 54 points to 34 - actually belies just how bad things were.

The main culprit was the side's defence, with New Zealand scoring eight - yes, eight - tries in the first 48 minutes of play en route to building what was at one stage a 54 points to 6 lead.

All this has many howling for changes to the Australian lineup for Saturday's return clash in Dunedin.

But Wallabies coach Michael Cheika claims it's more about changing the way his side plays, rather than who's playing.

"I don't think there's going to be a lot of changes made. The change has to be more about believing in ourselves to go up and make the hits when we need (to)...tracking on the inside, tracking well on the inside, and making sure we're coming up in defence and backing ourselves. Not worrying about what the opposition might be doing out the back or out wide."

In the AFL, there's just one more round of matches until the finals.

But the team who came out of the finals last year with their first premiership since 1954 is unlikely to be a part of this year's September action.

The Western Bulldogs lost their match against Port Adelaide in Ballarat, meaning they will have to beat Hawthorn this Friday and then wait and hope other teams lose their matches in the final round, if they wish to make the finals.

After the exhilaration of last year, coach Luke Beveridge is suitably downcast.

"It's in the lap of the Gods. We need teams to lose to make it (to the finals). We've still got another game, and we've just got to see how the results fall over the weekend."

Adelaide, Greater Western Sydney, and Geelong have all booked themselves a top-four spot, and thus a double-chance in case they lose in Week One of the finals.

Those three teams, plus Port Adelaide, Sydney, and Richmond, have booked finals spots.

Melbourne, Essendon, West Coast, St Kilda, and the Bulldogs are all fighting for the last two spots in the finals.

In rugby league, there are two weeks of games left until the finals.

The Melbourne Storm have secured first place for the second year in a row.

One team unlikely to feature in the finals after the events of the past weekend, though, is the Canberra Raiders.

A late Penrith try handed the Raiders a 26 points to 22 loss.

Coach Ricky Stuart, however, blames his team's poor start to the match, rather than the end of it, for their predicament.

"There's probably three tries there that we're all disappointed in- don't know how they scored them. We're better than that. At the end of the day, the first twenty-five minutes of tour game let us down. We didn't play well in the first twenty-five minutes. I thought that if we had have played the first twenty-five minutes of the game the way we played the remainder of it, we're probably not in this position."

Canberra now has to win their last two matches, and hope other results go their way.

One team who is having results go their way at the moment in Manchester United.

A 4-0 win over West Ham to begin the Premier League season last week has been followed up with another 4-0 win this time around, the opponent this time being Swansea.

It was 1-0 before three goals in the space of four minutes late in the second half turned the result into a thrashing.

Coach Jose Mourinho is impressed with the ruthlessness of his team, not going into a defensive posture just because they were already leading.

The next chance for Mourinho's horses - or players, in human form - to run freely in the Premier League is at home to Leicester next Sunday.

 

 






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Weekend sport wrap | SBS News