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Curry, Underhill, Kolisi, Hooper all miss out as fans pick finalists in vote for world's best flanker
By Online Editors
Four of rugby's biggest names have failed to make it to the final round of a global fan-voted campaign to determine the best flanker on the planet.
Punters worldwide have hit the polls on RugbyPass’ Facebook and Instagram accounts as part of the Straight 8 Fan Vote campaign to decide the planet’s best players in each position, as voted by the fans.
In the first instalment of the series, England's Maro Itoje was crowned the best lock in the world by fans across the globe, leaving the likes of Eben Etzebeth, Brodie Retallick and Alun Wyn Jones in his wake en route to the title.
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There have been plenty more heavy casualties in the flanker vote over the past 48 hours as tireless All Blacks star Ardie Savea and reigning World Rugby player of the year Pieter-Steph du Toit duke it out in the final round of voting.
In order to make the final, both Savea and du Toit had to fight off the challenges of a raft of world-class flankers who many will feel have been hard done to have not made the last round.
In the first round of the knockout bracket, du Toit was paired up with towering France loose forward Charles Ollivon, who proved to be no match for the bruising Springboks blindside after picking up just under 18 percent of the vote.
Savea, meanwhile, was matched with Wales veteran Justin Tipuric, but the British and Irish Lions representative suffered the same fate as Ollivon, as he attained only 23.5 percent of the fans' approval.
"https://www.facebook.com/rugbypass/?ref=bookmarks">here) or the RugbyPass Instagram page (here).
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Latest Comments
I would go as far as to say they trend towards the Ben Smith style engagement. Utter crap.
I don't think any All Black coach has had a tougher first year than this (so to here that they did that is really poor).
They is of course the sky production, the producer behind the scenes. They select commentators to deliver on that content they're going to provide them with, which means they have to be 'yes' mean. Mills is the A grade yes man. Actually really please Mills seems to be acting stronger, more with his own personality these days, and the game day commentry teams have bee pretty good imo. Bates, Steven, Shields, even that italian player was alright last week.
Go to commentsAs Naas would say... A win is a win.
It was not perfect and at times frustrating. All 3 tests were not the best by the Boks and they still found ways to win.
Rassie would have noted the sloppyness at times and silly mistakes. The 9's made amateur handling mistakes when clearing the rucks in all 3 tests.
Once the "stupid" mistakes are eliminated, this Bok team will be very very hard to beat.
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