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Former Lions and Bulls lock beaten to death in France

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South African and French rugby is in a state of shock after the news that Barend Britz has been beaten to death.

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Britz played Transvaal (Golden Lions) and Northern Transvaal (Blue Bulls) in the 1980’s before moving to France where he played for Perpignan. In 1994 he won the Challenge Yves du Manoir.

The second row retired from the game in 1996 and settled in the French town and set up a bar called ‘Bar and Britz’

The attack happened at 9pm last night at Britz’ bar according to L’Independent, with glasses and carafe’s being thrown at the bar window. Britz confronted the man, who then subsequently assaulted the 63-year-old. Britz was rushed to hospital but could not recover from his injuries.

A man in his 30’s has since been arrested and is in police custody.

His former club Perpignan tweeted “The President of the USAP @F_Riviere, coaches, players, and all USAP personnel have learned with great sadness the passing of BAREND BRITZ, a former iconic player in our club.We offer our most sincere condolences to his family”

Tributes have come pouring in on his son’s Facebook page, where a photo of the two has been posted.

Barend Britz and his son pose for photo in 2016.
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Perpignan are due to play Connacht in the European Rugby Challenge Cup at The Sportsground on Saturday. The EPCR confirmed to RugbyPass that Perpignan have requested a minute’s silence before the match in honour of Britz.

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J
JW 56 minutes ago
Why the Aussie revival is for real and what it means for New Zealand

Yes, true, reading your first sentence I immediately remember reports of them just leaving them be, which also doesn’t sound very smart now. Quite a minor thing, but like with the “further stipulations” suggestion I had, even minor oversights can cause big problems!


Right, so that old decision basically came down to the Rebels license being newer (still in effect) that meant it was the Force that had to be cut? You can’t really extrapolate one to the other of course. Theres no hindsight ability to be able to say “well we should have taken out losses and cut the Rebels”.


I can agree on your last point/para, even though it’s largely the same argument you presented in your OP which I tried refuting. I say it’s similar really because it comes under the same ‘risk’ management as spreading your pro population. They wanted to be able to provide more opportunities to retain the likes of the Meafou’s, just as much as the wanted to tap in further to those Meafou’s in Melbourne. Bringing in the Rebels was the best way to do this, but perhaps it should’t have been done at such a sacrifice.


All considered though, it’s hard to know if one should believe the reports that the Rebels had a way out of the dilemma. They obviously had individuals involved powerful enough to make the State retaliate towards RA, but my stance had been that COVID and so, the stopped payment, had been what put them under. I don’t lay fault with RA for their demise, but I also had a bigger expectation that Melbourne was the sporting captial of Australia. It really does just seem like a AFL land however (they reckoned their 10k crowd was enough but it’s hard to believe).

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