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Italy bring in highly rated kicking and skills coach ahead of Six Nations
By Online Editors
Toyota Cheetahs Kicking and Skills Coach, Albert Keuris, will be assisting the Italian National side from 20 to 28 January as a consultant at the training camp in preparation for the Guinness Six Nations.
Keuris, who will be focusing on skills and kicking, has an sound record coaching the Shimla Varsity Cup Winners in 2015 (77% kicking accuracy), the Toyota Cheetahs in 2016 SuperRugby (81% kicking accuracy), Toyota Free State Cheetah Currie Cup Winners in 2016 (82% kicking accuracy) as well as the 2017 SuperRugby team where he worked with two of the top three kickers in the competition; Niel Marais (89%) and Fred Zeilinga (85%).
In 2017/18 Guinness PRO14 season, Fred Zeilinga won the Golden Boot (85% accuracy), which was the best statistic in a decade of PRO Rugby, with two other players also in the Top 10 with 83% accuracy.
In the 2018 Currie Cup the Toyota Cheetahs had the second highest kicking success in the competition and Tian Schoeman slotted the most conversions in the 2018/19 Guinness PRO14 seasons. In 2019 the Toyota Free State Cheetahs won the Currie Cup with a kicking rate of 80%.
Italy will be facing Wales in their first Six Nations match on Saturday, 1 February under the interim head coach, and former Toyota Cheetahs head coach, Franco Smith.
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Latest Comments
Finau is definitely operating on razor thin margins. He hasn’t done anything wrong… yet. But a player going into contact 6 inches lower than he is expecting, without him even knowing, will end in disaster. You can imagine a situation where the pass dies on Edmed and he has to bend down a little lower to catch it at the last second. Finau’s hit would have been catastrophic. The margins are just too fine. He needs to study how PSDT, at 6’7”, manages to drop his tackle height and exert just as much force with close zero danger of taking someone’s head off. Given how poorly NZ has adapted to lower their tackle height, and that this issue which has plagued the ABs for years and played a big part in them not winning the World Cup, I thought NZR and all SR coaches would be prioritising sorting this issue out. If I was Razor I would be on the phone to Clayton MacMillan and Samipeni Finau saying exactly that. Finau is a monster and shaping up to be the closest thing to Kaino since Kaino, but I wouldn’t risk selecting him for the ABs at the moment.
Go to commentsThe surprising stat I saw in the Blues game when showing Sotutu equaling the Blues forwards record was that Akira has not scored a try since 2019. Now my memory is pretty bad when it comes to those sorts of the things, I can remember his AB try though, but anyway I can’t see I can remember his last blues touchdown or any in recent years. Surely that still has to be a bogus stat. Maybe excludes SRA games?
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