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Saracens' Brad Barritt one of many well-wishers to show support for Michael Fatialofa
By Online Editors
Worcester lock Michael Fatialofa has been inundated with messages from well-wishers as he recovers from a serious neck injury.
Fatialofa remains in intensive care at St Mary’s Hospital in London after undergoing successful surgery last week to relieve pressure on his spinal cord.
The 27-year-old New Zealander suffered the injury during Worcester’s 62-5 Gallagher Premiership defeat against Saracens at Allianz Park on January 4.
“More than 760 messages of support for injured Warriors lock Michael Fatialofa have been sent in just five days to the special email address that has been set up by the club,” Worcester said on their official website.
“The messages include one from Brad Barritt, the captain of Saracens who were Warriors’ opponents when Michael suffered a neck injury in the Gallagher Premiership match at Allianz Park.
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“Michael remains in a serious but stable condition in the intensive care unit of St Mary’s Hospital in Paddington.”
Play was held up for almost ten minutes as Fatialofa received medical attention and, having been carried from the pitch on a stretcher, he was taken by ambulance to St Mary’s Hospital.
Warriors set up the email address – fats@warriors.co.uk – last week to enable well-wishers to send messages to Fatialofa and wife Tatiana.
“Michael and Tatiana are thankful of the messages they have received so far and the support that has been shown by the rugby community,” Worcester added.
“Warriors players have shown their support for Michael by wearing training tops with ‘Fats’ written on the back and matchday shirts with the initials ‘MF’ on the bottom right-hand side.”
- Press Association
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Latest Comments
Well that sux.
Go to commentsLike I've said before about your idea (actually it might have been something to do with mine, I can't remember), I like that teams will a small sustainable league focus can gain the reward of more consistent CC involvement. I'd really like the most consistent option available.
Thing is, I think rugby can do better than footballs version. I think for instance I wanted everyone in it to think they can win it, where you're talking about the worst teams not giving up because they are so far off the pace we get really bad scoreline when that and giving up to concentrate on the league is happening together.
So I really like that you could have a way to remedy that, but personally I would want my model to not need that crutch. Some of this is the same problem that football has. I really like the landscape in both the URC and Prem, but Ireland with Leinster specifically, and France, are a problem IMO. In football this has turned CL pool stages in to simply cash cow fixtures for the also ran countries teams who just want to have a Real Madrid or ManC to lose to in their pool for that bumper revenue hit. It's always been a comp that had suffered for real interest until the knockouts as well (they might have changed it in recent years?).
You've got some great principles but I'm not sure it's going to deliver on that hard hitting impact right from the start without the best teams playing in it. I think you might need to think about the most minimal requirement/way/performance, a team needs to execute to stay in the Champions Cup as I was having some thougt about that earlier and had some theory I can't remember. First they could get entry by being a losing quarter finalist in the challenge, then putting all their eggs in the Champions pool play bucket in order to never finish last in their pool, all the while showing the same indifference to their league some show to EPCR rugby now, just to remain in champions. You extrapolate that out and is there ever likely to be more change to the champions cup that the bottom four sides rotate out each year for the 4 challenge teams? Are the leagues ever likely to have the sort of 'flux' required to see some variation? Even a good one like Englands.
I'd love to have a table at hand were you can see all the outcomes, and know how likely any of your top 12 teams are going break into Champions rubyg on th back it it are?
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