What a summer of Sport it has been! I hope our pupils have managed to watch some of the big events over the summer; from the exhilarating World Cup Cricket Final, men’s and women’s Cricket Ashes, The Solheim Cup, US Open Tennis and Women’s Netball World Cup, to name just a few. We also have the World Athletics coming soon in the next few weeks.

For this week’s news article we would like to focus on Rugby Union. The Rugby World Cup is currently in the group stages, where the 20 playing nations are battling it out in a bid to make it through to the final, which is on 2nd November (fingers crossed England can make it that far but do not tell Mr Strydom). This year’s tournament is being hosted by Japan and it is the first time an Asian country has hosted the Rugby World Cup. Japan has allocated 12 stadiums to host the games, the biggest being the International Stadium in Yokohama which holds a whopping 72,000 spectators; not surprisingly this is the venue for the final.

Japan is an incredible country with an amazing culture and some of you may have already been lucky enough to have visited the country. If you have not, O2 Sports have teamed up with Ex-England International Ugo Monye to produced six short videos* ahead of the World Cup. Similar to the RFU’s core values which we learnt about in Miss Corkran’s assembly on Monday, Ugo explores the following values and how Japanese people use them in their everyday lives and sport. They are; Respect, Integrity, Loyalty, Courage and Duty. We feel that through watching these videos, you will learn about the country, the culture and how Rugby is growing in Japan.

*As ever with online videos, we would advise and encourage parents to view the content before showing your children or watch it with them so that you know what they are viewing.

Mr Davey and Mrs Jacobs
Head of Boys’ and Girls’ Games