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Family affair at Montpellier with Nadolo's brother arriving as medical joker

Kurisi Kuridrani. (Photo by Bradley Kanaris/Getty Images)

Montpellier have beefed up for their run-in to the end of the Top 14 season with an interesting choice of a medical joker. 

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Vern Cotter’s side have been enduring a miserable season, knocked out of the Champions Cup with a defeat at Edinburgh while their inconsistent league form sees them placed in ninth spot nine points outside the sixth and final play-off spot. 

That has led to speculation that the future of Cotter, who arrived in summer 2017, is under threat as last year’s Top 14 finalists have nose-dived this term despite their budget being one of the biggest in France. 

They didn’t have to search to far to compensate for the absence of Benjamin Fall, who has suffered a foot fracture. Needing to quickly solve an emergency, they turned to Chris Kuridrani who is the younger brother of Nemani Nadolo.

The Brisbane-born 27-year-old, who can double job on the wing and at full-back, is a former Queensland Reds Super Rugby player who has also had a stint in Japan with the Honda Heat. 

(Continue reading below…)

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Standing at 1.9 metres and weighing 100kgs, he is the younger brother of Nadolo, the Fijian flyer who recently announced his retirement from international rugby in advance of this year’s World Cup in Japan (Nadolo is his Nemani’s mother’s maiden name). 

“I’ve been thinking about this decision for 12 months,” said Nadolo when explaining his reason to concentrate on playing only for Montpellier. 

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“I called the club two days before making it public. Everyone was surprised, shocked. He [Vern Cotter] was looking for a joker to replace me during the World Cup.

“When I played last June, I had a thought: if you wake up one day and you hesitate about your job, it is the moment to stop. This is what happened to me with the Fijian team, whereas I feel that I still have a lot to give in Montpellier.” 

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fl 1 hour ago
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I don't listen to Nigel Farage. Really not sure where you'd be getting that from. Maybe you should stick to responding to what I've actually said, rather than speculating about my sources.


I'm not sure what you think Putin is going to do. He'll probably conquer Ukraine, but its taken him a long time, and cost him a lot of soldiers. Hitler overran France in a matter of weeks and then started bombing Britain. At this rate Putin might make it to Paris by 2080? I think he'll give up long before then!


I don't see what Stalinist language policy has to do with any of what we're talking about. De-Ukrainization took place in the 1930s, but the genocide of Palestine is taking place in 2025. If your argument is that the invasion of Ukraine is part of a longer history of Russian suppression of Ukraine then you might have a point, but that really just underlines the key difference between Hitler and Putin; Hitler wanted to dominate as much area as possible and so posed a threat to all of Europe, whereas Putin wants to force the assimilation of those who have historically been within the Russian sphere of influence, so only poses a threat to eastern europe and central asia.


"Read and think for yourself."

What would you recommend I read? On the genocide of Palestine I've found Patrick Wolfe's "Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native" and Sai Englert's "Settlers, Workers, and the Logic of Accumulation by Dispossession" especially useful - they might disabuse you of the notion that what we are witnessing is an "authoritarian criminal syndicate" fighting a nation! - rather Zionist genocide is a largely democratic process, arising from a structure of settler colonialism which has no analogue in Ukraine.

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