PORTUGAL: Australia trains in Portugal ahead of Rugby Union World Cup

The Wallabies end a four-day training camp in Algarve, going to France full of belief, knowing that anything less than winning the World Cup will amount to failure. With nine days left until Rugby World Cup gets underway, Australia is heading to France as one of the favourites to win. The squad ended a four-day training session at Browns Sports Training Centre on Tuesday (August 28) in touristic southern region of Algarve, and will leave for France on Wednesday. "We will be doing a bit of coordination work there and just make sure that everybody now their roles in certain place and then we go into our game preparation, our game week starts on Sunday, because we are gonna have Monday off. So we are straight into Japan, we have done our research on them, we know the way we wanna play against them and then it's rehearsal and both attack and defence and putting it in the practice," said Wallabies defence coach John Muggleton. Australia is the most successful country in the World Cup's short history, having won the title in 1991 and 1999 and reached the final in 2003. Host France has signalled with impeccable timing that a New Zealand triumph is not a foregone conclusion. France has not beaten the All Blacks in nine meetings home or away over the past six years while taking some awful thumping along the way. Two impressive wins over defending champions England raise the mouth-watering prospect of a Paris final between the hosts seeking to win the Cup for the first time and an All Black team desperate to end 20 years of agonising failure. Only Australia or South Africa look realistically able to prevent the top two following their allotted paths to the Stade de France on October 20, although Argentina and Ireland will do their best to blow France off course in the pool stage. Australia, who has worked hardly over the past two years to prepare for this World Cup, has been given an added incentive to win the tournament for their departing halves George Gregan and Stephen Larkham. The pair, who have both played in excess of 100 tests for Australia, were members of the Wallabies team that won the 1999 World Cup final in Wales and are retiring from international rugby at the end of the competition. "But you know you take a lot of confidence from the fact that we have got players in this squad that have won World Cups and certainly played at World Cup finals. So as a young guy on the squad I just try to feed off them as much as possible," said World Cup debutante Stephen Moore. 2007 World Cup starts on September 7 with France taking on Argentina in Saint-Denis.

ITN Source | August 30, 2007

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