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Spain have been ejected from subsequent yr’s Rugby World Cup in France after being discovered to have fielded an ineligible participant in qualifying for the event.
A World Rugby Impartial Judicial Committee discovered that South African-born prop Gavin Van den Berg appeared in two video games for Spain when not but eligible for his adopted nation on the grounds of a three-year residency interval.
It’s the second males’s event in a row that Spain have been disqualified from because of participant eligibility points.
The 2023 version would have marked their first look at a males’s World Cup since 1999.
Spain have been fined £75,000, together with having to pay a suspended sanction of £50,000 levied after the earlier breach.
They’ve additionally been given a ten level deduction – 5 factors for every of the 2 video games performed by Van den Berg – within the 2021-22 Rugby Europe Championship, knocking them out of the qualification locations for the World Cup.
The deduction signifies that Romania will now take Spain’s place in France subsequent yr, becoming a member of Pool B alongside Scotland, Eire, South Africa and an Asia/Pacific 1 qualifier.
Portugal progress to the repechage qualification course of.
Describing the sanction as “very harsh”, the Spanish rugby federation urged that the state of affairs had occured because of an “alleged forgery of the participant’s passport”.
Over the last World Cup cycle, all of Spain, Romania and Belgium have been deducted factors having fielded ineligible gamers, permitting Russia to qualify for the event in Japan.
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