You would always have to be interested in joining such a good club," said West, who was dismissed after refusing to become Wigan's football manager.Other candidates are the Keighley player-coach, Daryl Powell, Hull KR's Steve Crooks, and Tony Anderson, from Halifax' existing coaching staff. The Halifax football manager, David Hobbs, who is temporary team manager, said: "No one candidate is preferred over another at the moment.". The Ebbw Vale rugby union player, Mark Jones, yesterday won a High Court injunction to have his suspension for fighting lifted, allowing him to continue playing, until such time as his appeal against the ban has been heard. The judge's ruling to overturn a sports body's decision marks a historic change in the attitude of the courts to issues regarding the way sport is run. Mrs Justice Ebsworth granted the injunction, a decision which legal experts said could open the floodgates to legal challenges of the decisions of referees and umpires. Jones, a 16-stone forward who has been capped for Wales in both the union and league game, had claimed that his four-week suspension, imposed by the Welsh Rugby Union's disciplinary committee after he was sent off in a game against Swansea, was "unfair".He can now carry on playing until an appeal over the committee's decision is completed - either by an internal hearing or, if that fails, at a full trial of the issue at the High Court.The judge said sporting decisions had for years been made from "wet and windy" touchlines but the new professional game meant that those decisions now affected "many people who earn a living".She said it was now "naive" to contend - as it has been until recently - that the decisions of disciplinary committees could not be challenged because the sanctions imposed now had "economic results" on those affected.A senior lawyer said previous legal challenges in the High Court had been thrown out because judges had ruled they could not intervene in the decision of a sporting organisation because they had no status in law..

Ice hockey Cardiff Devils will back their captain, Shannon Hope, when he contests a grievous bodily harm charge resulting from an incident on the ice. The Great Britain captain and defenceman will appear in Sheffield Magistrates Court on 2 April over a challenge which left the Sheffield Steelers' Canadian forward, Jamie Leach, in hospital with a double fracture of the cheekbone.The incident occurred during the Superleague match between the country's top two teams in Sheffield on Boxing Day.Leach was the club's leading scorer at the time and as a result of his injury, he missed a crucial part of Sheffield's unsuccessful attempt to beat the Welsh side to the Superleague title The Canadian is pursuing a civil action for damages.. If the build-up to an England-Scotland match is "jarring", to quote Jack Rowell, and preparations for Ireland leave the players wondering whether they will still be in possession of all four limbs come Saturday night, where does that leave the annual set-to with the French? Off the scale, that's where. Soaked in history and romance it may be, but the Five Nations' Championship still remains secondary in importance to its component parts. Each individual encounter generates and thrives within its own unique atmosphere and Le Crunch, as this particular match always seems to be labelled these days, is way out there on its own.

It took France 17 attempts to register their first victory over the English and when it finally came to pass in Paris exactly 70 years ago, the 3-0 scoreline was more prosaic than poetic. Since then, the pendulum of superiority has swung back and forth with compelling unpredictability. Yet the cataclysmic nature of the fixture has become fully apparent only in the last quarter of a century, from the final match at Stade Colombes when the French chalked up a record victory over Les Rosbifs, through the unforgiving Fouroux era of the 1970s and the muscular English dominance of the early 1990s and into the new age of nip and tuck. Chris Hewett recalls 25 years of epic confrontation through the eyes of some of its most celebrated combatants.English pride humbled by tunnel visionFrance 37 England 12 Stade Colombes, 26 February 1972Pierre Villepreux fondly describes it as "un rugby de reve", the rugby of dreams, and the Englishmen who suffered untold nightmares at the hands of Walter Spanghero's exquisite French side left Paris in the fervent hope that they would never again be subjected to such torture on the field of Colombes. They were granted that much, for this was the last international played at the famous old stadium, but there was no forgetting the extent of the humiliation.France scored six tries in what remains their most emphatic victory over England and at the time, the indignity seemed even more wretched than it does today.

Never had England conceded so many points in a full international and only once had they lost by such a margin - and that had been 67 years earlier in 1905. It is little wonder that Villepreux, the French full- back, recalls the occasion with a smile."On the psychological level it was extremely interesting because the players themselves had made a conscious decision to play totally spectacular running rugby; everything was based on attack, on running the ball and keeping it in the hand. Neither team could win the championship, so there was no pressure on us to get a result. We felt free to try to produce the rugby of which we were capable."I clearly remember the expression we used before running on to the field: `We attack from the tunnel'. There was a tunnel at Colombes and you emerged from behind the dead-ball line at one end. That was our image for the day and it was a game in which the result was less important than the way we played."Jo Maso, Jean-Claude Skrela, Max Barrau and Walter all had the same conception: quality, not quantity.