Another Bocconi-LUISS Challenge at Italy's First University Rugby Championship

The Bocconi team triumphed last year, solidly beating LUISS rivals 29-0 in Rome at the first rugby UniMatch. This year the challenge will be repeated again in Rome on Friday 26 February at 8:30pm on the CUS Rome field. That game will simply be a prologue of the first University Rugby Championship, with the LIUC Castellanza, Federico II Naples, Magna Graecia Catanzaro, Tor Vergata and La Sapienza teams participating as well.

The event is sponsored by the Italian Rugby Federation, "who provides officials and who certainly understands the importance of initiatives which promote the practice of rugby at the university level," says President of the Bocconi Sport Team, Alessandro Ciarlo. Predictions? "It's tough to call without knowing the actual make-up of the teams. We know that Naples has a good tradition," continues Ciarlo, "and that LUISS has a team that plays in C, but we don't know much about the other teams. We believe in our team, however."

The LUISS-Bocconi challenge will make up the first part of the tournament and will be the only full-length 80-minute game, while the other matches, following the Italian rounds pattern, will have each university play the other competitors for 25 minutes. The team who is first in the rankings at the end of the rounds will be declared the winner of the tournament. All games will be held at the Tor di Quinto Stadium, CUS Rome's home field, located at Via Tor di Quinto 64. At the end of the event, on Saturday 28 February, the teams will be able to see the Italy-Scotland match qualifications for the Six Nations Championship at Flaminio Stadium.