Shujaa oozing with confidence
The Kenya sevens national rugby team head coach Damian McGrath has promised to fearlessly face the team’s pool B opponents in the upcoming Sydney Sevens championship set to kick off today at the Allianz stadium where Shujaa will renew continental rivalry with South Africa at 7.06 pm and later face series leaders New Zealand and Uruguay on Saturday.
“We have done some good preparations for Sydney. We are much happier with the strong performances and still fighting for consistency which is our main objective. We are starting to see a strong team emerging but again we have a tough draw, South Africa and New Zealand are two of the strongest teams in the sevens world, however, we are going to give our best and try and bring a shock,” he told People Sport.
He added: “Hamilton 7s was a very tough competition, we were in the same pool with some big sides in the world series and we finished the group without winning a game. We lost narrowly to France (21-26), and we were level with Fiji until we received a yellow card, they scored two tries afterwards to beat us 5-21, and the same situation was experienced against Samoa who are 8th in the world standings, we were level at half time and arguably the better team but indiscipline in the second half cost us as we ended up losing 5-31.”
“The strength of our performances against some very good teams helped us on the second day where we beat Canada and Tonga and met Samoa again in the 9th place playoff and again we got a yellow card at a very crucial time when the score was level to ultimately cost us the game.”
Commenting on the world series relegation group, the tactician is confident Shujaa is capable of crawling back into the top 10 and avoiding the 4-nation relegation playoffs pitting the world challenger series winner the bottom trio to include positions 12, 13 and 14.
“The teams are all fighting at the bottom of the table against relegation like ourselves but we believe we can beat them although they are currently better ranked than us. We have to do our best and we will not be complacent. We can consider the team has started to improve from the off-field issues over the last six months and things have started to turn around I hope we can kick on from here and use this as a springboard for better performances.” Kenya 7s coach Damian McGrath told People Sports from Sydney, Australia.
