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Live blog: Sevens Challenger Series – day one
By Liam Heagney
RugbyPass is live from Stellenbosch for the opening day of the second and final leg of the 2023 Sevens Challenger Series featuring 24 teams from 21 countries. South Africa women and Tonga men lifted the first-leg trophies last Saturday and they now go in search of repeat victories to secure the respective ultimate prizes up for grabs.
The aggregate winners of the 12-team women’s section will gain automatic promotion to next season’s revamped World Series circuit, while the men’s champions will go forward into a four-team qualifier in London next month looking for promotion to next season’s similarly revamped big show.
The Springboks defeated Belgium 17-10 in last weekend’s women’s final and they will now be in Pool D action twice on Friday at the famed Markotter rugby fields at Paul Roos Gymnasium on the banks of the Eerste river. They take on Paraguay at 11:44am local time and then round off their day against Madagascar at 2:46pm.
South African star Nadine Roos spoke at length with RugbyPass about how much promotion would mean to sevens in her country, believing it would greatly accelerate the interest among young girls to take up the sport.
In the men’s section, the Tongans last weekend had too much firepower in their final against Germany and they will look to build on that 26-14 victory with an 11:44am clash with Jamaica followed by a 2:46pm meeting with Chile.
The action kicks off at 9am with Poland taking on Hong Kong China and Czechia facing Colombia in the women's section. The first men's teams in action will be Uganda-Brazil and Belgium-Zimbabwe at 10:06am.
Follow all the live blog action below and click here for a live stream provided by the SA RU:
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Latest Comments
Finau is definitely operating on razor thin margins. He hasn’t done anything wrong… yet. But a player going into contact 6 inches lower than he is expecting, without him even knowing, will end in disaster. You can imagine a situation where the pass dies on Edmed and he has to bend down a little lower to catch it at the last second. Finau’s hit would have been catastrophic. The margins are just too fine. He needs to study how PSDT, at 6’7”, manages to drop his tackle height and exert just as much force with close zero danger of taking someone’s head off. Given how poorly NZ has adapted to lower their tackle height, and that this issue which has plagued the ABs for years and played a big part in them not winning the World Cup, I thought NZR and all SR coaches would be prioritising sorting this issue out. If I was Razor I would be on the phone to Clayton MacMillan and Samipeni Finau saying exactly that. Finau is a monster and shaping up to be the closest thing to Kaino since Kaino, but I wouldn’t risk selecting him for the ABs at the moment.
Go to commentsThe surprising stat I saw in the Blues game when showing Sotutu equaling the Blues forwards record was that Akira has not scored a try since 2019. Now my memory is pretty bad when it comes to those sorts of the things, I can remember his AB try though, but anyway I can’t see I can remember his last blues touchdown or any in recent years. Surely that still has to be a bogus stat. Maybe excludes SRA games?
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