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Grace Chingoma Senior Sports Reporter
INJURY-HIT Zimbabwe have roped in former Under-17 captain Tamuka Kambani to boost the Junior Sables team that is currently in Nairobi for the World Rugby Under-20 Trophy.
The eighth man has since arrived in Kenya after flying from the United States where he is based at Davenport University.
The Junior Sables meet Uruguay tomorrow in their second pool match following their 64-33 defeat to Scotland in the tournament opener last Saturday. The Junior Sables were also unfortunate after losing skipper Panashe Zuze to injury in the first 10 minutes. Huntley Materson also fractured his hand and has since been ruled out of the tournament after he fractured his hand. Materson has since returned home.
Zuze will miss out on the next game and is only expected back for the last pool match against the United States.
Junior Sables coach Shaun De Souza said he had drafted Kambani, who has also captained the national basketball team at the Under-16 level.
“Injuries are part of the tournament and we must come up with a contingency plan. So we felt it was necessary to have Tamuka.
“He has since arrived from Davenport Campus. He has been part of our system. We need to contest for the third and fourth playoff.
“So we had to borrow some funds to have him here as we couldn’t have funds to have him in Camp in Harare,” said De Souza.
The former St Georges College student was part of the Under-19 schools squad from 2019 — 2021. He has also featured for the Under-20 High-Performance Sevens team (2022), and Under-20 High Performance 15s squad (2022). He was also part of the Under-20 team squad last year.
Their next opponents Uruguay are the World Trophy 2008 champions and have featured in the tournament 10 times.
But the Junior Sables are targeting a podium finish despite a slow start.
“We still set for a podium finish, we want to finish in the third or fourth play-off. We want to be successful against Uruguay and the USA.
“We learnt a lot playing against a Six-Nation team. The game was a good platform for us where we assessed our strengths and weaknesses,” De Souza.
A total of eight teams thus hosts Kenya, African champions Zimbabwe, Scotland who were relegated from the World Rugby Under-20 Championship, Asian champions Hong Kong, Samoa, Spain, Uruguay from South America and USA are battling for the sole promotion to the elite league.
Zimbabwe have featured in the World Trophy four times. On all occasions, they failed to go beyond the seventh position.
Online Reporter