Chronicle Editor
Ricky Zililo, Senior Sports Reporter
ZIMBABWE Rugby Union (ZRU) hopes the Cheetahs’ qualification for the 2022 World Cup and the Junior Sables for the 2023 World Rugby Under-20 Trophy can inspire the Sables when they head to the Africa Cup.
Zimbabwe, Uganda, Cote d’Ivoire, Senegal, Kenya, Algeria, Burkina Faso and Namibia are set to battle it out in the Rugby Africa Cup 2022, which doubles as the final qualification round for the 2023 World Cup.
The Africa Cup will be held at the Stade Maurice-David in Aix-en-Provence and Stade Pierre-Delort in Marseille from July 1-10, with the winner of the eight-team knockout competition booking a ticket for the World Cup.
Runners-up will still have a chance of qualifying for the 2023 World Cup through the Final Qualification Tournament.
The Sables, who have been using the Currie Cup as preparations for the France trip, are hoping to secure automatic qualification to the World Cup.
Giving feedback on national teams’ progress, ZRU president Aaron Jani said: “We’ve qualified for the Junior World Trophy. It’s been a big drought for us. We haven’t participated in this tournament since 2016 when we held this competition at Harare Sports Club. So, we’re very excited to be the number two representative of Africa in Junior world rugby.
“We’re also excited by the Cheetahs, who qualified for the World Cup in Cape Town. It’s very exciting that we did it with locally-based players. We took a big gamble by focusing on local players where we took a training squad last year which was focused mainly on preparing for this tournament and it has paid dividends.”
Jani said they started with a 34-man Sables’ squad, which kept changing as the technical team tried different combinations, plugged deficiencies and beefed-up certain areas.
“Our focus has not been on results as far as the Currie Cup is concerned, but we’ve been very much focused in making sure we’re preparing for the number one goal, which is the Africa Cup, and by insinuation the World Cup qualification.”
Sables coach Brendan Dawson is expected to announce his Africa Cup squad on May 22.
Jani also said the Lady Cheetahs’ sixth-place finish in last weekend’s Rugby Africa Women’s Cup in Tunisia had prompted the ZRU technical team to direct its efforts on strengthening women’s rugby.
He said the union’s technical team is expected to present the way forward for women’s rugby in a couple of weeks.
“We started well with the Lady Cheetahs; we won the tournament in Lesotho and we were developing very well. We thought we had covered enough ground having held a number of competitions locally and we were expecting a good result from Tunisia, but that didn’t happen. So, it’s back to the drawing board as far as ladies are concerned and we will be looking at ways of strengthening our efforts in terms of our ladies,” said Jani. — @ZililoR
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