1st day of training for Borneo 7s Tour

Today was the first official day of the Borneo 7s Tour. We have just completed a successful tour in Brunei where we placed 2nd to Malaysia. There we got all the little kinks out of our game and are finally starting to gel together as a team. I think coming in 2nd was a fairly big accomplishment considering the fact that most of our team had only met 2 days before the Brunei 7s started and had only 1 training session together compared to teams like India that have spent the last 2 months together in South Africa training in a rugby Academy for this event and Malaysia who have been together as a team for almost 15 years.

The day started off at 845am today where we met for a team breakfast of runny eggs, fried rice, fried chicken legs, baked bean, and some sort of curry (compliments of King Park Hotel in KK). Needless to say this didnt sit well with some of the boys during our 3 hour conditioning practice today. However, a sick stomach wasnt going to stop us from having a breakthrough practice. There was an aire of excitement and anxiousness in our play, probably because we were able to see the stadium we were playing at before practice. Many of us have never played in a venue so large. They are expecting over 10,000 people to watch our games this weekend. With these huge crowd come huge teams of course. Our bracket includes China, Chinese Taipei (Taiwan), and India. Other notable teams that we will have to face after our pool play are Korea, Thailand, Malaysia, Hong Kong and Japan (the top team in Asia). There will be 16 different countries competing all with hopes of winning, as whoever wins will qualify for the premier tournament in the world, the Hong Kong 7s where teams like New Zealand, Australia, South Africa, USA, and Fiji compete.

After our first training session filled with endless sprints and drills we had some free time to roam the city. We were able to see the Center Square which is the major shopping center of KK. We had a quick bite to eat at Kenny Rogers then we were off to our classroom session where we discussed what we did well in the last tournament and what we needed to improve on for the next tournament. Things like trust, communication, and defense were main points that were covered. We then headed to the final practice of the day which was a light run through of tackling drills and set piece play. We ended the day with a team dinner at little italy and finding a filipino tailor who agreed to custom tailor our national team kit in 1 day for us for the steep price of $3 US dollars per person. Not a bad deal.

(Borneo 7s Stadium)