Hong Kong advance to Cup quarters as Asian Games hopes fade

Hong Kong's presence in the sevens competition at the Asian Games in Doha next year looks highly unlikely with the news that the selection criteria could be based on performances at the last games fours years ago in Pusan, South Korea.

On that occasion, Hong Kong finished bottom of the eight team competition, which is not good enough if the IRB uses the results to pick which seven teams should play in Doha - the eighth spot will be given to hosts Qatar.

'The IRB might make its decision on the results from the last Asian Games and this is not good news for Hong Kong,' said Jamie Scott, the Hong Kong-based secretary-general of the Asian Rugby Football Union who is a guest at the Singer-SriLankan Airlines Sevens. This 12-team tournament was supposed to be the qualifying competition for Doha, but the IRB moved the goalposts at the last minute perplexing Doha organisers as well as Asian officials.

'We don't know why the IRB decided not to use this event as a qualifying competition. It was supposed to be one. Now we hear that the IRB could just nominate the teams for Doha,' said George Hore, Qatar's Olympic committee's director of rugby.

Scott's bombshell will blow Hong Kong's hopes out of the water. And on a waterlogged pitch at the Nittawela Stadium yesterday, Hong Kong barely managed to keep their hopes alive after scraping through to a 10-5 win over Malaysia which put them in the Cup competition today.

With two teams from each group advancing to the Cup, Hong Kong, who were second behind China in the pool matches, will now play Japan in the Cup quarter-finals. If they lose, a likely case, they will then be in the Plate semi-finals.