Hero Robertson left kicking himself despite Hong Kong's epic victory

Man-of-the-match Keith Robertson was still trying to figure out what went wrong with his goal kicking the day after Hong Kong secured a perfect start to the third HSBC Asian Five Nations season by beating South Korea.

Flyhalf Robertson had a 50 per cent success rate with the boot - kicking four out of eight attempts - that luckily did not matter as Hong Kong swept to a convincing four-tries-to-one 32-8 victory over the Koreans at the Football Club on Saturday.

'I really don't know what happened with my kicking,' Robertson said yesterday. 'But I'm happy that my kicks didn't count in the end. It would have been terrible if we had lost because I missed my kicks.'

Starting for the first time at flyhalf in an international, Robertson missed two crucial penalties, both within comfortable kicking distance, as Hong Kong took a 10-8 lead into half-time. In the second half he missed a couple more, a penalty in front of the posts and a conversion.

'It was amazing that I was missing considering that, before the game started, I knocked over 20 out of 20 kicks at goal in practice. Perhaps it was due to first-game nerves,' Robertson said.

Robertson has been under the tutelage of former England sevens international Joe Shaw, a player-coach with Kowloon this season, who has been teaching him the finer points of goal kicking. And everything seemed to be on par, until things went wrong horribly in game time.

'Joe [Shaw] has given me a lot of pointers and helped me to try and get more consistency into my kicking game. I have tried new things out, but perhaps I lost concentration,' said the 23-year-old Robertson, who will now place extra emphasis on goal-kicking during training before Hong Kong's next game against the Arabian Gulf on Friday.