Confident Hong Kong women hope to wrap up Asian sevens crown in Colombo

Hong Kong’s women are now the hunted and not the hunter as they try to clinch the 2015 Asia Rugby Women’s Sevens Series in Sri Lanka this weekend.

The team lead the two-leg series after claiming their debut tournament victory in China last month.

Hong Kong beat Japan and the hosts in Qingdao to break the stranglehold the two nations and Kazakhstan have held on Asian women’s sevens for almost a decade.

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The men’s team, meanwhile, will be trying to salvage their reputation in Colombo after a poor performance in the opening leg in Qingdao, where they won the Plate but finished fifth, followed by a marginally better third-place finish at the Thailand Sevens three weeks ago.

A new challenge for the women’s team will be managing expectations – their own, mostly – but Hong Kong coach Anna Richards says she and the players are looking forward to the opportunity.

“That weight of expectation hasn’t really come up in our training environment. It is more the expectations the team is placing on themselves, which is a great sign,” Richards said.

“We know the level we need to reach to win now and we also expect all of the teams to have improved since Qingdao. So we are the ones putting the expectations on ourselves in terms of our own performance,” she added.

This weekend in Colombo will be the final “warm-up” tournament for the women ahead of the first leg of their two-tournament Olympic qualification process starting with the Asia Rugby Olympic Qualifiers in Hong Kong on November 7-8. The second leg takes place in Tokyo three weeks later.