One of the game’s most excellent players has said that without Hong Kong, there could be no HSBC World Rugby Seven Series and no rugby at the Olympics. Waisale Serevi, the Fijian who first graced the Hong Kong Sevens thirty years ago and counted World Cup triumphs among his several successes, is now instructing the Russia group and does not doubt its debt to the metropolis.
“Everything began from right here; that is what I consider,” he stated. The most prestigious match on the Sevens circuit, Hong Kong has attracted much of the arena’s satisfaction because of its inception in 1976. It is now one among ten stops on what became the IRB World Sevens Series and has been sponsored by HSBC since 2014.
In 2009, it became usual to participate in the Olympics, and in 2016, Fiji won gold in the inaugural competition in Rio, beating Great Britain 43-23-7 in the final.
“I simply want to thank Hong Kong rugby because,e without the Hong Kong Sevens, I believe Sevens couldn’t be in this place,” Serevi, 50, stated. “They are the ones who have driven it up from being the Hong Kong Sevens, then the series; then we went to the IOC to bid for rugby because it’s so thrilling, and now it’s far in the Olympics.” There became a time when Hong Kong turned into the Olympics of rugby union, an opinion well-known TV commentator Bill McLaren remarked on in his autobiography Talking of Rugby.
“I don’t forget a large South Sea islander saying that, in his view, the Hong Kong Sevens has been the Olympic games of rugby union,” McLaren wrote. “Certainly, the Hong Kong occasion encapsulates all the right matters that the game has to offer – outstanding organization, first-rate carrying spirit, regularly occurring camaraderie, admirable discipline behavior, the maximum fun crowd participation, the danger for emergent rugby nations to lock horns with the potent guys of New Zealand, Australia, Fiji, Wales, Scotland, and the Barbarians. There is, too, scintillating strolling and handling. That’s what the game is supposed to be all approximately.”
If Hong Kong were the Olympics, then New Zealand and Fiji would be perennial gold-medal winners, and Serevi would be one of the show’s starsw. But the times of Southern Hemisphere dominance are over, and now the likes of the US, England, South Africa, and Australia are equally risky.
As Mike Friday, America’s head coach, mentioned in his pre-match press convention on Wednesday: “Anybody can beat absolutely everyone on any given Sunday; you’ve visible that this season. This World Series is evolving, pioneering; it’s leading from the front.”
For Serevi, that evolution started at his first event at the Hong Kong Football Club in Happy Valley and has led to recreation with expert groups and an exciting future.
“Before it became simply Fiji and New Zealand coming to the Hong Kong Sevens [who could win], now it’s approximately six groups,” Serevi stated. “Spain has simply crushed New Zealand, and it’s getting harder and tougher; now it’s all professional groups.”
