Twelve captains gathered today at the historic Hatley Castle in Victoria ahead of an exciting weekend of rugby at the penultimate round of the HSBC World Rugby Women’s Sevens Series in Langford, Canada.
Westhills Stadium plays host to the HSBC Canada Women’s Sevens 2018 on 12-13 May with New Zealand looking to retain the title they claimed last year on the way to being crowned series champions for a fourth time.
Australia arrived in Canada atop the series standings, but with only 24 points separating the top six teams there is everything to play for in Langford this weekend.
Australia captain Shannon Parry said: “We have had a couple of weeks at home to fine-tune a few things and two great training sessions here in Canada. We are really looking forward to getting in amongst it in our first game against Canada on Saturday.
“You’ve got to beat the best to be the best and obviously with a home crowd it is massively in their [Canada’s] favour but for us it’s about playing our game and trying to silence that crowd early on and come away with the win.
“There is a lot on the line, we have been preparing well and we know what is at stake but in saying that, it’s game by game and for us we just need to focus and get through the pool stages.”
Hosts Canada, who took home silver in last year’s tournament, will be looking to go one better this year and return to winning ways after failing to reach the Cup quarter-finals in Kitakyushu last month.
“We are really excited to get going, it’s been a couple weeks back in prep after Japan, the girls are excited and ready to go, we’ve got family in town so it is special for us,” said captain Ghislaine Landry.
“There are a few things we have gone back and looked at [since Japan] our support and work-rate wasn’t where it needed to be, we have trained so hard and the girls are really excited to put that on show this weekend.”
The action gets underway at 10:30 local time on Saturday (GMT-7) with Russia taking on USA.