Africa-Press – Lesotho. NAMIBIA’s women’s sevens rugby team surprised friend and foe alike after finishing second at the Rugby Africa Sevens Pre-qualifier for Southern Africa in Lesotho over the weekend.
Namibia won three of its four matches to finish runners-up behind the winners Zimbabwe, who qualified for the Africa Sevens Championship, which in turn serves as a qualifier for the Sevens World Cup and Commonwealth Games.
It was Namibia’s first competitive tournament in more than five years, during which time their only international competition was a heavy 75-5 defeat to Zambia in a friendly 15’s match last year.
Under coach Christelle Kotze the team has, however, learnt quickly from its mistakes and in Lesotho underlined the rapid progress that they had made over the past few months.
They lost their opening match 39-0 against Zimbabwe, but then went on a winning streak, beating Mauritius 17-10, Botswana 12-10 and Lesotho 38-5, to finish second overall.
The Zimbabwean match was a tough encounter, according to Kotze. “It was a tough and physical game and the girls also struggled with their defence, but we addressed that at halftime and did a lot better in the second half,” she said.
“Our second game was against Mauritius, who I considered to be the second strongest at the competition seeing that they’ve been busy for quite some time with their women’s rugby, so we spoke hard to the girls and addressed our mistakes in the first game.
“We made sure that the girls were ready mentally and when they jogged onto the field they just did what they were supposed to do – they did the basics right, pressing up in defence, and moving thee ball wide to score from the wings,” she said.
Their third match was another physical encounter against a powerful Botswana side, according to Kotze. “Botswana has a bunch of strong big girls, so they literally tried to run over us, because we have a smaller squad in terms of size, but the girls stood their ground and we scored a try at the final hooter to tie the score at 10-all.
Fiola (Vliete) then had to convert the try and luckily she did, which gave us a 12-10 victory,” she said. Kotze said the team gave a great performance in their last match against Lesotho.
“We had to win the last game to make sure that we finished second, so my message to the girls was basically just to give it their all and to play for the future of women’s rugby in Namibia, to play for anyone back home and just to make their country proud.
I think the girls did that – they really showed character in that game, they showed what we’ve been training in practise, and most of it came together,” she said.
“There were still a lot of mistakes throughout the whole tournament, but we will work on that and can only improve from here,” she added.
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