The Zimbabwe Sevens rugby team face an uphill task when they kick off their IRB World Sevens series campaign at Emirates Airline Dubai Rugby Sevens with three tough Pool C matches against England, France and Kenya today.
The Cheetahs kickstart their campaign with a tough match against England this morning at 9:54am (Zimbabwean time).
England won last year’s tournament while France and Kenya are core teams on the nine-legged HSBC Sevens World Series.
The Cheetahs will only have four hours to regroup before meeting France at 1:16pm and concluding their group campaign against Kenya at 4:23pm.
Zimbabwe will be looking to put in similar performances to last year when they defeated core teams Argentina, Scotland and US in the three rounds they participated in, reaching a Bowl final in last year’s Dubai Sevens, and lifting the Shield in South Africa.
“We have had a summer Sevens series with locally-based tournaments, and have also been lucky enough to play in three regional tournaments,” said Cheetahs’ team manager Bruce Hobson.
“We would like to say we are pretty well prepared for this and are really looking forward to it. “France are now a lot more physical. England are always England, and we have seen Kenya recently on a couple of occasions.
“But we have been looking at our game, and the way we play it and certain areas we needed to work on, so we will see if we have got that right this weekend.”
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The Cheetahs arrived in Dubai on Monday morning where they linked up with the Germany-based duo of Manasah Sita and Gardner Nechironga, who flew straight from their bases to Dubai after featuring for their club last weekend.
According to team manager Bruce Hobson the team had a “loosening” training session later that day which was followed by a non-contact game against Dubai College.
The Cheetahs played a training game against Canada on Wednesday morning which was followed by a gym session in the afternoon.
Zimbabwe play in five of the nine IRB tournaments in this year’s IRB World Sevens series namely Dubai, Port Elizabeth, Hong Kong, London and Edinburgh.
