Wales head coach Paul John is taking nothing for granted in this weekend’s Hong Kong leg of the IRB Sevens World Series.
John guided his side to a morale-boosting quarter-final spot last weekend in the Australian leg in Adelaide before the surprise package of the tournament, USA, won a keenly contested match with the last move of the encounter to knock out Wales.
In this weekend’s sixth leg of the series, Wales find themselves in the same pool as Japan, Hong Kong and England who are still smarting after being stunned by USA last week in pool play. The shock result saw England fail to make it out of their pool and as a consequence they have slipped further down the pecking order on the points table.
While most pundits would point to the clash against England as the key encounter in Pool E, John is refusing to look that far ahead.
“The game against England will only be the key game if we have won the two. We aren’t even thinking about England to be honest with you. We’ve got Japan on the first day and they are improving all the time in every tournament then we’ve got a very difficult game against Hong Kong.
“That could be a real potential banana skin as they always perform well in their home tournament so we can’t even look at England until we have won the other two games. We were taught a lesson last weekend against America. If you under estimate anyone they come and bite you on the backside. We were taught a lesson last week,” he added.
Wales are currently in a top position in the overall standings with 24 points with usual suspects New Zealand and Samoa leading the charge with 96 and 94 points respectively.
“We’ve 24 points which is how many points we had for the whole of the series last year,” said John. “We’ve won a couple of Bowls and made a couple of quarter-finals. We had eight new boys in the first tournament of the season in Dubai. It’s been a learning process but the boys are getting better and better. Unfortunately it’s the nature of the game that there are going to be some ups and downs.”
Hong Kong Sevens Draw
Fri 26 March
Pool E – Wales v Japan
Sat 27 March
Pool E – Wales v Hong Kong
Pool E – Wales v England
Sun 28 March
Knockout stages
