The Guyana men’s rugby team, winners of the North America Caribbean Rugby Association (NACRA) Sevens championships five times in succession, will seek to correct the mistakes made at the recently-concluded Pan Am Games and redeem themselves by winning their sixth title.
The team will be defending their NACRA Sevens title against 15 other teams this weekend, November 12 and 13, in Barbados.
Stabroek Sport caught up with captain of the men’s rugby team, Ryan Gonsalves yesterday to get an insight into the mindset of his men heading into NACRA after coming off of a disappointing performance at the Pan American Games in Guadalajara, Mexico last month.
“We brought back the basic knowledge and the experience of playing at a very high level. We have more knowledge of keeping the ball, retaining the ball. At NACRA it is going to be vital because the defences aren’t as structured and once we retain the ball we will be scoring a lot of tries,” Gonsalves said.
The rugby captain also spoke about how different it is facing world class teams than teams competing at the NACRA championships.
“Basically structure of defence, defences that actually give nothing at all that is how the big teams play nowadays, they press you to the line, they force you to make mistakes and when you make mistakes they capitalize. The teams we were up against in the Pan Ams were world class teams. We competed to our best we had some good breaks that we didn’t finish and the score lines could have been a lot closer than they were.”
When asked about the team’s spirit, Gonsalves said that their confidence is building again and they cannot wait to redeem themselves.
“Right now we are rebuilding our confidence and the attitude is very high – most of the guys that were at Pan Am accepted that it was a bad showing there and we have put that behind us and we are going into NACRA as the defending champs ready to retain our title.”
The local ruggers will enter the championships seeded number one followed by Jamaica, Mexico, The Bahamas, Trinidad and Tobago, The Cayman Islands, Barbados, St Lucia, The British Virgin Islands( BVI), Martinique, Bermuda, Guadeloupe, St Vincent, USA South, Turks and Caicos and Curacao in that respective order.
The 16 teams will be divided into four pools – A, B, C and D.
Pool A consists of Guyana, St Lucia, BVI and Curacao, Pool B will be made up of Jamaica, Barbados, Martinique and Turks and Caicos, Pool C consists of Mexico, The Cayman Islands, Bermuda and USA South, while Pool D will be made up of The Bahamas, Trinidad and Tobago, Guadeloupe and St Vincent.
The names of the players who will make up the squad will be announced tomorrow at a press briefing.
