The Springbok Women’s Sevens team has well and truly begun their preparation for the World Sevens Series, which heads to Dubai from 2-3 December, 2023.
Renfred Dazel’s team secured some good wins ahead of the tournament as they beat Belgium in two warm-up matches.
They defeated their European counterparts 22-0 and 19-5 respectively, demonstrating the significant progress they have made in the last year.
Coach Dazel feels the improvement was evident and was happy with this teams performance in the two matches.
“It has been close to seven months since we last played Belgium in the Challenger Series, and I am happy with things we improved on,” he said on sarugby.co.za.
“It is obviously just training matches and the last time was a tournament final, but the luxury since then of having a bigger squad showed today, we have much more depth already and even today, we could blood young players,” Dazel said.
Some new faces were added to the Bok Women’s Sevens team, like Junior Women Bok Shiniqwa Lamprecht as well as Shona-Leah Weston.
Weston is looking to get back to her best after a devastating ankle injury back in 2017.
Meanwhile, Dazel feels that he has been able to help the players improve and develop their skills.
“The advantage of a full-time programme is that you can bring in someone like Shiniqwa and develop her skill level over time,” said Dazel.
“The matches also gave me the opportunity to test Shona against an international team, while someone like Asisiphe Plaatjies made a good return from injury. Those are valuable improvements for us out of these two matches, and I’m grateful to Belgium who provided us this opportunity.”
“We have another week of work here at SAS and then a week in Dubai. Coaches always want more time, but I am comfortable that we have used ours well up to this point.”
Dazel went on to say that they have targeted areas for improvement.
“As an example, we wanted to have a better scrum and Chris Dry (former Springbok Sevens player and current SAS Sevens Academy coach) gave valuable input in that regard. Each team brings a different challenge to scrums and Belgium added their flavour to it today, but I was pleased in how we reacted and delivered.”
The South African coach is set to name his team for the Dubai leg of the tournament of Friday, 24 November 2023. He will be hoping his team can start well as they will make their way for the home leg in Cape Town a week later.
Photo Caption: The Springbok Women’s Sevens team have well and truly begun their preparation for the start of the World Sevens Series, which heads to Dubai from 1-2 December 2023. Photo: Springbok Women on X
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