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Paul Munyuki Sports Reporter
IT will be crunch time at Harare Sports Club tomorrow as local and foreign-based players battle it out to impress selectors and win places in the Cheetahs and Goshawks rugby sevens squads ahead of the World Series tournament. Competition for places in the two sides has intensified and even those plying their trade outside of the country’s borders have had to come back home and undergo the trials.
The players will be mixed in the provincial select sides and Barbarians.

Over the last two weeks the tournament was held at club level where the provinces had a chance to select players whom they felt were good enough to be considered for selection into the national sides.

Among those seeking to catch the eyes of Zimbabwe Rugby Union director of coaching Liam Middleton, national coach Gilbert Nyamutsamba and other selectors will be unheralded pair of Simba Govere and Riaan O’Neil from South Africa.
Andrew Nichols, who is coming from the United States, will be part of the players trying out their luck.

The Cheetahs and Goshawks squads will go into camp Monday to prepare for the Zimbabwe Sevens invitational tournament where Russia have indicated they will send two teams while Hong Kong, Georgia and South Africa will also take part.

Nyamutsamba believes this is probably one of the best ways of selecting national sides that will play at the two-day Zimbabwe invitational tournament set for March 14 and 15 at Harare Sports Club.

“After this weekend’s tournament we will come up with a host of players that we believe have the potential to represent the country be in the Cheetahs, Goshawks or in the third string side,” said Nyamutsamba.

“According to statistics last year was our best performing year buoyed by the fact that we went on to do well in Hong Kong but this year we have a challenge in that we are going through a rebuilding phase and that is going to affect our performance.

“(Results from) Port Elizabeth (another leg of the World Sevens Series) last year showed that we are rebuilding and we can’t avoid that because it is a necessary phase that we have to go through.”

The Zimbabwe Sevens invitational tournament will be the Cheetahs only major preparatory tourney before they fly to Hong Kong the following week for another qualifying round of the World Sevens Series core membership.

They have been drawn in Pool E where they will face Russia, Chile and Barbados at the end of the month.
“Given that we are only playing one qualifier tournament this year I believe we have to go there with our strongest possible side, call in the foreign-based players and they have to fight for places with the locally-based Cheetahs.

“At the end of the day our ultimate goal is winning the tournament in Hong Kong and becoming a core member next season,” Nyamutsamba said.