Tuesday, January 22, 2008

2008 season so far

After a long break following the end of the Ugandan women’s 2007 rugby season, ugrugbychiclet is back. Not much to report but here goes:

According to the fixtures released by URU the annual Kampala Womens CAR 7’s tournament will be on June 21st and 22nd and two 15 aside games against Kenya on May 24th (home) and August 9th (away) as curtain raisers for the men’s Elgon Cup internationals. These games (for both the women and the men) may be in doubt though following the current political situation in Kenya at present. Kenya has been ravaged by violence since the last week of December 2007 after controversial presidential elections.

Meanwhile, URU has appointed David Mutaka to take over as the Lady Cranes 7 aside coach from Herbert Wafula who resigned last year. David Mutaka represented Uganda in both the 7 aside and 15 aside codes before retiring in 2006. Mutaka has a giant task ahead of him to ensure that the Lady Cranes qualify for the 7’s World Cup. If successful, Lady Cranes will be the ever first Ugandan team (across all sports- both female and male) to qualify for a World Cup.

In related news from around the globe, Brazil beat Argentina 45 – 00 in the final of the CONSUR (South American) qualifier to become the first country to qualify for 2009’s Women’s World Cup 7’s. The FIRA-AER (European) qualifier will be held in Limoges on June 14th and 15th – 6 teams will qualify from this event. The NAWIRA (North American and Caribbean) qualifier will be in the Bahamas on October 25th and 26th (2 teams will qualify) while the hosting countries and the dates of the ARFU (Asian – 3 teams will qualify), CAR (African – 2 teams will qualify) and FORU (Oceania – 2 teams will qualify) qualifiers and are yet to be announced.


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