By Shamzeer Jaleel

The scheduled Inter Club Sevens 2022 for this weekend will not take place but the training for the national sevens outfit will go on at the Sugathadasa Stadium under closed doors.

This will be used as the yardstick to select the national sevens squad for the Commonwealth Games Rugby Sevens in England and Asian Games Sevens in China later this year.

At the meeting which took place at the Ministry of Sports, under Director General, Amal Edirisooriya all 8 club representatives were present. Because of the current issue in the country Kandy SC was not favourable to travel down to Colombo along with the Police team who had deployed their teams to avoid further demonstrations. The trials will take place on 23 and 24 April with the squad of 46 selected players divided into 4 teams. All players will be housed at the Sugathadasa Stadium hostel.

At the DG’s meeting it was decided to complete the remaining games during the last three weekends of May. If there are further delays the Century plus years old Clifford Cup is in danger of being cancelled for yet another year which is a sad story. It is likely that the shortlisted players of 20 each from the Men’s and Women’s outfit will be formed to go under training in the near future with the Commonwealth Games Sevens which is just three months away to kick off.

Very likely the coaching unit for both Men’s and Women’s outfit will be selected in the near future. Fazil Marija or Nilfer Ibrahim is likely to take over the Men’s while Saliya Kumara is a front runner to look after the Women’s outfit.

According to sources Kandy SC will miss out on Jason Dissanayake who has already migrated and former Kingswoodian, Lavanga Perera injured. The Central Hills outfit will have Tharinda Ratwatte, Srinarth Sooriyabandara, Thilina Bandara, Danushka Dyan, Nigel Ratwatte, Kavindu Perera, Buddhima Piyarathne, Danush Dange and Heshan Jansen. Majority of them are expected to be named in the final 20.

Referees back at work