Our aim is to win a medal at 2022 Asian Games: SLR President

By Shamseer Jaleel

“The aim of Sri Lanka Rugby (SLR) is to win medal at the Asian Games 2022.” This was disclosed to Daily FT soon after the reappointment of Rizly Ilyas as the President of the governing body at their virtual Annual General Meeting (AGM) held online due to COVID.

Speaking further, the former Peterite and Petersons SC player said: “SLR is confident to resume rugby and activate their short-term and long-term goals of winning a medal at the Asian Sevens series and qualifying for the Olympics in 2024 and World Series in 2026 with the high performance program.” 

Rizly continuing said: “I feel a renewed sense of confidence, hopefully with the blessings of Sports Minister Namal Rajapaksa and High Performance Committee Chairman Mahela Jayawardena, we will be able to commence our high performance program with our Men’s and Women’s players contracted year around for residential training.” 

He further stated that the high performance program will have a professional outlook with foreign coaches and this will be the opening for the Inter Club Sevens hopefully to be played in August and lead the way to prepare the Men’s and Women’s teams for the Asian Games, Commonwealth games and Dubai Rugby Sevens. 

The Dubai Sevens is similar to the Hong Kong sevens where 12 emerging teams lock horns in a separate event with the winner gets the World Series the following year. This is similar to that event which will take place in Dubai during December.

Rizly ended as saying, former Royal, National Olympic sensation and Sports Council member Julian Bowling appointed by the Sports Ministry is currently under discussion with SLR Secretary Jude Pillai in finalising the High Performance Programme.

According to the event calendar, the Inter Club Sevens is scheduled to take place in August with two legs to be played followed by the Asia Rugby Sevens second and third leg of events which will be contested for Men’s and Women’s. Further, the Asia Rugby Under-19 top 4 league event between defending champions Hong Kong, hosts Sri Lanka, Taipei and South Korea will take place during the month of November. All the events are scheduled to take place at the Race Course rugby ground in Colombo.