Great start by Kandy SC

Friday, 7 August 2015 01:10 - - {{hitsCtrl.values.hits}}

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By Shamseer Jaleel

Kandy Sports Club, defending league and Clifford Cup champions cannot ask for anything better than how the 2015/2016 rugby season started for them. They came to the final and edged out the defending sevens champions Havelocks SC at the Race Course rugby grounds last weekend.

Kandy displayed outstanding rugby and their entire line up of players representing Sri Lanka in sevens rugby at some stage of their rugby career. Led by every reliable BUP_DFT_DFT-24-38 FazilMarija, who is the present sevens and fifteens skipper along with Gayan Weeraratne his brother Roshan Weeraratne, Richard Dharmapala, Nigel Ratwatte, Lavanga Perera, Anurudha Wilwara, Vishwamithra Jayasinghe and Sayuru Anthony.

Former Science College player Richard Dharmapala won the Best Player Award. In fact he made a try saving tackle in the last minute of the game which stopped Dhanushka Ranjan of Havies from scoring which would have taken the game to extra time, the game could have gone either way.

Kandy SC was coached by former Trinity full back and Kandy SC player Saliya Kumara. He will be assisting Sean Wijesinghe this year in the coaching the Kandy SC outfit with South African Johan Taylor being the Technical Advisor.

Kandy Sports Club beat Police SC50/0, Navy SC28/0,in the quarter- finals beat Army SC70/0, beat CR and FC in the semi-final 19/7 and Havies 17/10 in the Cup final.

Fazil speaking to Daily FT said: “Very happy with the performance and a great start for the season. We want to end winning the triple champions. The boys played with lot of determination and pride for playing for Kandy. That is the difference between playing for other clubs and Kandy. The next three months we will focus on the Asian Sevens series which will kick-off in China early next month with two more tournaments in Thailand and Colombo. We will be featuring in Olympic Qualification game in early November where one team will book their berth for the Rio Olympic Sevens in 2016.”