T&T senior men’s national rugby team advanced to the quarterfinal round at the Rugby Americas North (RAN) Super Sevens Tournament at the Thomas A Robinson National Stadium in Nassau, Bahamas on Saturday
This after the Shakeel Dyte-captained local rugger men ended their three-team round-robin Pool A qualifiers with a 1-1 record behind Canada and ahead of winless British Virgin Islands.
Playing in their first RAN Tournament since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2019, Dyte and his teammates were steamrolled 33-7 by the Canadians in their first match of the two-day event with Nigel Ballington scoring the lone try for T&T in the encounter which serves as part of the qualifiers for the Rugby World Cup Sevens 2022 in Cape Town, South Africa in September, along with the Commonwealth Games 2022 in Birmingham, England in July/August.
However, in their final pool match, T&T crushed the British Virgin Islands 41-5 after Canada also won against BVI 36-0.
The other teams to qualify for the men’s quarterfinals on Sunday from 10.28 am are Pool B duo, Jamaica (2-0) and Curacao (1-1); Pool C pair, Mexico (3-0) and Cayman Islands (2-1), and from Pool D, Barbados (2-0) and Bermuda (1-1).
The semifinals are carded to begin at 1.24 pm followed by the final at 6.10 pm
The local women led by co-captains Nicolette Pantor and Alix Lewis ended a tough first day on a high with a 22-0 blanking of Cayman Islands to keep alive their top three hopes with a 1-2 record ahead of their final round-robin match on Sunday from 10.05 am, against Mexico, winners over the Cayman Islands 48-5 followed by a lopsided loss to Canada, 0-45.
In their first two matches in their five-team round-robin series, T&T women went under to Canada 0-44 and Jamaica (10-27).
Mexico also faces Jamaica and Canada plays Jamaica in the final round of women’s round-robin matches on Sunday.
The top two teams in the women’s round-robin will contest the final from 5.48 pm before which the third and fourth-placed teams will meet for bronze from 2.30 pm.
At the end of the competition, the top two men’s teams and one women’s team from the event will book their tickets to the Rugby World Cup Sevens 2022, while the highest-placed men’s team eligible to participate at the Commonwealth Games 2022 in Birmingham will represent RAN, alongside Canada who has already pre-qualified for both men and women.
USA men’s and women’s teams have already qualified for the Rugby World Cup Sevens in South Africa based on their finishing positions at the 2018 edition of the tournament in San Francisco, which means that RAN will be represented by three men’s teams and two women’s teams in South Africa.
This is the first international sevens competition hosted by RAN since last year’s Fireminds RAN Sevens in Turks and Caicos, where Jamaica lifted the trophy as champions with a 21-7 win over Mexico in the final.
Earlier this year, RAN announced that its RAN Super Sevens tournament—which was to be played in Mexico City February 12-13 with both senior and age-grade divisions—had to be postponed due to the ongoing COVID-19 global pandemic.
