By Brenden Nel.
The Springbok Sevens team produced a gritty performance to win three from three and book their place in the quarterfinals of the Hamilton Sevens in the early hours of Saturday morning.
The Blitzboks opened their account with an excellent win over Canada in their pool D match and then followed it up with tough, but gritty wins over Spain and Argentina to top the pool and end the day unbeaten.
They will now face France in their quarterfinal at 11.58pm on Saturday and then if they make it past that, face the winner of the Fiji-Argentina quarterfinal in the semifinals at 3.48am.
It was a hat-trick from Shilton van Wyk that kickstarted their campaign with the 35-5 win over Canada, as the Blitzboks look to continue their early momentum in the HSBC World Sevens Series.
Selvyn Davids’ return has clearly had an effect on the Blitzboks as he scored against Canada and again against Spain, and along with Davon Blood and Shaun Williams set up the win before having to hold off a late surge by Spain the final minutes.
Against Argentina, the Blitzboks had to come from behind twice as the Pumas scored early but tries from Blood, Christie Grobbelaar and Zain Davids was enough to settle a tense game in the favour of the South African team.
The good news for the Blitzboks was that Samoa, who are joint series leaders with them after Brian Lima’s side won in Cape Town, fell by the wayside and failed to qualify for the Cup competition, losing to France and Fiji in their pool.
That means if the Blitzboks have a good run they could end day two on top of the World Series standings.
Kenya’s hopes of a better performance started off poorly as they went down 31-5 to Samoa after being competitive early and scoring the first try. But from there things fell apart as they lost to Fiji 21-7 and then 26-21 to France to continue their drought in this year’s series. Kenya have still not won a pool game in the three tournaments played thus far and if this continues they may well be in danger of being relegated to the Challenger series at the end of the season.