Graham Croker
National selectors have plundered
Foley will take over the captaincy from
“Captaining your country is not something that you get to do every day, so I’m just looking forward to getting out there and performing well,” Foley said.
“(Vice-captain) Ed’s been around for a couple of years now and he’s a really experienced player and a really good leader so I think we’ll work well together in leading a young squad which has a lot of new players.
“In the past couple of years we’ve probably gone into
Australian Sevens coach Michael O’Connor said he’s confident his new-look squad will be competitive on the World Series circuit after showing some promising form at back-to-back tournaments in
“While we didn’t play Nick (Phipps) or Bernard, what the Gold Coast and Noosa Sevens tournaments gave me was an opportunity to play some of the new players rather than putting them in cold in
“A lot of them are still leaning the game and are very raw but there are some encouraging signs for the team from an attitude point of view and their willingness to want to learn. I’m really looking forward to it. I have a new crop of players so it’s quite exciting.”
Coach O’Connor welcomed the return of Phipps, who was the bolter on the Wallabies’ seven match trip through Hong Kong and
The Melbourne Rebels recruit returns to the Sevens fold as one of four Commonwealth Games silver medallists, who feature in the 12-man squad.
The
“Nick didn’t get a lot of game time in
O’Connor says he’s expecting the same kind of success this season. “You don’t want to go backwards in life and that’s the challenge to this squad now, last year’s squad did exceptionally well – they ended up getting us a silver medal at the Commonwealth Games and they finished third on the World circuit and that was a good result,” he said.
“We’re not going to rest on our laurels, we want to at least reach the same heights and definitely stay on the top line of that draw. We don’t want to fall back to where we were. That’s the expectation this year, not to go backwards, it’s to stay up there and go forward.”
After the first two tournaments, the Sevens World Series moves on to events in
The Australian squad is: Bernard Foley (captain), Ed Jenkins (vice-captain), Hamish Angus, Trent Dyer, Shaun Foley, John Grant, Michael Hodge, Greg Jeloudev, Tevita Kuridrani, Jono Lance, Nick Phipps, Dan Yakopo.