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Fiji prepare for 3-day 'overseas' training camp in Toulouse

Josua Tuisova and Semi Radradra

Fiji head coach John McKee is in France preparing for an important three-day camp with his overseas based players in the build up to the World Cup in Japan.

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This is McKee’s first visit to France since he masterminded Fiji’s stunning 21-14 victory over Les Bleus in Paris and he has chosen Toulouse as the base for his training camp (March 4-6) which will be used to assess fitness levels and check on injured players.

With key men of Viliame Mata, Peceli Yato, Vereniki Goneva and Leone Nakarawa making a big impact on European rugby, McKee knows his squad could be a serious threat at the World Cup despite having slipped back to ninth in the world rankings – one below France.

Fiji are in the same World Cup pool as Wales, Australia, Georgia and Uruguay.

Continue reading below…

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McKee hopes to have around 30 players involved in the camp being held under Regulation 9 release and it is designed to overcome the limitations imposed on Fiji’s preparations for major tournaments with so many players operating overseas. The Fiji Sun reports that McKee will visit French clubs to continue building better relationships with coaches and owners while also seeing a number of Cup squad candidates in action.

McKee said: “We will see some other players who have been on our radar playing well for their respective clubs. If you visit them you have a really good first hand assessment of those players. We don’t only look at the top players, we are starting to look at some groups which are outside the camp. We envisage there will be a couple of guys joining the camp outside the November group.

“There were some who were injured when the November selections were made with the likes of Levani Botia who’s back on the field. Seta Tuivucu who got injured playing against Scotland hasn’t played since, but is now back at full training and he’ll be in camp with us and hopefully he gets a little bit of game time towards the end of their season.

“We have many good local players including a couple of young local Flying Fijians who are on the radar, they are involved in an intensive training program here and we are watching them closely.”

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J
JW 5 hours ago
'Let's not sugarcoat it': Former All Black's urgent call to protect eligibility rules

Yep, no one knows what will happen. Thing is I think (this is me arguing a point here not a random debate with this one) they're better off trialing it now in a controlled environment than waiting to open it up in a knee jerk style reaction to a crumbling organtization and team. They can always stop it again.


The principle idea is that why would players leave just because the door is ajar?


BBBR decides to go but is not good enough to retain the jersey after doing it. NZ no longer need to do what I suggest by paying him to get back upto speed. That is solely a concept of a body that needs to do what I call pick and stick wth players. NZR can't hold onto everyone so they have to choose their BBBRs and if that player comes back from a sabbatical under par it's a priority to get him upto speed as fast as possible because half of his competition has been let go overseas because they can't hold onto them all. Changing eligibility removes that dilemma, if a BBBR isn't playing well you can be assured that someone else is (well the idea is that you can be more assured than if you only selected from domestic players).


So if someone decides they want to go overseas, they better do it with an org than is going to help improve them, otherwise theyre still basically as ineligible as if they would have been scorning a NZ Super side that would have given them the best chance to be an All Black.

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