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more »Rowan’s World Games Diary: Scrimmaging with US before Friday

During the 2009 World Games, UR7s are providing a glimpse of what’s going on behind the scenes courtesy of an exclusive diary from one of Hong Kong’s key talisman, Rowan Varty.
We arrived on Wednesday morning in Kaoshiung and seemed to spend most of the day on a bus! The games are well organised, although our hotel is a little out of the way and has the distinct disadvantage of not having any food. We are sharing with the Ultimate Frisbee teams, which the USA have just won.
We managed to have a hit out session with USA in the afternoon, which was good for both of us. These hit outs usually start off as touch and normally end up being full tackle, but today was well managed.
We are sharing a bus with the American guys as everything is miles apart; they are nice guys. One of their new players, Leonard Peters, is an NFL convert. He has only been playing rugby for four weeks, but is ridiculously massive.
They are similar to us in the sense that they are not a traditional rugby playing nation, but have good support from their union. As a result, they are now full time on the circuit and have made massive strides. It’s our goal to emulate what they have done and find ourselves at more circuit events over the next couple of years.
We also had a chance to see the stadium that we are going to be playing in. It's meant to hold up to 55,000 people, and faces south, which lets the wind blow through to keep it relatively cool. It's also loaded with solar panels and environmentally friendly materials, meaning it can almost fully power itself. It's a bit nicer than our hotel.
One of the most important factors on a tour is who you room with. I've ended up with youngster Edmund Rolston, who is lucky to be here after leaving his passport at home. He has made up for it however, providing hours of entertainment on his recently purchased, horrendously fake iPhone 'mini'. Usefully, it has a T.V antenna, so we settled down to some ten pin bowling highlights. The room has a T.V. but it’s just not the same.
We are set to train again in the morning and then try and catch one of the many sports on in the afternoon. Then on Friday the group stage begins. At this stage, I'm backing South Africa to take the gold medal. They have been here for two weeks now, and have had a very strong year. They also have most of their regular 7's stars, and so will be hard to beat.
Time for bed.





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