After their first victory in their home country on Saturday, Fijian Drua captain Bitila Tawake said her team has “created history for women in rugby”.
Key points:
- Fijiana Drua won all six of their matches to win the Super W title in their first season in the competition last year
- The new-look side — led by incoming coach Inoke Male — has now won its first game on home soil, beating the Brumbies in Nadi
- Fijiana Drua will play against the Melbourne Rebels in Suva before relocating to Australia for the rest of this year’s competition
Since joining the Super W last year, the reigning champions have not stopped creating history.
The Drua’s round one win over the Brumbies in Nadi was the first Super W game ever held in Fiji, and also the first time a Brumbies side, men or women, has played in Fiji.
The 12-7 triumph at home was the Drua’s seventh consecutive win, having never lost a game.
Last year the Fiji women redefined Super W as the first overseas team to compete, but their presence in the competition went far beyond that.
The Drua stunned fans with their early domination, which never let up in their inaugural season.
They entered the grand final undefeated, where they swiftly put an end to the NSW Waratahs’ long reign of supremacy in Australian women’s rugby.
It’s a lot to live up to this year and there are some new ingredients in the mix.
New Drua head coach Inoke Male was only appointed a month ago.
Bitila Tawake remains as the captain, but several of her teammates have moved on, leaving only nine of last season’s players in the squad.
On Saturday, the revamped Drua had eight debutants in their run-on team as well as six newcomers on the bench.
It was the first real test for the new-look Drua, with a lot of young players joining the squad, some who’d never played a team from overseas before.
This can explain why the match wasn’t the high-scoring, fast game fans were accustomed to from the Fijians. The Drua held a slender half-time lead of 7-0.
It was one of the debutants who helped secure the team’s first win at home.
Lavenia Tinai is a Commonwealth Games medallist for the Fijiana Sevens and one of the new faces in the squad.
The fullback scored the first of the Drua’s two tries and landed a conversion, allowing them to escape with a 12- 7 victory.
After the win, the Drua’s new coach held back from laying on the praise and said the result would have been better if his team had been allowed to play without so much “start-stop”.
“We had a lot of start-stop which distracted our plan but it is always good to come out with a win in the first game of the season,” said Male.
“There are a lot of takings from this game and we need to go to the drawing board and polish it up before our second match against Melbourne Rebels.”
This weekend’s match against the Rebels in Suva will be the final game played on Fijian soil before the Drua relocate to Australia for the remainder of this year’s competition.
The Drua are the only team in the Super W who live and play in a full-time set-up, essentially a training camp that lasts all season.
This can make up for any lost time the team may feel with a fresh head coach and more than half the squad being new.
If the Drua continue undefeated and make the finals again with largely a new team, it will re-emphasise Fiji’s depth of talent.
This season the Super W will feature a total of 18 games, with each of the six teams playing each other once in a round-robin format.
For the first time, four instead of three teams will compete in the semi-finals with the two winners advancing to the grand final in Townsville on May 6.