NAIROBI, Kenya, November 18 – National men’s rugby 15s team assistant coach Carlos Katywa is keen to build on their gains ahead of next year’s World Cup qualifiers and Rugby Africa Cup.
Katywa is hopeful Simbas will receive adequate preparations and test matches before they embark on their qualification campaign.
“There’s a lot of process and procedure that goes into preparing a team such as this. I do not think we want to look outside our scope, especially, heading into a crucial year, such as the qualifiers that we are heading into. We are looking inside, to play more friendlies and to look at the fringe players; get into some camps and proceed with the guys,” the Kabras Sugar RFC head coach said.
The coach further believes the current Simbas squad is already overflowing with quality and is, therefore, not keen to rock by the boat by making unnecessary changes.
“Because of the nature of the coming eight months, it is very crucial for our union…our team that we come out guns blazing. It is very hard to start diluting the team because the work we have done with these guys, it would take us a lot for new players to come in and learn the setup. We don’t want to open ourselves up to could have, should have, or couldn’t. We want to just stick to what we have and work hard moving forward,” Katywa said.
Noisy neighbours silenced
Simbas extended their dominance over East African archrivals Uganda, beating them 21-5 to clinch their 14th Elgon Cup crown at the Kings Park in Kampala on Saturday.
The two teams had clashed a week earlier at the RFUEA Grounds in Nairobi where Kenya came away with a slim 27-25 win.
Katywa says they analysed their opponents’ weaknesses in the first leg and set out to exploit them at their home ground.
“We found some key weaknesses in the scrum…for instance, Uganda had a very good scrum last week and we found that we were not working on the second shove so this is what dominated in this encounter. On the lineout we saw a lot of inconsistency in how they defend the lineout. They were very indecisive on whether they wanted to contest or not. We made sure to work very hard on the setpieces and when we get the opportunity…to dominate,” he said.
The big win notwithstanding, Katywa believes there are areas of their play they need to refine.
“There were quite a number of unforced errors on our side in the first half. I feel we could have closed out the game in the first half if we wanted to but for our decision making. Also, remember it is quite early in the season for us back home…a lot of the guys are still in preseason and offseason. It’s not an excuse though…there were quite a comedy of errors from our side that we need to cut out,” he said.
Both teams are set to clash, once again, in next year’s Rugby Africa Cup.
In the meantime, coach Jerome Paarwater’s men will return to their respective clubs for the 2024/25 Kenya Cup, which starts on November 23.
