'Get us off the back fields': Coach calls for sevens change
The world's top women rugby players are used to playing on the 'back fields', but Australian coach Tim Walsh says that needs to change.
Georgina Robinson is a Sports Reporter for The Sydney Morning Herald
The world's top women rugby players are used to playing on the 'back fields', but Australian coach Tim Walsh says that needs to change.
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The Australian Rugby Union has promised to "strike a better balance" on match scheduling at next year's Sydney Sevens after an embarrassing bungle kicked the world champion Australian women off the main pitch to make way for the men's pool stages.
They've been trotted out as the face of the Sydney Sevens, but Australia's Olympic and world series champion women's sevens team will be shunted to a training field for the quarter-finals to make way for the men's pool games next weekend.
Imagine if former Wallabies No.8 Wycliff Palu bobbed up for Tonga in the 2019 World Cup and Sitaleki Timani joined him. Or the boost to a nation if former All Blacks Sitiveni Sivivatu and Joe Rokocoko played for Fiji in 2015. As one senior administrator put it: "That would be huge for those countries. Somewhere like Scotland would never allow it".
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