NZR open to sharing the load with Fiji
New Zealand Rugby chief executive Steve Tew says its open to including the Pacific Islands as potential hosts for New Zealand’s leg of the World Sevens Series from 2020.
Hamilton hosted its inaugural Sevens tournament earlier this year and has the 2019 event locked in but plans beyond that are yet to formally be announced after a World Rugby meeting in San Francisco last weekend.
NZ Rugby is contracted to annually host one leg of the World Series up to 2019 and Tew said they were confident of retaining a Sevens tournament, as well as confirming the governing body’s desire to include a women’s event to run concurrently with the men’s.
When asked about Hamilton potentially alternating as hosts with Suva, in Fiji, a guarded Tew told Radio Sport that NZ Rugby would be happy to welcome the Pacific Islands into the discussion.
‘‘We have made it clear to World Rugby that if there was a need to include the Pacific Islands, because they have got a bid themselves, then we’d be open to that discussion,’’ Tew said.
‘‘It’s all in-house at the moment and we’ll wait to have those discussions before we talk about them. These commercial arrangements take a bit of nutting out.’’
Fiji won the Hamilton Sevens in February in the first year New Zealand’s leg of the World Series was hosted outside of Wellington and both days at FMG Stadium Waikato were sold out.
The capital lost the tournament after 18 years as ticket sales and interest rapidly declined from its early years when Westpac Stadium would sell out in minutes.
Fiji won the Pacific Island nation’s first Olympic medal with Sevens gold in Rio in 2016 and it’s the spiritual home of rugby’s shortened form, so the country would revel in hosting a leg of the World Series.