Ella promises tour for home boys

The Fiji Times - Saturday, November 07, 2009 7:28 PM

National coach Glen Ella said he had arranged a tour of Australia in January for a Fiji-based national team.

There will be little break for the members of the Flying Fijians over the festive season as they will prepare for the short tour where Fiji plays a match against Super 14 club the New South Wales Waratahs.

Ella said the aim was to try and blood as many young players as they could with the experienced lot in the national side.

He said this would develop them for the Rugby World Cup in 2011.

"We have a tour to New South Wales in January and playing the Waratahs," Ella said.

"This tour will involve all local players. What we will try and do is to blood as many of the younger and local players as we can. So they get to be exposed to that type of pressure at the international level.

"Then we come back and develop them even more. So it's a gradual progress for these players towards the next world cup."

The Flying Fijians departed for their Northern Hemisphere tour yesterday confident of a good outing.

Fiji will play Scotland, Ireland and Romania on their tour. Ella said it was not a picnic trip and they hoped to win all their games.

"We are going to be playing as hard as we can and hopefully we win," Ella said. "We want to win.

We are not going there for practise. I know that it is going to be tough, but if we can gel together in a short period of time we could beat anybody. We will just need to give the ball to our fast backs."

The national side will overnight in Seoul before heading to Edinburgh via London.