Woods and Groube end the contract with Sri Lanka Rugby

Woods and Groube end the contract with Sri Lanka Rugby

By Shamzeer Jaleel

Sri Lanka Rugby (SLR) ended their contract with the Head Coach of the Senior national sevens team, Peter Woods (NZ) and its trainer Nick Groube (NZ) after the two-year contract expired as of last month in October.  

New Zealander, Peter Woods took over from the former England Sevens player, Matt Turner in 2016 at a difficult time. Peter almost took Sri Lanka to a medal losing out to South Korea at the Asian Games 2016 Bronze Medal encounter. Sri Lanka ended on number 4. Afterward Sri Lanka participated at the Commonwealth Games in Australia playing alongside Uganda, Fiji, and Wales. In fact, scored first against all three sides even the Fiji encounter Sri Lanka was the first to score in the tournament in Gold Coast 2018. He was well supported by High-Performance Rugby Director, Inthi Marikar who later on resigned from his position.

Asian Games Sri Lanka started off well ending on number 3 minus many senior players but dropped with the ranking in Korea (number 6) and Colombo (number 4). Sri Lanka Rugby will also end the services of the trainer, Nicolas Groube who spent a two-year stint working with the sevens side as well as with the fifteens side.  

Sri Lanka will not have any sevens commitments till March 2019 when they lock horns at the Borneo Sevens in Malaysia. The Asian Sevens 2019 will see three new countries hosting and the bidding process will take place later next month. Hong Kong is very likely to retain their position another two countries will be hoping for the claim. Sri Lanka after missing out on the Asian Rugby Championship XV a side event will be locking horns in the Division I event. Head Coach is likely to be appointed in the 1^st quarter of 2019.