Yahoo News 
Investing in the future key for new UAE rugby coach
Epeli Lagiloa feels that nurturing the up-and-coming players will help the game of rugby in the UAE in the near future.
The UAE Rugby Federation’s performance manager, who just returned with a squad of 15 Emirati players from a week-long training camp at the Natal Sharks Academy in Durban, will this week name his 12-man squad for the Asian Sevens Series in Kuala Lumpur at the end of the month.
The Fijian said that the emphasis will be on the younger players as getting them ready for tougher assignments is his main concern.
“Most of the guys here have been playing for a while together, but I will be including a few of the youn-ger guys in this squad,” he said. “It’s not about winning – it’s about investing in the future. Winning will come automatically from this.
"If we don’t develop the players here first, we will exhaust our supply. Having a strong base of players is important and it will bode well for rugby here in the coming years.”
The camp in Durban wasn’t designed to bulk the players up, but it was more of a lesson in preparation, rather than a brutal training camp.
“This was a great experience for the boys,” claimed the 60-year-old. “It’s is a great initiative, the Memorandum of Association between the Sharks and the UAERF. There is no better place to prepare the players.
“They gained so much experience from using the gymnasium; how to do strength and conditioning exercises and the routines that should be followed, the sequences of the exercises. They learned about the specific muscles that are important in sevens as opposed to 15s rugby...
“Rather than just going there to play rugby, they needed to understand how to use their bodies to improve their game. There are many finer points which I need to teach the players too, such as managing their time on the field. They should never waste one second.
“Also, we worked a lot on defensive patterns. Defence is the key to our game. You can score tries any time, but defence is something which is difficult to get right.”
Their first test will be at the Asian Sevens Series in Kuala Lumpur on August 31 and September 1 and that should give Lagiloa an early indication of the job he faces.
The Asian Games in Incheon, Korea next year is an intermediate target with the Olympics in Rio de Janeiro in 2014 his final one.
Lagiloa isn’t too confident, or indeed concerned, about the team’s performance levels in Malaysia because he understands their fitness levels are not up to the mark.
“The fatigue really crept up on us [in the games they played in Durban],” he said. “I see it as no major threat though because we can easily work on this between now and the Asian Games. We have other aspects to worry about at the moment than fitness.”
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