Improving fitness among key areas for “Green Machine”

Guyana’s national men’s rugby team, commonly called the “Green Machine”, produced a sterling performance on Saturday at the National Park Rugby Field to topple Barbados 48-17 in their first game of the Southern Zone of Rugby America’s North (RAN) 15s campaign, but the focus has shifted to improvement for the remaining matches ahead.
Though the team seemed well-oiled on the day, coach Larry Adonis explained that improving the fitness level is vital for the team going forward.

“The fitness stood-up; I looked at the recovery rate and it was okay; it was about 85% and coming next month it has to be a full 100% firing and really ready to go,” he said.
In the weeks leading up to match, many of the players found difficulty in attending training sessions due to work commitments and this could be a correlation to the fitness concern, but the coach is hopeful that the situation would change to allow the team to jell better.
With respect to the performance against Barbados, Adonis highlighted that “it was a good game, Barbados put up a good fight at the start; we started to break them down and started to run up the score.”
According to the coach, there are technical areas that need to improve to better the performance of the squad.
“We still got some areas that we got to work on, especially in the line-outs and the malls, we [are] still a little weak there because they scored most of their tries in those areas, but otherwise the guys put up a good performance and we really pleased with this outcome,” the ruggers coach said.
Their next opponent is Jamaica, who was easily defeated by Trinidad and Tobago on Sunday in the twin-island republic, but Adonis explained that the team needs to be cautious of the Jamaicans.
“Watching at Barbados, they always come technically sound and we were able to do a lot of the stuff against them, the stuff that we practiced, but coming up against Jamaica it will be a different kettle of fish because it is years now we didn’t face Jamaica so that will be a different ball game, so we still got to prepare and try to get ourselves organised and ready for them,” Adonis explained.
With quality players like Claudius Butts and Theodore Henry missing, the coach was asked if an inclusion of other players would be done for the upcoming matches.
“Not much changes; people like Claudius Butts might be coming in, but we going mostly with the same squad; you don’t change your winning solution,” he posited.
The national ruggers next encounters are against Jamaica on May 21, then Trinidad on June 19.