Hong Kong never looked back after sevens captain Natasha Olson-Thorne scored in the opening minute against Singapore, running out 40-7 winners over their hosts at the National Stadium on Saturday.

The win will not be enough to improve Hong Kong’s position of 23rd in the World Rugby Women’s Rankings, although they have halved the deficit to Trinidad and Tobago above them to just under six tenths. Singapore remain in 34th after the defeat.

After Olson-Thorne gave Hong Kong the perfect start, they didn’t have to wait long for a second try from prop Tammy Lau Nga Wun in the ninth minute. Aggie Poon Pak Yan converted the opening try and then scored two tries to give the visitors a 25-7 advantage at half-time.

Hong Kong began the second half as they had the first with Lau grabbing her second of the match within three minutes of the restart, but then had to wait until the hour mark for try number six through captain Chow Mei Nam.

The visitors crossed for one more try through Candy Cheng to leave coach Jo Hull happy with the way her side bounced back from a 39-3 loss to Japan in the Asia Rugby Women’s Championship last weekend.

Building block

“Our set piece performed very well and we were able to set up a dominant platform at the scrum and line-out which led to the pack tries,” said Hull after her first win as Hong Kong coach.

“We played with a lot of confidence today, which was great to see. We generated a lot more go-forward ball and were much more accurate under pressure then last week.”

Hong Kong will face Japan in the final match of the Asia Rugby Women’s Championship on 28 May and Hull knows that will be an entirely different challenge to taking on Singapore. 

“We can take a lot of confidence and some good lessons away from this match, particularly about what kind of shape we want to be in in our attack, but we’re under no illusions about what this result means for Japan. 

“We didn’t talk about the result after the game, we were purely focused on our own performance goals which is another positive indicator of what we are building … the win is more important as a building block now and I’m just really pleased with the way the team responded after last week."

Photo: Dannii Cheung/HKRU