The final tournament of the HSBC World Rugby Women’s Sevens Series 2018 in Paris was good for Las Leonas with a seventh-place finish and a good win against England. I think that is a fair reflection of where we are at in the series in general.

We’re pretty happy because this year was a step up for us – not just in performance but in all areas. We have evolved and the girls who were new to the series last year have another year of experience behind them and that has brought increased competition. Our new coach, Pedro de Matías, has also energised us and given us new tools to use.

Personally, being named in the HSBC Dream Team for the series was amazing, I am so happy and so proud to represent Spain in this way. It is only thanks to the good play of the team that I am able to play well and achieve this recognition. I am happy for my team, for my country and, of course, for myself that all the hard work I have been doing over the years and the support I have had from coaches and my family has led to this achievement. I’d like to thank all of them.

We’re now in San Francisco for Rugby World Cup Sevens 2018. We have been preparing well for the Fiji game, the first game of the whole tournament. We know it is going to be tough because Fiji are always hard to play against.

It is a pretty difficult game to start because if you let them play and let them have the ball, they can be so dangerous, especially on the back of playing so well in the last tournament. But we are working hard to make sure our strengths neutralise their main threats. We’ll try to put our best game out there.

Happy memories

With this new knock-out format it is quite difficult because if you lose the first game, you are out. Both ourselves and Fiji don’t want to be fighting for ninth position, we want to be playing in the Championship quarter-finals.

We have good memories from Moscow in terms of performance, when we finished in fourth position, which is the best we have achieved at a World Cup in either men’s or women’s. We caused a big surprise in the quarter-finals when we beat Australia who were the world champions at the time.

I’ll never forget that moment. Unfortunately, we lost to Canada in the semi-final and then to the USA after in the third-place play-off that went to extra-time.

We’ll be aiming to do our best at this World Cup and we are pretty excited at playing in such a big stadium with such a good atmosphere and ambience.

Hopefully we can have the perfect end to the season. 

Photo: Aljaz Babnik