Gai Wu Falcons and Valley Black have contested the past five Premiership Grand Championship Finals. Can Gai Wu add the Cup to their league title or will Valley’s reign as Grand Champions continue…
Kicking off at King’s Park at 4.30pm, this clash has an extra layer of spice with Gai Wu defeating Valley 22-15 last time they met to bring an end to the Black’s three year 51-game winning streak.
“Finally I have a full strength squad to select from this week so it will bring me a bit of a headache at selection,” Gai Wu coach “Sailo” Lai Yiu-pang said. “The set piece is going to be a big area, if we can secure the set piece, especially the scrums, and put pressure on them, then we will have more opportunity to create a platform for ourselves. If we fail to secure that platform in defence there will be more challenges.”
Gai Wu breezed past Tai Po 63-0 in the semi-finals while Valley outlasted a gallant Tigers side 17-10 and Lai knows his team will need to be on the ball throughout this weekend.
“The two teams will be throwing everything at it, I expect it to be a close game and a big battle,” he said. “We have to be able to play 80 minutes of rugby, they have some experienced players – Bella [Milo] and Aroha [Savage] can turn every opportunity into points.”
“We can’t let up and we have to defend well. The reason we beat them last time is because we defended really well, we shut them down early so they didn’t have too much front-foot ball and then we put pressure on them and forced them to make turnovers.”
Chong Ka-yan and Lee Ka-shun will be among the key players for the Falcons as they look to end Valley’s run of three consecutive grand championship wins.
For Valley coach Milo, it’s about building on the basics. “We’re excited and nervous at the same time,” she said. “We have got to get our set piece right and put a bit of pressure on their key players. Our biggest work this week has been our defence. We didn’t really slow down their breakdown last time we played so they had faster ball and we were just a bit too slow to get out wide.”
“We’ve just focussed on ourselves and how we can get better from last week’s semi-final, we didn’t start too well. We have been talking about how we can control our game, ” added Milo.
Grand Championship Finals 2018
Additional reporting and image: hkru