After being written off by fans at home, Fiji Bati interim head coach Wise Kativerata says his young band of players have a point to prove having reached the knockout stages of the Rugby League World Cup.
The withdrawal of several National Rugby League players had put a dent in the Bati’s world cup campaign a few weeks out from the trip to England.
The Bati coaching staff had to call in reinforcements from the lower rugby league competitions to fill in the gap. And the young replacements have performed well so far, matching Australia in the opening 30 minutes of their game, convincingly beating Italy, and holding off Scotland.
This weekend they face New Zealand – a side that came into the world cup as the number one ranked team. Kativerata said instilling self-belief in the players was a key focus for the coaching team.
“New Zealand has some big names, and so does Australia. I know our boys can do it,” the former Fiji Bati said.
“These young boys have a point to prove. People wrote them off even before they got on to the plane because a lot of experienced players were not coming. I believe in them. A lot of people look at the names, I don’t. I look at the person standing in front of me.
“The first thing you’ve got to do is you’ve got to instill sel-belief in them. If they can believe in themselves then they can believe in the system that I’m trying to put in place.”
Kativerata said they would not change much of their game plan and stick to the basics.
“It’s a big game this weekend. Our preparation is still the same. We started today and worked on things we didn’t do very well last week (against Scotland). We’ve tried to keep the boys happy by making things simple. We don’t want to complicate things. We’ve done well against Australia with that system. We’ve done well against Italy and against Scotland. There are a lot of points that we can take from each game. We don’t have to change anything that is working well for us.
“We knew Scotland was going to come after us – they weren’t going to just die wondering. We learned a lot from that game – the moment we get away from what we do best, we make mistakes.
“That was one thing that we spoke about and I keep reminding the team that we need to do the simple things. Rugby league is simple – you keep the football, complete your sets, kick long and defend.
“You force the mistake and you have an opportunity to score points.” Fiji takes on New Zealand at 7am Fiji time on Sunday.
