FLYING Fijians coach John McKee reflected on the heavy defeat to Scotland at Murrayfield on the weekend, and provided an update on the injury to debutant full-back Setareki Tuicuvu.
“Tuicuvu fractured one of the bones in his foot midway through the first half, so sadly he’s out for the rest of the tour,” McKee said.
“It is very unfortunate for that to happen on his Test debut. We’ll do our injury assessment update and decide if we should bring in another back or not.
“We had the normal knocks and bruises, a couple of shoulder niggles, but nothing else major.”
Meanwhile, McKee confirmed that France-based wing Josua Tuisova will rejoin the group in time for this weekend’s clash with Uruguay in Hartpury near Gloucester. “Josh was in camp with us when we were in Toulouse, but he got injured playing for Toulon last weekend.
“He was cleared on Friday to rejoin us, so he’s flying across tomorrow and we expect him to join us on Monday evening (Tuesday Fiji time). In regards to the record loss to Scotland, coach McKee said he was “disappointed with the way the game finished.
“We went to Edinburgh with quite high ambitions of what we could achieve and I felt that our preparation had been good and we were right in the game at half-time.
“The game was in the balance then, but the two yellow cards cost us massively with Scotland scoring just before and just after half-time, and that started to turn the game in their favour.
“The yellow cards also sucked a lot out of us, especially the forwards.
“I think Scotland gambled a little bit on a very up-tempo game with the expectation that we wouldn’t be able to go with the pace, and that paid off for them as we did struggle with the pace of the game at the back end of the second half.”
McKee lamented the lack of ball that Fiji had, but added “when we did have it, particularly in the first half and in that stage towards the end of the second half too, we were quite dangerous and created several line breaks.
“Overall, we just didn’t have enough ball. From set play ball, we weren’t able to build enough pressure because we tended to turn over possession quite quickly so we couldn’t play the game we wanted to play.”
