Hong Kong will embark on its first non-Asian fifteen-a-side tour since 2012 this month when the side, ranked 22^nd in the world, travels to Africa next week to play the 24^th ranked Kenya national team in a two-match series. Hong Kong will depart on Thursday for Nairobi with matches on 23 August and the test match on 27 August.

Coach Leigh Jones today announced a 28-man squad for the tour, which is notable for the inclusion of several current players - or recent graduates - of the HKRU U20 programmes. The team also includes a majority of the members of the new Elite Rugby Programme (ERP), Hong Kong’s first ever professional programme for fifteens rugby.Back row forward Nick Hewson will captain the squad on tour.

Four players from the NAG ranks have been named to the squad, including forwards Alexander Post and Mike Parfitt and backs Hugo Stiles and Liam Owens. The four join Finlay Field, another U20s veteran who marked his senior debut versus South Korea at home earlier this year.

All four of the NAG players selected have served as captains or vice-captains of the Hong Kong U20s teams in both fifteens and sevens with Hugo Stiles leading the U20s Sevens team in the Asia Rugby U20s Sevens in Hong Kong last week. Stiles also co-captained the team at the Junior World Trophy in 2015 while Owens has previously led the U20s Sevens squad. Post previously led Hong Kong in the Asian qualifiers for the Junior World Trophy previously.

The high number of university players making themselves available for the tour points to the increasing lure of Hong Kong Rugby as a career path with the inception of the ERP last season and the sevens programme at the Hong Kong Sports Institute now in its third year. It is a pleasing development for coach Leigh Jones as he brings his side offshore for a tour outside of Asia for the first time as coach.

“It’s great to have the young guys involved. In the past we haven’t been able to keep tabs on them or influence their rugby or physical development and ultimately they lose out on three years of preparation. Recently we have started to reverse that trend. We are working hard to maintain ties with our top young players both in Hong Kong and overseas to ensure that they are involved at a reasonable playing level and provide them with solid programmes while monitoring their progress,” Jones said.

Hooker Post currently plays for Richmond in the United Kingdom, which earned promotion to the Premiership National League 1 last season while Owens and Stiles are playing for their university sides in Edinburgh and Bath respectively.

“The tour will give these players an opportunity to acquire a senior international cap in their second game, but it also provides them with some important exposure and makes them feel they are a part of something,” said Dai Rees, GM of Performance Rugby at the HKRU who will serve as Manager on tour.

“These young players have trained hard all summer and want to represent Hong Kong. All of them are still a couple of years off of finishing university but we hope that continued monitoring and inclusion will encourage more and more kids to return or even stay in Hong Kong. This will not only benefit the international scene but the domestic league as well,” Rees added.

The remainder of the squad is drawn from players within the Elite Rugby Programme, including several players on the cusp of Hong Kong eligibility, offering the coaching staff a unique opportunity to evaluate the centrally contracted players in a high performance tour and match environment.

“We need high intensity games for the non-eligible players in the ERP. This unique group needs a test. They have been working very hard and doing everything asked of them but they want to play rugby. This tour gives the ERP players a rare opportunity to play together as a team,” said Jones.

Amongst the players on the cusp of Hong Kong eligibility are Valley standout Matthew Rosslee, who will become eligible during the tour and stands a good chance to return from Africa with his first senior cap. Hong Kong Cricket Club hooker Ben Roberts is another soon-to-be eligible player from the domestic scene likely to earn his first cap on tour.

“Kenya is an important opportunity to examine these players at effectively a test level. It will be a fair step up from what they are used to at club level and we will see how they adjust,” Jones added.

With the sevens team in training for the upcoming Asian series, including several ERP players who transitioned to the Sevens team for the Cathay Pacific/HSBC Hong Kong Sevens earlier this year, (James Cunningham, Toby Fenn and Ryan Meacham), the backline will be under numbers pressure in Nairobi, particularly for the test match.

With 22 top players unavailable for Kenya the tour represents a welcome platform to enhance Hong Kong’s strength in depth according to Rees:

“We are developing another squad from the ranks of the Elite Rugby Programme and the National Age Grade programmes. Kenya gives us a chance to expose this larger group of players to international rugby and hopefully will help increase this base year after year.

“We have grown from about 35 to 50 players in the past year. But tours like this send an important message to players that if you make the effort, if you come back, participate and commit yourselves you can be selected for Hong Kong.”

The tour will also further Hong Kong’s aims to qualify for Rugby World Cup 2019 with Kenya a potential hurdle come the global repechage stage of qualification.

“Kenya and Zimbabwe regularly feature in the final repechage for Rugby World Cup. We are targeting to reach that stage again for 2019, so it is advantageous to measure ourselves against our potential opposition. We have played Zimbabwe in the last few years in the Cup of Nations so this is a great opportunity to front up against Kenya, a team we haven’t played in several years,” said Rees.

“We haven’t toured since Dubai and Europe years ago. It’s vital to get players on tour to see how they respond to different environments and react when they are outside of their comfort zone,” Rees added.

“It is a full-blown tour with test rugby,” said Jones. “We want to win of course but it is also a great opportunity for us to get an early look at some of the young guys and non-eligible ERP players, so there is also one eye on development. It’s going to be a fabulous experience for the players and I hope this tour will be the first of many,” Jones added.

Jones is under no illusions about the challenges: “We are travelling effectively without 22 first-class players committed to the sevens build-up and Kenya are a big, athletic outfit. They have lots of pace and individual power. I think it will come down to our collective strength as opposed to their individuality and I’m interested to see if we can be organised enough on the pitch to nullify their threats.”

Hong Kong previously played Kenya in Dubai in 2011, winning 44-17 en route to a victory in the four-team tournament that also included Brazil and the UAE.

For Jones the tour will mark a second sojourn to Africa in recent months after he took part in the recent World Rugby Talent Optimisation Programme in Stellenbosch, South Africa, which gathered coaches and match officials from 18 nations in July.

“It was a great experience,” said Jones. “To be able to dine at the same table as all of the Tier 2 nations and hear the amount of resources that are going into Tier 2 rugby at the moment was impressive. World Rugby is pumping a fair amount of resources into this level. We need to match that to stay on the coat-tails of those Tier 2 nations, hence the inception of the Elite Rugby Programme and tours like this,” according to Jones.

“Chatting to other coaches in South Africa, Hong Kong is ahead of the game in many ways. Things like having a full-time lifestyle manager (Mick Stott) in the ERP would still be unique for many Tier 2 sides. We also have a high level of expertise in our coaching and strength and conditioning strands, so in terms of expertise on the ground we are already more than a match, it just comes down to fundamental playing numbers at the end of the day.

“We will grow those numbers through the continued development of the ERP scheme, offering opportunities like the Kenya tour and generating the most competitive domestic competition that we can,” Jones concluded.

Hong Kong Team for Tour of Kenya

Adam FULLGRABE, Adam ROLSTON, Adrian GRIFFITHS, Alex NG Wai-shing, Alexander POST, Ben HIGGINS, Ben ROBERTS, Charles CHEUNG Ho-ning, Charles HIGSON-SMITH, Conor HARTLEY, Daniel FALVEY, Edmund ROLSTON, Finlay FIELD, Hugo STILES, Jack PARFITT, Michael PARFITT, Jamie ROBINSON, Jamie TSANG, Jason KJESTRUP, Jonny REES, Liam OWENS, Matthew LAMMING, Matthew ROSSLEE, Nick HEWSON (Captain), CHEUNG Ho-yin, Rohan COOK, Tony WONG Ho-yeung, Tyler SPITZ.