Two years ago Tonga won the men’s World Rugby Sevens Challenger Series and came within touching distance of joining their Pacific neighbours Fiji, among the elite.<\/p>\n
But now the team is on the verge of extinction, and so is Tonga’s national women’s sevens side.<\/p>\n
As is so often the case in Pacific sport, it all comes down to money, and for the Tonga Rugby Union funds are in very short supply.<\/p>\n
The union’s focus is on the men’s and women’s fifteens, and for the sevens teams to continue, a new source of income has to be found.<\/p>\n
The TRU’s Chief Executive, Aisea ‘Aholelei, says a final decision has yet to be taken, but he’s frustrated that his organisation has been left in the dark about World Rugby’s future plans for the sevens set-up.\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Two years ago Tonga won the men’s World Rugby Sevens Challenger Series and came within touching distance of…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":46012,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[567],"tags":[39841,64,63,39842,3755,760,85,12907],"class_list":["post-46011","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-rugby","tag-aisea-aholelei","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-challenger-series","tag-podcast","tag-rugby","tag-sports","tag-world-rugby"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/46011","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=46011"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/46011\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/46012"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=46011"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=46011"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=46011"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}