Watch every second of the 2026 Super Rugby Women’s season live and on demand via Stan Sport.<\/a><\/p>\n“I love my home country, my motherland, and I will always support the Drua,” Kalounivale told AAP ahead of their Super Rugby Women’s semi-final.<\/p>\n
Born in Suva, Kalounivale made a career move to New Zealand and has accrued 29 Test caps and a World Cup with the Black Ferns.<\/p>\n
She crossed the Tasman to sign with the Queensland Reds in May, but kept her sights on sharing a rugby field with her fellow countrywomen, even if it meant scrumming down against them.<\/p>\n
“It’s just part of the process,” Kalounivale said.<\/p>\n
“For me to play against my own nation … I’m buzzing out there.”<\/p>\n
The Reds are still smarting from a 50-17 touch up by the table-topping Drua during the regular season.<\/p>\n
After an opening-round loss to defending champions the NSW Waratahs, the Fijians are undefeated, and their winning margins have been impressive.<\/p>\n
Kalounivale took plenty away from that tough first encounter with the swashbuckling Pacific side in June.<\/p>\n
“In my head, I was thinking, wow, I’m versing the Fijian Drua and this is how – as Fijians – this is how we play,” she said.<\/p>\n
“It was fast, it was like the offloads, such a game of flair and excitement they brought.<\/p>\n
“It’s so exciting … they’re so natural and naturally gifted with that talent.”<\/p>\n
Kalounivale said settling the score on Saturday will mean leaking fewer errors and keeping the high-flying Drua earth-bound during set pieces.<\/p>\n
“We have to just keep pressuring them … tighten up our connections and continue building,” she said.<\/p>\n
“The Drua love to scrum high, so we’ve just got to bring them a bit lower.”<\/p>\n
That’s exactly what the Reds did when they turned a trio of losses around to upset the always-formidable Waratahs away from home and secure their semi-finals berth.<\/p>\n
“We just wanted to put some pride back in the jersey … and did exactly that,” Kalounivale said.<\/p>\n
“(We) put our bodies on the line, turned up on the day, and applied pressure.”<\/p>\n
The Waratahs and Western Force will square off in the other semi-final in Perth on Saturday, the game doubling as a curtain-raiser for the Wallabies-Italy Nations Championship fixture.<\/p>\n
The second-placed Force will hope to unseat the six-time titleholders from NSW as they bid for a maiden Super Rugby Women’s premiership.<\/p>\n
Silverware has also proven elusive for the Reds, who have been runners-up on six occasions, losing finals to the Waratahs and the Drua. <\/p>\n
The grand final is on July 25.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Tanya Kalounivale is about to realise her life-long dream of playing professional rugby in her native Fiji. The…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":805304,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[567],"tags":[64,63,12061,348768,760,85,131635],"class_list":["post-805303","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-rugby","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-queensland-reds","tag-queensland-women","tag-rugby","tag-sports","tag-super-w"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/805303","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=805303"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/805303\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/805304"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=805303"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=805303"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=805303"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}