Fijian teens eyed at the Bulldogs
21/10/2008 01:04:18 PM
The Western Bulldogs have pinpointed two Fijian teenagers as future AFL players for the club. The Bulldogs' Project Fiji scheme has signed Inoke Ratu, 19 and Solomoni Loki, 16 to the club's international scholarship program. Ratu is described as "athletic, very competitive and raw" while Loki has a "silky running style, great hands and an incredible aptitude for ball sport". Bulldogs development coach Simon Dalrymple said both youngsters showed good game sense and ball handling skills in a recent trial game held in wet conditions in the Fijian capital of Suva. He said the club was impressed enough with several potential players to do follow-up sessions. "The first game of AFL was conducted on the Labasa College rugby pitch with two teams of 14 taking part," Dalrymple said. "The ability of the athletes to grasp the game quickly was astounding. "Conditions at the Suva testing session (last Saturday) were dreadful to say the least with monsoonal rain for the preceding 12 hours and continued through the day until after testing was completed. "Bulldogs staff were surprised to arrive at the Corpus Christi ground for the start of testing to find a large number of athletes already at the venue and numbers continued to swell throughout the morning to in excess of 300, despite the dreadful conditions." There are currently two Fijian-born players in the AFL - Port Adelaide duo David Rodan and Alipate Carlile - while 18-year-old ruckman Nicholas Naitanui is set to be a top-three pick in next month's national draft.
View more news for this day.
Related News Stories:
Brought to you by AAP
© 2003 AAP
To submit a comment, you must be logged in.
See older news: 1 month | 1-3 months | 3-6 months | 6-12 months | 12+ months |
| 