After being branded chokers for losing back-to-back finals, Al Ain Amblers’ head coach Peter Aki says his team are now concentrating on challenging in next season’s Sport360 UAE Premiership.
Amblers beat Jebel Ali Dragons 35-15 in Friday’s UAE Conference Cup showdown, finally shrugging off the unwanted tag after losing in 2013 to Abu Dhabi Harlequins and in 2014 to Dubai Hurricanes.
The men from the Garden City have been all-conquering this season, winning 10 out of 10 in the pre-Christmas UAE Conference competition.
They scored 570 points in the process and conceded just 63 – an average of a 57-6 win every game.
Early in the new year the league’s 12 teams were split up into the Top 6 and Bottom 6 divisions, playing another five games, with the best two teams in the former going on to play in the Conference Cup and the top two from the latter group going head-to-head for the Conference Plate.
Amblers won all five Top 6 games and brushed the Jebel Ali Dragons aside in the final to make it third time lucky.
Although their promotion to the Premiership is yet to be ratified by the UAE Rugby Federation and there is also no news on whether a team will drop down into the Conference or if it will become a seven-team competition, Aki is looking ahead to mixing it with the UAE elite.
“We’re looking forward to next season in the Premiership, and seeing how we get on,” he said. “Now we’ve won the final we deserve it, so we’ll look forward to the challenge.
“It’s been three years in the making. We’ve been together as a team for three years and it might take another three years to make any headway in the Premiership, but we’ll give it a good go and, like I said, look forward to it.”
After stuttering at the final hurdle in the previous two years, any fears of a repeat were dismissed in Friday’s showpiece, which was barely a contest, Amblers sauntering into a 27-3 lead early in the second half and always retaining control on the game. The club is making great strides for rugby in the UAE, with 40 per cent of its 2,000-plus members of Emirati origin, yet they have their critics.
Their first team has dominated the Conference scene for the last three years, rival clubs claiming they’re too strong for the division.
On top of that, they were rounded on for entering a second team into this year’s Conference, club chairman Andre Fourie claiming other clubs were jealous.
“The club is growing and moving in the right direction and, for some reason, people don’t like that,” he had said previously.
However, as Aki said before Friday’s final: “People think we should go up but we haven’t won anything. We haven’t won the right to go up to the Premiership so the pressure’s on us.”
If, as expected, they get the green light and are promoted to the Premiership, there can be no argument that they’ve certainly earned it now.
