Waisea Nayacalevu has revealed the 2023 Rugby World Cup quarter-final between Fiji and England was hours from being called off, as the speedster hits out at “corruption”.
In a wide-ranging interview with the UK’s Daily Mail, Nayacalevu said the players were also promised bonuses that never materialised.
His focus has now shifted to playing for English Premiership club Sale Sharks, but the 34-year-old dreams of returning home to fix the system: “I would change everything… I just want people to be treated fairly.”
“There’s corruption in the Fiji rugby house,” Nayacalevu explained. “We weren’t going to play the match against England, we were going to walk out. They promised us things and we didn’t get it. We were promised a bonus.
“We were staying in Marseille and I organised a presentation, a Zoom call, I organised everything, to talk about what they had promised us. We gave them a date and said, ‘If you don’t pay by this day, nobody is going to play this quarter-final’.”
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“I’ve played for Fiji for more than 10 years and it’s the same thing over and over again,” he added. “It’s not the first time… boys getting half-paid, boys not getting paid for weeks. We were paid on the Thursday before the England match. It was close. It distracted our focus.
“This is probably my last year with Fiji and I told the team, ‘Boys, when I’m gone from here I hope you guys learn from this… when things happen in the future I hope you have the balls to put it in their face’. If we didn’t have corruption, if we had professional people in charge, then Fiji would be better. It’s not fair, but you have to go in there and fix it.”
Photo: Gaspafotos/MB Media/Getty Images
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Src: sarugbymag.co.za
