18 Feb 2015

Sport: Samoa confident Apia Park will be AB ready

11:47 am on 18 February 2015

A team from New Zealand Rugby have flown home after two days assessing progress towards July's historic test between the All Blacks and Manu Samoa in Apia.

One of the concerns for officials was a drainage problem at Apia Park, which is being refurbished by Chinese workers in time for the test on July the eighth.

The Manu Samoa Technical Advisor and interim head of the SRU's High Performance Programme, Namulauulu Alama Ieremia, expects the ground will be ready in time.

"I've been told it will be ready so when the bosses over here say it will be ready then hopefully it will be ready. [I'm] as confident as I can be with a tier two nation set-up up here. It has it's own challenges but we're pretty confident we can get there. I'm hoping it will all be right: there's a lot of people that are putting in a lot of effort to make sure things are going to meet the standard so somehow we manage to actually get things done over here -it's a funny trait to have in the Islands but they do get done".

Namulauulu says despite his new High Performance role, his main priority remains preparing the Manu Samoa team for the season ahead.