The Swire Shipping Fijian Drua team is also looking abroad to sign-up players for the 2024 Shop N Save Super Rugby Pacific season.

This was confirmed to SUNsports by Fijian Drua chief executive officer Mark Evans.

Last week the Drua announced that nine players from their squad would leave at the end of season.

This season the Drua signed overseas-based players of tighthead prop Mesake Doge from Wales, Etonia Waqa of New Zealand along with France-based Eroni Sau and Epeli Momo.

“A lot of it is to do with improving the players you have,” Evans said.

“Making them better players. Picking people that you think have got growth and have got improvement in them.”

Evans said every year a few players were brought to the main squad from their development team.

“We’ve done that. When the full squad comes out, you’ll see six guys who have come up from development. They were in development this year and going to be in the main squad of 37, come next year.”

Evans said they were looking at players to play for the Flying Fijians.

“This be it in Super Rugby or in the other competitions in Europe or in Japan. We look at that a lot. Some of them are out of our price range at the moment, but not all of them.

“We’ll bring a few back from France. If we think there’s a slot and I think that’s good thing. We are starting to have some conversations where players are ringing us from Europe and saying, we’d like to come back and play for the Drua.

“That’s a really big change from where we were two years ago, where we were scrambling to put a team together.”

Evans said they had been telling the players that they had to be qualified to play for the Flying Fijians if they want to join the Drua.

“We only contract players who can play for Fiji because that’s part of our purpose. That’s of why we’re here.”

Story by: Waisea Nasokia – waisean@fijisun.com.fj