Dubai: Defending champions Fiji and last year’s runners-up South Africa blazed through the group stages of the Emirates Airline Dubai Rugby Sevens on Friday with three straight wins.

Fiji beat France 54-7, Brazil 36-5 and Argentina 33-21 to top Pool A, while South Africa beat Portugal 36-0, Canada 24-12 and Wales 12-5 to top Pool D. Fiji will now play Wales, and South Africa will play Argentina in Saturday’s quarter-finals.

Ben Ryan, coach of current Sevens World Series leaders Fiji, who won the opening round of the current nine-stage series in Australia in October, said his team still had a lot to work upon if they were continue their run of form and defend their Dubai title on Saturday.

“We’re into the cup, that’s the main thing I guess,” said Ryan. “Certainly coaches look for perfection and that wasn’t perfection today.

“We need to improve on our concentration, we gave silly penalties away and our defence didn’t get off the floor quick enough, which left us exposed. But we did well to get three wins and now it’s all about 11am tomorrow [Saturday] morning.”

Fiji won their first Dubai Rugby Sevens last year and will need to pull off another first if they are to reclaim their title, because this season’s Gold Coast Sevens winners have also never won two series tournaments back-to-back.

“Tomorrow is really tricky,” added Ryan. “You’ve got to be on point at 11am, it’s early and you’ve got to be on the money because upsets happen and we don’t want to be one of them.”

Meanwhile, South Africa coach Neil Powell also said his side had improvements to work upon before Saturday’s knockout stages, if they were to go one better than last year’s runners-up spot to add a fourth Dubai title to the trophy cabinet.

“I’m obviously happy with the results,” said Powell. “But we can play a better brand of sevens especially after this last game, where Wales startled us at the rucks.

“That’s something that we need to look at for tomorrow [Saturday]. But, overall, I’m very happy with the guys. We had maybe a slow start against Portugal, but we had a good game against Canada and then a not so good game against Wales.

“We can build upon that game against Canada and if we can take that confidence and momentum into the next game tomorrow morning, I think we’ll do well.

“But, we’ll have a look at what we’ve done against Wales and we’ll see how we can improve on that too. We’ll go back tonight [Friday] and see what we can do to hopefully be successful against Argentina.”