Out of public view beneath Kai Tak Stadium’s South Stand, Germany’s players huddled around Pablo Feijoo and listened to the head coach tell them they should not be surprised by the speed and ferocity they had just encountered.

Among those listening to the Spaniard address his squad in English following their 42-5 defeat by Fiji was Niklas Koch, the captain who combines trying to put rugby on the map in a football-crazy country with working as a policeman.

Stepping away from the debrief, he acknowledged Germany had “learned lots of lessons” from their first Cathay/HSBC Sevens opponents.

“If you have the ball, you have to keep it; every ball you give to top teams, they punish you,” Koch said. “But this is how you improve game by game, and it is what we wanted.”

Germany are back in Hong Kong for the first time since 2016, when they competed in the secondary World Series Qualifier. They secured their golden ticket after claiming a top-four finish from the do-or-die HSBC SVNS 2, where failure to secure promotion kills a team’s campaign after three tournaments.

“They were three big-pressure competitions, where every game matters,” Koch said. “You want a longer season and to play at the highest level.”