Hong Kong beat Korea 64-3 to lift a second successive Asia Rugby Men’s Championship title.

Coming into the match, Hong Kong knew they only needed one point to complete a successful defence of the title, but nine tries ensured an emphatic victory on home soil.

Jack Neville got the hosts off to a fine start before Seb Brien and Ben Axten-Burrett showed individual skill and speed to add the second and third tries.

Neville added his second before Hyunu Lee received a red card for Korea, all but ending their hopes of a miraculous comeback.

Tyler Spitz was the first to take advantage of the numerical advantage, leaving the scores at 31-3 at half-time. Matt Rosslee added their sixth try after a good combination with his half-back partner and captain Liam Slatem.

Callum McCullough (2), Faizal Solomona and Axten-Burrett added further tries as Hong Kong ended the campaign on a high.

Afterwards, Slatem said: “We are ecstatic, we said before we started we wanted to go back-to-back, so we are really happy. We put in a lot of hard work over the past six weeks and happy it paid off.

“We’ll keep growing as a group, we have our full-time programme now that will continue. We then go into club season, we’ll come together around November and hopefully play in a couple of internationals.”

The win was not enough to improve Hong Kong’s position of 24th in the World Rugby Rankings as they gain only a tenth in victory, although Korea do slip one place to 31st with Switzerland the beneficiaries.

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China, meanwhile, have jumped six places to 80th after backing up their 63-10 victory over Indonesia with a 74-17 defeat of India to win the Division II East South title.

India were not able to overcome the damage caused by losing to the lower ranked China with a 42-12 defeat of Indonesia in the round robin tournament’s final match not enough to prevent them falling five places to 86th. Indonesia remain 103rd