Wales and the US set the Australian round of the IRB Sevens series alight on the opening night yesterday with shock wins over Fiji and England.
Tournament favorites New Zealand and Samoa safely negotiated their way through their first matches, but elsewhere the form book was thrown away.
A stirring second-half performance by Wales, who languish a lowly ninth in the championship table, produced a 17-12 win over regular Sevens high-flyers third-ranked Fiji.
The match started according to the script, with Fiji scoring twice early to take a 12-0 lead and a runaway win seemed a formality, but Justin Tipuric brought Wales into the action with a try on halftime and Chris Morgan and Darren Daniel scored soon after the resumption to give Wales a five-point lead, which they clung to in a desperate closing four minutes.
The 11th-ranked US then turned a 17-7 halftime deficit into a 24-21 victory over England, who lie fourth in the table.
Championship leaders and seven-time World Series winners New Zealand kept their tryline intact when they beat Scotland 31-0 in a five-try romp, finishing with two players in the sin-bin.
New Zealand, who have won two of the four tournaments so far in this series, see their strongest opposition coming from Samoa, who won the recent Las Vegas leg.
Samoa were made to struggle for much of their game against France, however, and only led 14-7 at halftime, before racing away at the end to a 33-12 win. France scored first in both halves, but had no answer to the pace out wide of the Samoans, where Mikaele Pesamino, the series-leading try scorer, touched down twice to raise his tally for the season to 30.
Hosts Australia, hoping their home-soil advantage will spur them to their first title in eight years, started their campaign with an easy 40-5 win over Niue.
Other first round matches saw Argentina beat Tonga 19-17, South Africa beat Japan 40-0 and crowd favorites Kenya posted a 27-7 win over Papua New Guinea.
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