HSBC 7's: London 16 - 18 May (last Round)

[Hugh Jarse]

The Septics show the value of blistering pace in Rugby Sevens, and the criticality of making your tackles.

Look out world. Perry Baker and Carlin Isles are whippets that run like lightning, but in addition to that the team are now tackling, rucking and also producing 110kg monsters that can run like the wind.

Well done Team USA.

Awesome series of finals games in Twickers. Pace, power, skills and strategy. Great advertisement for the game. The gap at the top of the series is getting closer, with any of the top 8 teams capable of winning a tournament.

Pix: World Rugby

CUP FINAL WINNERS: USA
Bronze medal winners: Fiji
Plate winners: New Zealand
Bowl winners: Kenya
Shield Final: Japan

Pix: World Rugby

2014/2015 World Series Winners: Fiji.

1. Fiji 164 points
2. South Africa 154 points
3. New Zealand 152 points
4. England 132 points

5. Australia 120 points
6. USA 108 points
7. Scotland 89 points
8. Argentina 80 points
9. Canada 67 points
10. Samoa 64 points
11. France 61 points
12. Wales 55 points
13. Kenya 46 points
14. Portugal 28 points
15. Japan 21 points
16. Brazil 3 points

 

[Harv]

For all the talk over many years about the sleeping giant of USA rugby, I do think we've just witnessed a moment with the Yank's recent success in the Sevens, crowned by their London performance. Realize it's not XVs, lots of work to do, etc, but the game's best cross sport appeal in the US is Sevens. It reaches into nontraditional rugby communities and is the best pathway for fine athletes who lack the skills traditional rugby nations develop in their players at an early age. Great stuff.

 

[Omar Comin']

The US performance this season, culminating in this victory shows the impact of world class coaching. Since Mike Friday took over they've got so much better.

At the moment their XV's team is coached by a local guy who has no professional experience. Give them a couple of years under a world class coach and they'd be a lot stronger. The benefits from the recent growth in high school rugby over there should start to be obvious soon too.

 

[qwerty51]

Perry Baker is a freak.

 

[Strewthcobber]

Maybe not the right thread but I've always wondered.....does the circuit/world rugby distribute revenue to the sides or are they relying on Olympic and general revenue to pay for them selves?

I know the ARU spent $3m on sevens this year (its in the annual report). Is that about what every team budget has, or would it vary pretty widely?

 

[mxyzptlk]

The Septics show the value of blistering pace in Rugby Sevens, and the criticality of making your tackles.

Look out world. Perry Baker and Carlin Isles are whippets that run like lightning, but in addition to that the team are now tackling, rucking and also producing 110kg monsters that can run like the wind.

Well done Team USA.

In the quarters, semis and finals, the US put up a combined 117 points. That's the highest total any winning team put up this season through a cup finals run. Not a bad base to build on. (Fiji was second with 110 total quarters, semis and finals points in Australia.)

 

[USARugger]

Baker and Isles are obviously the show-ponies but Bender, Duratalo, Barrett, Hughes, etc. were my collective MVPs. It's much easier for the gas guys to look good when the forwards are playing with the physical dominance that they were and the halves are making the right decision 95% of the time.

Still convinced Tolkin has no fucking idea what he's doing with the XVs team until Barrett gets a run at 13 - we've had problems there for ages, have a solid back row unit already, and Barrett leans towards the smaller side when we're talking about competing against Tier 1 sides.

At 13 he has the acceleration, step, fend, bump, offload and overall physical dominance (he literally tries to hit the tackler so hard that the tackler can't handle it, and it's a beautiful thing) to hang with anyone.

Hughes at 9 for the XVs Eagles could solve a lot of issues there, too. Giving him a serious run sure as hell wouldn't hurt considering our current options.

The US performance this season, culminating in this victory shows the impact of world class coaching. Since Mike Friday took over they've got so much better.

At the moment their XV's team is coached by a local guy who has no professional experience. Give them a couple of years under a world class coach and they'd be a lot stronger. The benefits from the recent growth in high school rugby over there should start to be obvious soon too.

The most frustrating part of the coaching situation is that there are coaches that are working in upper-division college sides right now who have proven over the course of a few years that they are more capable of developing a team than Tolkin has in the same time frame.

There are a few guys that have taken programs from essentially nothing into being some of the most skilled and fluid sides in the country - some of them even do it with nearly no foreign recruits and are actually fielding a side of players who don't have an average age of 24-26. If that doesn't show the trifecta of on-field, administrative, and recruiting nous that you want out of a head coach.. I'm not sure what does.

Some of them have been pulled into the U-20s setup in the past few years though, so there's at least some recognition happening.

 

[mxyzptlk]

Baker and Isles are obviously the show-ponies but Bender, Duratalo, Barrett, Hughes, etc. were my collective MVPs. It's much easier for the gas guys to look good when the forwards are playing with the physical dominance that they were and the halves are making the right decision 95% of the time.

We saw Avengers this weekend, and the first time Hulk ran through a jeep, I turned to my wife and said "That's Danny Barrett breaking a tackle."

What was just as impressive to me was that they made their cup run without Test, without Bender in the final, and didn't even bring in the show-ponies until the second half against Australia. They're becoming a balanced team.

 

[USARugger]

Test is beyond quality but I'm not even totally sure where we slot him in after that performance. He'd make one hell of a super-sub off of the bench the way things are looking now.

The side didn't just look balanced, they struggled to find a facet of play that they didn't dominate - and I think a lot of that was built off of the marker the forwards laid down when they started bullying the opposition out of each match on the last day (and the stupid amount of retention we managed from restarts - Test's specialty for a long time).

Unufe really put his hand up too, doing a lot of the stuff we'd expect Test to do in open play. Friday will have some great selection headaches if everyone manages to keep this kind of form up going into the Olympics.

The sadistic approach to S&C the new 7's trainers apparently love is showing too, the boys never looked like slowing down in any of the matches.

 

[Omar Comin']

The most frustrating part of the coaching situation is that there are coaches that are working in upper-division college sides right now who have proven over the course of a few years that they are more capable of developing a team than Tolkin has in the same time frame.

There are a few guys that have taken programs from essentially nothing into being some of the most skilled and fluid sides in the country - some of them even do it with nearly no foreign recruits and are actually fielding a side of players who don't have an average age of 24-26. If that doesn't show the trifecta of on-field, administrative, and recruiting nous that you want out of a head coach.. I'm not sure what does.

I think the ideal for the Eagles would be to have a couple of those sort of guys underneath a Mike Friday equivalent. I think going straight from an amateur set up to head coach at test level is too big a step up. They need a foreign coach that's fully committed to living in the US and getting their head around the local system and pathways - and helping to develop local coaches.

 

[USARugger]

They'd have to be a special guy. That plan has backfired on us hard on the past, which is part of the reason we ended up with Tolkin.

I'm just not sure if USAR understood that when he said that he was going to pull from the local pathways that he meant he was going to repeatedly play sub-standard players whom he had coached in the past at the amateur level.

O'Sullivan and Scott Johnson completely fucked our grassroots pathways because they either didn't comprehend, or didn't bother to try to comprehend the American university system and how it translates into athletic development at the elite level.

I had the pleasure of playing through that period in a fairly competitive squad at the higher end of Collegiate Rugby.

Having your conference shifted three times in four years, selections camps for for the local/regional "All-Star" teams (the representative sides which are essentially auditions for the Falcons/Eagles for players who may not have been part of the U-20s setup) were a corrupt/inept clusterfuck (when multiple players from your squad completely outplay their opposite # during every one of your league matches that year and then the other guy is selected to represent the region, you can only wonder if the fact that their head coach also being the selector for the elite squad had something to do with this. The best tighthead prop in our entire conference one year was not selected because he was told his passing off of his weak side was not good enough. You cannot make this shit up.) - not to mention the guys I played with who were told they just "weren't good enough" but would then go on to get recruited by the academies of teams like Munster, Connacht, Wasps, etc...

It would be nice if the only issues we had with talent identification/development, player management, and recruiting had to to do with the head coach. There are still lots of pieces of the machine that need fixing and the geographic enormity of the USA doesn't make that very easy.

What's Ewen up to after he's done with his shindig in Chch?