Aussie sevens men: Rebuilding in the shadows

It’s not often we can say a women’s sports team outshines its male counterparts both on and off the field, but for the Australian rugby sevens unit this has very much been the case in 2016.

The women have scaled the heights of success – achieving every goal they set themselves over the past year.

For the men at Narrabeen however, it’s been a bumpier ride to say the least, with coaching changes, pressure from the ARU and external elements on player selection ahead of the Olympics, and the continual disruption of serious injuries to key players.

So given the bright lights and attention, and well deserved accolades falling the way of the women, maybe a turn in the shadows is exactly what the Aussie men require to wipe the board clean and plan anew for the next four year phase. This will involve a home Commonwealth Games, a World Cup and culminate in another tilt at Olympic success – all around the annual ten round, six month HSBC World Series over each of the next three years.

National sevens coach Andy Friend, having only been in the job for ten months, has been thrown some testing challenges in his introduction to full-time Rugby sevens. He admits the unit is now wiping the slate clean and looking at the necessity of rebuilding, having recently endured the departure of a number of core senior players post Rio. This is something many of the World Sevens teams have also gone through.

Friend was at the Central Coast Sevens tournament last weekend letting the new-look senior team off the leash to have their first full competitive run on the park since the Olympics. He also casted keen eye over other prospects in the Australian development team which also took part in the competition in Wyong.

“It’s definitely going to be a rebuild year for us (and) I’m now charged with that ‘rebuild’. We’ve lost ten players – so lost a lot of experience. That doesn’t mean that we’re not going to be attempting to do our best and win if we can, but the reality is that a top eight finish would be really good for us this coming year and then into next year (2017-18) which is the Commonwealth Games that will also be a big target for us,” said Friend.

“We’ve still got three to four contracts to fill; that’s one of the reasons we’re here (at Central Coast Sevens), to look at the development guys and see who else is out there.”

With the last four-year plan finishing in Rio, the next four year Olympic phase, as it will now be seen in World Rugby schedule terms moving forward, is an even busier one for most countries playing the sport at the top level.

There is the annual HSBC World Rugby Sevens series which kicks off in December each year and concludes ten rounds later in the following May. This schedule in 2018 will no doubt be adjusted as there is the Commonwealth Games to be hosted in Australia in April, followed by the Rugby Sevens World Cup in July in the USA. Then there’s the World Series following that will be an Olympic qualifying season – so it is an action packed calendar leading to Tokyo 2020.

Looking at that schedule, Friend admits it will be full on.

“It’s a bit of a tricky one. We’ve got Comm Games in our own backyard, so that’s an important one for us to do really well in; straight after that there’s a World Cup – that’s a really important one too; and then the following year there are Olympic Games qualifiers and then onto the Olympics – so it’s a slow and steady build to Tokyo, with a real focus on the Gold Coast Commonwealth Games,” he said.

As for who he has to compile his new-look team, there are 23 contracts on offer. Friend admits he has 19 in place but is looking to fill the remaining three to four, with the possibility of adding some supplementary contracts like those currently in place for players such as Lachie Anderson and Tim Anstee. They join the unit when they can around university commitments and availability.

For the core players who have remained, such as long-time skipper Ed Jenkins, the rebuild is something like a walk down memory lane to when he helped mould and mentor the last batch of newcomers some five to six years ago. But as Friend points out, that’s the game for both players and coaches.

“Every team goes through a cycle. We had a cycle build up to Rio but it didn’t go the way we planned; people then move on. So what’s exciting is we’ve got this new crop (and) there are some really good footballers coming through. Hopefully we can springboard off the momentum the Olympics gave us, some of the things we did last year and the girls winning the Gold medal and then Sevens can continue to grow and we can see this next crop of youth coming through.”

The Aussie coaching group will be looking to fill some big shoes from among these newcomers with the likes of Cam Clark, Tom Cusack, Con Foley, Allan Fa’alava’au, Pama Fou and Sam Figg all among those who have moved on from Narrabeen.

“These are young men who have committed so much of their time to the Sevens game that some just want to try their hand at XVs – probably as a kid growing up they wanted to be a Wallaby – and that’s why I think in the Sevens movement, we can capture the kids’ imagination from a young age to say they want to be a Sevens player.

“The current generation of players didn’t have that because the Wallabies was always the pinnacle; so what we’re looking for now is to try and make, for some people, Sevens as the pinnacle, and if they want they can aim at playing for the Aussie7s” explains Friend.

While Andy Friend has set what he sees as a realistic goal for the Australians of a top eight position in the World Rugby standings by next May – despite finishing fourth in the 2015/2016 series – the international team landscape has also changed and may therefore make for some interesting and exciting results as each round progresses.

We could finally see a shake-up in the ‘world order’ as we know it from the dominance of the usual suspects – Fiji, New Zealand and South Africa – and witness some ladder climbing from the likes of USA, England, France and Argentina with Kenya and Samoa always unknown quantities, no matter what their coaching bench looks like.

There are no fewer than five coaching changes across the board – and that is just in the Men’s competition – with the playing ranks also undergoing post-Olympic changes similar to the Australian squad.

“Yeah, there are big changes. Probably the one team that doesn’t seem to have changed at all is South Africa. They are a quality side so they’re going to be very good. It’s going to be a brand new series and there are going to be a whole heap of anomalies in there. But the top four sides are always going to be reasonably strong,” said Friend.

So international changes mean a new look and an exciting unpredictability to the upcoming World Series may be in the offing.

While some teams have surprisingly already nominated squads for Dubai in December, Friend has a couple more hoops he wants the men to jump through before he considers the line-up for Round 1.

“We’ve got to get through Oceania (Championships) first. I’ve got about eight players injured at the moment so we need to try and get those guys back – there’s a lot of experience there. Jesse (Parahi) is out at the moment with Nick Malouf, Henry Hutchison and John Porch – so there’s some real quality footballers currently sitting out – and then we lost Lewi last week with this Achilles injury,” said Friend referring to the devastating setback for key playmaker Lewis Holland who ruptured an Achilles tendon which will see him sidelined for the best part of 12 months.

Declaring Saturday morning’s faltering start to the Central Coast campaign as a classic example of the team’s inclination to start slow then gain momentum with successive victories, Friend maintains his attention is very much focused internally at this stage.

“At the moment it’s all about us. What we need to do to get better,” he said.
In the end, the Aussies went all the way to the Cup Final and, in a hard fought and physical battle against a very good Uluinakau side from Fiji, they won the title and chalked up some impressive performances from old and new alike on the field.

While the Oceania Championships in November will be another chance to put some training into practice out on the field, the big challenge will come in the first weekend of December when the Aussie7s Men line up against Kenya, France and Japan on Day One in Dubai.

Andy Friend may be being realistic or conservative when he says the goal is a top eight finish this year as the first step in a major rebuild, but the calibre of performances for this next big travelling World Rugby show has shifted slightly into the realm of the unpredictable – so maybe there will be a few surprises in store.