Hong Kong Sevens

March 31, 2006

From time-to-time I get emails or people stopping me in the street and asking, hey Dave, why do you ignore the Sevens tournaments? It's a reasonable question.

Sacreligious short answer: I'm not a huge fan.

I find the 7's entertaining, and realize the tournaments sometimes provide substantial boosts to the careers of up-and-comers (Jonah Lomu and Christian Cullen being two superstars who got their legs with the 7's program) and catapaults them to 15's.

I competed in 7's tournaments many years ago, and they were enjoyable romps. But I've always found the contests too much like touch-rugby, and watching international 7's contests simply don't have the intensity of test match rugby. I'm probably in the minority here, but when I watch rugby I want to see the game contested with real scrums (which is one of the reasons I have difficulty taking the code of League seriously).

Having said all that, there is a box at the upper-right side of this webpage filled with excellent links and resources. I encourage you to check those out -- most are the resources I go to every week, some daily. I suspect half of those links are talking about the Hong Kong Sevens this weekend---I just checked and yup, Rugby Planet is all over it.

Right now I'm trying to catch up with European and Super 14 club competitions this weekend.

Hey, the Blues might have just kept David Nucifora's neck off the guillotine for another week...