2012 Olympics, a Natural Sevens Progression

2012 Olympics
A natural progression

by Andy Ripley, IRB Newsletter Issue #9.

“Want of money made us rack our brains as to what was to be done to keep the Club from going to the wall, and the idea struck me that a football tournament might prove attractive, but as it was hopeless to think of having several games in one afternoon with fifteen players on each side, the teams were reduced to seven men.”

This is a quote from an article, ‘An Old Melrose Player’s Recollections’, written most probably in 1907/1908, by Ned Haig (1858-1939), an apprentice butcher in Melrose - a small town in the Borders area of Scotland – who, in 1883, when looking for a way to improve the club’s finances, hit on the idea of fitting a knockout miniature rugby tournament into an afternoon of athletic sport.
So our friend and his butcher, one David Sanderson, at the time captain of the local club, ‘invented’ the seven-a-side game, or the short game as it is called.
Haig’s idea caught on, and soon the example of Melrose was followed by other towns in the area - Hawick, Selkirk, Jed Forest, Kelso, Gala etc – and the autumn and spring sequence of Sevens became hugely popular in the Borders.

Sevens is like no other game, it is typically played as a knockout tournament and on the same size of pitch as the fifteen-a-side game, each half lasting seven minutes.
The idea of the game is similar to the fifteen-a-side game, but the tactics are very different, as the emphasis is on the running game.
I can well remember participating in a number of those Border Sevens tournaments in the 1960s and early 70s, when a couple of guest sides usually from London (since the Middlesex Sevens competition, always held on the first Saturday in May, had bred teams that could almost compete with the Border clubs) or Loughborough College or St Luke’s College (Exeter), where the game was also strong, were invited.
There was a huge Borders traditional gathering for the Sevens tournaments in Hawick, Selkirk, Melrose, Galashiels, Jedburgh, Peebles or Kelso, where large crowds quite often double the size of the population of those towns.

In the 1920s the ‘Sevens bug’ spread across the border into England, with the Middlesex 7s launched in 1926, and overseas. In 1973, as part of the Scottish Rugby Union centenary celebrations the first World Tournament was held at Murrayfield.
The Scottish Union, founded in 1873, was intensely conservative and determinedly protective of amateurism. It is therefore somewhat surprising that the first international match (1871) was played in Scotland, the first televised match (1938.) was between Scotland and England and the first 7s international competition was played in Murrayfield in 1973.
I played in the England side that won the tournament, which surprised us particularly as we had performed poorly in the Five Nations that year.
It surprised us even more when a couple of months later the nucleus of that Sevens team became the only Home Union to beat the All Blacks in New Zealand in the 20th century.
Legend has it that a canny overseas-based Scot was in the crowd at Murrayfield on that day of April 7, 1973 and that the idea of an international 7s competition was born then and there.
Whatever the truth, three years later in 1976, in far-off Hong Kong, the HKRFU launched the Hong Kong 7s, unremarked and unremarkable at the time and outside the hand of the International Board.
Thus the creation of Ned Haig from Melrose was permanently hoisted onto the international stage.

The weekend festival featuring teams from all parts of the world, with their exciting brand of play in front of packed houses, quickly stole the global heart of players and spectators alike.
I played in the 1981 Barbarians team which won the competition that year but it was the Pacific brand of rugby and the Australian and New Zealand teams that raised the whole game onto a new level, although the exploits of newcomers of the likes of Oman, Kenya or Japan would always be rewarded with a mighty cheer from the bursting and jolly stands.

If Ned’s objective had been to raise a few bob, then his game was succeeding beyond his wildest dreams, particularly in light of the report following the first Sevens tournament at the Greenyards in Melrose in 1883, “The events began at 12.30 and concluded at 7.30. The day was not very favourable being cold during the forepart and wet long before the close.”

In 1993 a World Cup of Sevens was held, appropriately in Scotland (110 years since Ned Haig’s extraordinary exploit), then again in 1997, this time in Hong Kong, and in Mar del Plata (Argentina) in 2001.
Sevens has been a regular feature in the South Pacific Games and in 1998, it was also included in the Commonwealth Games for the first time, New Zealand taking Gold then and again in 2002 in Manchester.

Since then, Sevens rugby has taken another huge leap forward, with the creation of a World Sevens Series – a truly international Grand Prix of tournaments involving dozens of nations.
Should the International Olympic Committee see the light, the natural progression in the international expansion of 7s is the 2012 Olympics.

The paradox of course was that Ned’s objective in 1883 was to raise a few pounds for the club, whereas according to the Rev H. Almond, the headmaster of Loretto and the referee (then called an umpire) at the after-match dinner at the first ever international between Scotland and England in 1871, “the objective of rugby football was to produce a race of robust young men with active habits and manly sympathies.”
Maybe if we are smart those words that cascade down the years can be adapted to fit the game in the 21st century and we can see Ned’s gift to us all play its part in the greatest of sporting arenas - the Olympics.