Not So Magnificent Sevens

IF YOU WANT to take the temperature of Scottish Rugby, then the pages of The Offside Line is the best place to start. THE controversial incident of a packed rugby weekend was Hollie Davidson's decision, in concert with Mike Adamson, to award a yellow rather than a red card to Bath's Sam Underhill in Friday night's Challenge Cup Final.

On first viewing, I thought “Red Card”, but, Hollie and Mike went through the protacol and found sufficient mitigation to downgrade it to yellow. You may not agree with this, but, in Rugby Union, the referee is the sole judge of fact – Hollie and Mike went through the correct procedure, so, having made their decision, it is up to the rest of us to abide by it. Dumb English talking heads please note.

In the BTL comments on TOL, however, while the mainly Scottish audience was naturally sympathetic to the situation Hollie found herself in, there was a sense that Hollie and the other elite match officials are under pressure, from the High Heid Yins of the game, to try to keep games at 15v15 as much as possible – so perhaps sending-off offences, such as the Court of Public Opinion appears to have judged Underhill's “tackle” are not being punished as much as they should be.

In this case, the COPO is clearly wrong. The onus is on the players to tackle safely and properly, so, if they will not do so – they deserve to be taken out of the game.

Underhill has already been red carded for a similar offence – by Hollie – earlier in the season, after which he presumably went through “Tackle School”, only to come out and get caught again. Methinks young Underhill is the sort of player who suffers what we here in God's County refer to as “regular rushes of shite to the brain”. I have no doubt, he will commit a similar offence in the future, and, again, it will all be the referee's fault.

Rugby Union is valiantly trying to stem the tide of impending law suits, from now-retired players with early onset dimentia and other brain injuries. Against this, they have lowered the tackle height – in the amateur club game – but, significantly not yet in the professional game. I wonder at the thinking of administrators who have not yet brought in this lower tackle height at elite level, where the players are generally, bigger, stronger, faster and hit harder.

• Lower the tackle height

• Make any head-on-head contact a red card – no exceptions

and in jig time, the number of head-on-head collisions would drop; you can never fully eliminate such collisions, but their number could be greatly reduced.

But, I hear the protests, you would have uneven games: 15 v 14 or fewer; again, it's an easy fix. Do what they do in other games such as ice hockey, where, if a player is thrown out of a game, the opposition gets a period of having a numbers advantage, then the excluded player is replaced. Rugby Union has already done this with the 20-minute red card, it's not as if my suggestion would be an innovation.

And what is stopping those gallant few still-employed Rugby Union journalists from asking the referee managers: “Are you pressurising your referees to keep 15 players on the field as much as possible?”

WITH COINCIDENTAL but apt timing, just as Melrose Sevens came around, the Team GB Sevens programme shed its near Harry Potter cloack of Invisibility to get a bit of attention, with the news that another re-boot is on the cards.

Now, the financing of the UK's Olympic Sports is way above my pay grade, but with a record, for the men, of:

• 2016 – silver medal

• 2020 – semi-finals, fourth place

• 2024 – semi-finals, fourth place

then to me that says: “podium potential” and the programme ought to be funded from the main Olympic Games pot. Aparrently, this is not the case, in which case, somebody within Team GB and several people in the three Unions concerned have taken their eye off the ball.

I am loath to criticise the lady, but, The Princess Royal – Patron of the SRU after all, is the High Heid Yin - President of the British Olympic Association and a member of the full International Olympic Committee – that's the sort of clout Sevens should be using.

The women's programme has not produced as good results, but finishes in fourth, fourth and seventh places in it three Olympiads is still, I feel justification for financial support from Team GB.

The World Rugby Sevens Circuit is under review, we understand. I get the impression the professional sports administrators who now have so-much power in the upper reaches of the game are so-obsessed by promoting the 15-a-side club game to something like “Premiership Football Lite” they have totally failed to realise the potential of Sevens.

As with so much in British life, far-less just British sport – all the decisions are made in London, and while Sevens has always been a big deal up here it is less-appreciated by The Rugby Football Union, who, naturally, is the lead union in GB Sevens. There is another slight Rugby Union connection to the BOA in that Board Member Vicky Gosling, a retired RAF Group Captain, who represents GB Snowsports and British Surfing, and has a background in tennis, is also a Founding Custodian of Rugby Centurions – so she will have Donna Kennedy, Chris Paterson, Ross Ford, Sean Lamont and Stuart Hogg on speed dial.

So Sevens is being run from England, by a Union with little time or interest in this form of Rugby Union – no wonder it is being kicked into touch.

I look at Cricket, which still survives in its purest form in Five-Day Test Cricket. However, Three-Day County Cricket, for well over a century the most-popular form of the game, is on life support, while One-Day Cricket, be it T-20, 40-overs, 50-overs of the new toddler form – The 100 appears to be flourishing.

Might encouragement of and investment In Rugby Sevens do for our game, what it did for Cricket, in getting people interested again, while allowing the traditional form to evolve into something the newer fans might in time get to appreciate.

That's enough about Olympic Games Sevens – next time, I will look at Sevens in Scotland.