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From triumph to tears: The cruel & unforgiving nature of rugby sevens
By Finn Morton
Rugby sevens can be so damn cruel.
By its nature, the sport is unforgiving in how it punishes players for missed tackles, wayward passes and generally minor errors which tends to accumulate into a calamity of pressure that’s tough to overcome.
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These mistakes and a lack of consistency were the Achilles heel for both the Australian women’s and men’s sevens sides building into the Games, and it was unfortunately what cost them when it counted with medals on the line.
Sport isn’t fair – it very rarely is.
Australian sports fans rolled out of bed in the early hours of the morning to cheer on their countrymen and women wearing green and gold. But as unfortunate and brutal as it is, these results at the Olympics have been on the cards for a while.
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No team is safe from the harsh nature of sevens.
The Australian women’s side were made to pay for some uncharacteristic mistakes and poor discipline. After going through the first two days of play unbeaten, they conceded three unanswered tries in a 21-12 semi-final loss to Canada.
They were leading 12-nil before Canada’s Charity Williams raced away for a score on the stroke of the half-time break.
Australia ran back out onto Stade de France later on for the bronze medal playoff, and they started well with Maddison Levi scoring the opener about a minute into the contest. Teagen Levi was shown a yellow card – discipline was a big issue for this team early in the SVNS season – but they didn’t concede.
But with seven players on the park, America made a game of it just before the half with Alev Kelter scoring just before the hang. That swung some momentum in the underdog’s favour.
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That’s two games in a row where the Aussies failed to hold on right until half-time.
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But in the second term, that’s when errors really started to cost them.
Isabella Nasser and Sariah Paki shaped up for a two-on-one about five metres out from the try line. Nasser triple-pumped with dummy passes before feeding the ball to her teammate, with Paki dropping the ball cold over the try line.
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The scores stayed at seven-all.
Australia did take back the lead with Maddison Levi linking up with sister Teagen to score with about two minutes left to play. But then, the USA’s Alex Sedrick levelled the scores by running through three Australian defenders to run coast-to-coast.
The conversion won it.
When looking back at that match, it felt eerily similar to what happened in Vancouver earlier this year. Australia were beaten by France in that semi-final at BC Place Stadium and couldn’t quite get up for the third-place playoff in a loss to hosts Canada.
It can’t have been easy at the Games, and it clearly wasn’t.
Former Wallabies captain Michael Hooper would later say on Stan Sport that Sedrick had “no right to score that try” from inside her own 22 with at least a few Australian defenders hanging off her. But that was probably the result of America’s continued pressure and resilience.
Bienne Terita, Sidney Taylor, Isabella Nasser and the Levi sisters were among the Aussies seen crying after full-time, just as they had after the semi-final defeat. New Zealand, Canada and the USA were instead the ones taking their place proudly on the Olympic podium.
It was a similar story for the men’s team.
Australia was a dark horse to challenge for a medal and came painfully close to taking their place on the Olympic podium, but South Africa won a thriller. Three days later, the women’s side fell out of a podium finish in two heartbreaking losses on Tuesday at Stade de France.
The Aussies started their 2023/24 SVNS Series season with a quarter-final exit in Dubai. Josh Turner described that tournament as “frustrating” for the men in gold after the loss to South Africa, who would go on to win that event at The Sevens Stadium.
But credit to the men in gold, they bounced back.
They made the Cup Final against Argentina the following weekend in Cape Town and played the same foe in the decider in Perth over the Australia Day long weekend in January. Australia showed without a doubt that they’re a team to be feared on the Series.
But the next month in Vancouver, they failed to make it out of the pool. Australia finished in the bottom four after losing to Samoa, the USA and Antoine Dupont’s France. It was a dip in form that happens to all teams at times, but it came out of nowhere for the Aussies.
Australia finished the regular season with a quarter-final finish in Los Angeles and then semi-final appearances in Hong Kong China and Singapore. But then, in the Grand Final in Madrid, they finished third in their pool ahead of only Great Britain.
Coach John Manenti called upon Wallaby-level reinforcements in Mark Nawaqanitawase and Corey Toole. Nawaqanitawase was a star at last year’s Rugby World Cup and Toole has long been touted as a Test player-in-waiting.
At the Games, the team turned heads with wins over Samoa, Kenya, and SVNS Series League Winners Argentina. They backed that up in the quarters against the USA before suffering a one-sided 31-7 defeat to Fiji in the semis.
Australia were also beaten in the bronze medal playoff after captain Selvyn Davids set up a last-gasp try to snatch the win for South Africa. Team South Africa had lost twice in pool play and had only progressed as one of the top two third-placed sides.
But the big talking point was a red card to Nick Malouf. The Aussies did well to almost win that match with six men, but some errors seemed to creep into their game on the final day as the pressure of the occasion continued to build.
For both the Australian men’s and women’s sevens sides, they were punished at the Games for some mistakes. The pressure of playing at a sold-out Stade de France must be intimidating, and the Aussies couldn’t quite hold on as they chased Olympic medals.
Sevens is an unforgiving sport and Australians woke up to that reality on Sunday and Wednesday.
But Australian sports fans, you should still be proud of what your team’s achieved on the world stage at the Paris Olympic Games. This is a tough sport. While they didn’t win gold or even make the podium, they still gave it their all representing all of you back home.
Sport can just be so cruel sometimes.
Teagan Levi (who is one of my favourite players) had a terrible day. Her loose offload at the end of the first half of the semifinal 5m from the Canadian try line cost the Aussies all momentum. They never regained it and lost despite being up 12-0 at that point. Then the yellow card, and being dumped as the primary tackler by Sedrick to concede a length of the field try. The other women didn’t have their best days either. Like the men, they didn’t deserve to make the final. Unlike the men, they didn’t deserve the bronze medal.
Part of the trouble is the way that rugby (both codes) is refereed. There is such a focus on the spectacle that referees have chosen to impose much harsher requirements on defending players at the ruck than attacking players. You constantly see attacking team ruck defenders with their head and shoulders buried in the body of the attacking player, gripping onto their jersey with their fingers, even though this would be considered “not supporting body weight” and “going off feet” if an attacking player tried it. Nor is the tackled player required to roll, even though penalties for tacklers not rolling are the most common type of penalty in both codes.
The successfully-achieved goal is to make it much harder to disrupt an attack by turning the ball over, but this just means that games consist of increasingly long periods of attack which are impossible to stop. The game becomes rugby league without the 6 tackle rule and it’s doubly bad since sevens only goes for 14 minutes and they still let heaps of time get sucked up by 3-man scrums. One team might only get one or two minutes with the ball in total, and they’re exhausted from spending the rest of the game tackling.
The relevant part to what happened overnight is that Teagan’s loose offload cost her team not just momentum, but also possession, which they were barely able to regain for the rest of the game. Once that happened, it was just a matter of how many points Canada could build unopposed, unless they made a similar error. The game becomes the team with possession’s to lose, and all they have to do to avoid it is avoid throwing loose passes.