Final Sevens Olympic Spot Repechage, Monaco 21-23 June

These are the three Mens pools:

Pool A: Chile, Mexico, South Africa, Tonga

Pool B: Canada, China, Great Britain, Uganda

Pool C: Brazil, Hong Kong, Papua New Guinea, Spain

GB's group is the only one with two teams from this season's top competition (Canada & GB), so it's nominally the hardest. South Africa are red hot favourites, and it's hard to see anyone in Pool A producing an upset.

All free to watch on Rugby Pass, which is the same service carrying the Japan v England game.

GB Squad

(As expected, no Adam Radwan, so that conversation appears to have gone nowhere. Some reports say it all fell apart over insurance. Will Muir was another name being bandied around)

Alex Davis
Kaleem Barreto
Ross McCann
Harry Glover
Morgan Williams
Robbie Ferguson
Ethan Waddleton
Will Homer
Max McFarland
Tom Emery
Jamie Barden
Charlton Kerr

GB opened with a 35-19 win over China. China got out to a 0-12 lead before GB kicked into gear. Unfortunately, it looks like we've lost Tom Emery to an ankle injury.

https://www.bbc.com/sport/rugby-union/articles/cv22y0kl8n7o

South Africa smacked Mexico 44-0, though Mexico had a red card, and played with six for much of the match. Among the other main contenders, Spain beat Brazil, and Canada beat Uganda.

Seems Papua New Guinea cried off, so there are only three teams in Pool C. That might favour Spain slightly, if it comes down to fitness.

GB beat Canada to top the group. Canada also go through to the play-offs in second place.

South Africa beat Uganda 26-0, and will face Canada, who narrowly beat Chile 24-19, with a golden point try.

GB beat Tonga 33-0 and will face Spain, who beat HK 26-5.

The final Women's Olympic spot will be decided by a match beteeen China and Kenya.

The Chinese team has a couple of English speakers

https://x.com/RugbyAsia247/status/1804869161979412837

GB beat Spain 17-12 to reach the final.

It was a tight match until GB scored right at the death to make it 17-5. After that, it was just making sure no-one got injured, or carded in the final half minute. Spain got a breakaway at full-time.

GB have had a harder route than South Africa. Whether than makes us match-hardened, or more tired will be decided in a couple of hours.

If you signed up to Rugby Pass for the Japan-England match, then you can watch all these matches for free on that service.

Very disappointing. Did the women at least qualify?

Flintoff05 wrote:Very disappointing. Did the women at least qualify?

GB women were already qualified, so didn't need this repechage stage. China got the final available women's spot.

Unfortunately for GB, the writing was on the wall as soon as Kenya shocked South Africa to take the African regional qualifying spot. That but the Blitzbokke into the repechage. They have been off colour this season but have usually beaten GB. And that's what happened this weekend.

This GB squad has been playing better Sevens recently but we left the charge too late. Longer term, if France and Ireland continue to perform better than GB in the regular season, then we may miss out on the Olympics again.

I think GB qualification was taken for granted in many quarters. It's darkly ironic that our failure came when combining as GB for the regular season was supposed to improve our Olympic chances

Unfortunately, when the RFU, WRU and SRU agreed to work together, all three unions appeared to lose interest in Sevens, and did nothing to ensure the partnership worked. Sevens news and squad selections rarely appeared on the websites of any of the unions. With no union taking directl responsibillity, the GB sevens progamme has been an underfunded afterthought. Antoine Dupont, Michael Hooper and Hugo Keenan all switched to the national sevens. When Adam Radwan floated the idea of doing the same for GB, we couldn't work out an insurance deal.

I was very hopeful GB might pull off a miracle, as our form had been improving after a terrible regular season. In truth, though, the writing has been on the wall since Tokyo. Other unions have started to take the code very seriously. Unless we match their organization, GB will be an also-run, at risk of being overtaken by sevens teams with greater ambition and cohesion.

Argentina, France and Ireland never used to be major contenders.this season, they have been three of the best performers.

Rugby Fan wrote:Unfortunately, when the RFU, WRU and SRU agreed to work together, all three unions appeared to lose interest in Sevens, and did nothing to ensure the partnership worked. Sevens news and squad selections rarely appeared on the websites of any of the unions.

As if to emphasize this point, the RFU, SRU and WRU websites all failed to report any news of the repechage event before this weekend, and have yet to report the results. All three sites did report the Olympic squad announcement for Team GB women.

If none of the national unions responsible for men's Team GB can be bothered to even mention it, then there should be no surprise that we can't attract anywhere near our best talent to the code. We are relying on a few enthusiastic sevens players, willing to give to the cause out of goodwill, backed up by some athletic university and championship level players.

Michael Hooper has conceded he won't make the Olympics. He missed the start of the season through injury, and picked up another at the end. Even fully fit, he might not have been selected for the squad.

It's not clear from his announcement if that's him done with professional rugby.

https://www.planetrugby.com/news/what-a-ride-wallaby-great-michael-hooper-brings-illustrious-career-to-an-end