Australia, New Zealand emerge as series, tournament champs at LA 7s
As the Saturday morning fog drifted off to reveal a sunny day over Dignity Health Sports Park, the final stop on the 2021-22 World Rugby Sevens Series was underway.
Only South Africa, Australia, Fiji and Argentina entered the weekend with a shot at a series title, determined by cumulative finishes over a nine-event circuit. However, the Los Angeles tournament trophy, the only United-States-based stop on the series, was up for grabs for the first time since March 2020.
“You’re playing in front of your friends and family, those are the people who have supported you for so long,” said two-time player of the year Perry Baker. “Whenever they get the chance to see you play it feels good.”
Baker and LA got the day off to a roaring start, with tries from David Still, Joe Schroeder and Baker himself setting up a 21-0 lead over tournament-favorite South Africa. The Eagles held on to win 21-7, setting up the Blitzboks for what turned out to be a very disappointing weekend.
After winning the first four tournaments in the series, along with a record 36 straight games, the Blitzboks had a chance to waltz to a consecutive series title. However, late season struggles culminated in a 13th place finish in LA out of 16 participating teams.
This opened the door for a very exciting set of knockout rounds, which were played Sunday. With two out of the tournament’s 45 matches left to play, the series champion had yet to be crowned and three teams, South Africa, Australia and Fiji, still had a shot at glory.
By the end of the third-place game, however, the race for the series was over. By defeating Samoa to finish on the podium, Australia clinched the first-ever season title for the nation’s men’s team. Australia became the fifth country in 23 seasons to win the circuit, joining South Africa, New Zealand, Fiji and Samoa.
Two of those teams, New Zealand and Fiji, battled it out Sunday for the Los Angeles Sevens title. Both squads were unable to participate in the first few tournaments of the series due to the COVID-19 pandemic, but the two titans of the sport showed no remaining rust in LA.
Fiji, led by 2019 player of the year and two-time Olympic gold medalist Jerry Tuwai and buoyed by tremendous crowd support at the tournament, reached the finals with dominant victories over the United States and Australia.
“We feel like we’re at home when we see all the blue flags and support here,” Tuwai said in an interview. “It gives us some confidence.”
Every Fiji try was met with a deafening roar from the crowd, and the stands were filled with the light blue Fijian flags waving in the hands of fans.
However, the bulk of the crowd did not get its way. After a very intense back-and-forth match the All-Blacks took home the tournament crown for New Zealand. The series standings dropped every team’s two lowest tournament finishes to account for the chaos caused by COVID-19, but New Zealand never truly contended because it missed four events, too many to be negated by the dropped scores.
However, the team ended the season strong and will likely be a top contender at next month’s Rugby Sevens World Cup.
From a United States perspective, this was a rough tournament after the opening win. Key players Maka Unufe, Steve Tomasin, Joe Schroeder and Lucas Lacamp suffered injuries, and the Eagles coaching staff will have to hope that they are ready to play in two weeks for the World Cup. The United States finished sixth in the series standings and eighth in LA, both respectable numbers for a team with so many young starters. However, losing three of the last four matches of the weekend was not ideal.
“Sometimes we got in our heads a little bit, became very intense, and we need to just find our cool,” said Eagles player Gavin D’Amore-Morrison. “I think keeping a cool head is where we’re going to need to improve, taking a deep breath going into the World Cup.”
The United States will look to improve on its sixth-place finish in the 2018 Rugby World Cup Sevens in the upcoming tournament, which begins Sept. 9. Many of the stars that participated in the preview World Cup are not healthy or no longer with the team, including Carlin Isles, Danny Barrett, Madison Hughes and Martin Iosefo. It remains to be seen if the young core is healthy or experienced enough to improve on that ranking.
“Rugby is always a learning lesson,” Baker said. “We’re going to go back and study a lot of film and take some of the good things that we did well in the South Africa game and capitalize off of that.”
Maxfield Mullins covers rugby. Contact him at mmullins@dailycal.org.