Scotland 7’S. Captains Blog: Part 1

Scott’s Sevens Blog – Twickenham 7sScotland 7s catain Scott Riddell is also the Midlothian Rugby Development Officer – he is currently away with the squad for the final legs of the IRB 7s World Series. He will be keeping us posted with small updates over the duration – here is part 1:We travelled to London on Tuesday 17th May after a preparation tournament at Glasgow city sevens. The tournament was a great experience as it gave us a chance to practice our tactics against some very good opposition. We played Whitecraigs, GHA, The Neath/Swansea Ospreys and London Wasps in the final. We definitely saved our best performance until last as we beat Wasps 42-0.I took advantage of the afternoon off on Sunday to try out my new golf clubs; the less said about that the better and I need to practice more!The squad met up on Monday 16th May to train at Murrayfield and also had video analysis sessions on our opposition in London of Australia, Samoa and Canada. All teams will do a lot of analysis on each other and it’s important that we know what to expect from our opposition.We got to the airport nice and early as it takes us a while to check in all of our luggage, considering all players have a big bag and there are around 17 team bags full of physio equipment, kit, nutritional supplements, balls, laptops, speakers, the list goes on. My bag weighed about 16kg but Ross Samson’s weighed 22kg! He must have had his whole wardrobe in there!We trained that afternoon and the following day we had a ‘hit-out’ against France, this again gives a chance to practice in a more of a competitive environment than just training against each other and lets the coaches look at different combinations.The next night, we went out for a Nando’s; its good to get out of the hotel and switch off from the rugby for an evening, you can imagine the poor Nando’s staff aren’t too happy when 12 rugby players and 5 management turn up and they don’t have any tables big enough! We also went to see ‘Thor’ at the cinema. I quite enjoyed it but some of the management thought it to be a bit silly.On the Friday, we had our final team run, to focus on our tactics and execute our skills at high tempo and accuracy.First up on Day 1 was Samoa, we started off a little slowly and went 3 tries down but came back well in the 2nd half, just losing 19-15. Next was Australia, we started really well but in the 2nd half, they came back strongly to win 24-21, after another disappointing loss against Canada, we were into the bowl competition.On Day 2, we beat Portugal, Spain and in the last play of the game we beat Kenya to lift the bowl, it was great for the team to raise ourselves up from the disappointment of day 1 to lift some silverware!Edinburgh next weekend and the boys are really looking forward to things! I’ll keep you posted of how things are progressing!Scott