John Fitzpatrick and Stu Low both in action last weekend in Amsterdam

The Backstabber had another great year at the Amsterdam sevens managing to make the Semi Finals for the 5th year running. On the Saturday the Backstabbers were put in a pool of 4 teams that included a Dutch, a Danish and an Italian side. This proved to be a useful exercise as it allowed the team who had not played together get to know each other and in true Backstabbers style the team bonded very quickly and dispatch these team easily scoring on average 50 point to nil.

The Sunday tournament tends to be a much harder day and this year was no different. First up we had the Dutch national champions who we managed to beat 38-0. Then next was a team called Karma Sutra who the previous week had reached the Semi Finals of the Kinsale Sevens no mean feat. The stabbers however had a flawless game and manage to retain the ball for 95% of the match and notch up a 47-7 victory.

Next up was a team called Susie's Exiles who play in all the invitational sevens and tend to be quite useful. This proved to be our first real test. It was a tight game but eventually we won 5 tries to 1 with some magical inter play between the Hawks contingent in the team leading to one of the tries of the tournament.

Next up was the formidable Samurai Rugby Sevens one of the Hawks sponsors. This team had beaten the Stabbers in the two previous year in the semi final and gone on to win.

The official report off the website read

Samurai International narrowly scraped (cheated) through their semi-final against perennial semi-finalists Backstabbers who have lost in the semi-final every year since 2002. Backstabbers looked as if they would break their semi-final hoodoo when they took a 14-12 lead with a couple of minutes to go. The turning point came when the(biased) referee showed a yellow card to a Backstabbers player, sending him to the sin bin for 2 minutes. This led to a strong reaction from the large crowd as the reason for the yellow card was not obvious and with the crowds sympathy now clearly with the Backstabbers there was further reaction when the Samurai took advantage of the extra man to run in a last minute try to win their way through to the final.


All in all another great tour for the Stabbers who lost to the eventual winner that included players of the calibre of Marcel Garvey (Sat Down by Stu Low).

This article was originally posted on 22-May-2007, 21:52 by Hugh Barrow.
Last updated by Hugh Barrow on 23-May-2007, 11:35.