The Herald reports


Thistle do nicely says Forrest after Sevens glory
STUART MURRAY

We had a point to prove and we proved it," said Scott Forrest, the Scottish Thistles captain, after his side had made sure that at least one moment of history in the annals of rugby in Scotland had a winner from the host country inscribed on the trophy. The 125th anniversary of the Melrose Sevens had drawn teams from all over the world, but none of them were good enough to overcome the full-time specialists from the elite international squad.

Which does rather beg the question of where the Sevens sees itself going. It was inaugurated back in the 19th century as a club tournament at a time when that was about all there was. It has spread its wings to include a foreign element in recent years and of late has found itself playing host to at least one, if not more professional clubs.

Now it has stepped over another mark by blurring the boundary between its club status and the IRB World Series with the arrival not just of the full Scottish squad, but also of a group of Irish players described as an Ulster President's Seven - in truth a group put together to qualify the Irish for the next Sevens World Cup.

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As for this weekend, until the Scots found top gear, it was the professionals from the Leicester Tigers who looked the most likely winners. However, in a competition that probably mattered most to the local players, it was Melrose that came out on top by reaching the semi-final, defeating Glasgow Hawks, Selkirk, and the Shimlas from South Africa on the way to their meeting with the Tigers.

To be fair, they gave the English representatives a run for their money in a combative match that saw a couple of punch-ups, but as soon as the full-timers decided to raise the pace, the amateur clubmen had no hope of living with it, before the Thistles professionals showed how it should be done, simply refusing to give Leicester the ball and running out 33-12 winners to claim the Ladies Cup.

The event itself was a one-off. Presumably it will be another 25 years before the Melrose tournament is again run on such an ambitious scale, as Ian Cooper, the tournament convener, observed afterwards: "We'll be sitting down to review the event, but it is a question of resources, the number of man hours it takes to put on an event like this is huge."

With the tented village over the road from the Greenyards and the whole of central Melrose closed to traffic, we achieved the first goal, which was to create a true party spirit around the place, with games on the main pitch almost a side show for many of the 12,000 or so who crammed into the ground.

The tricky bit was trying to make the rugby itself feel different and here too the organisers pushed the boat out, bringing in teams from China - great with the ball, dreadful without it - Australia, Ireland, South Africa, Italy (ostensibly, there was a suspicious lack of Italian names in the squad), and England.

What most of them had in common was that they played in the spirit of the occasion and, though there were a smattering of sevens specialists, they also had their academy players and amateurs alongside them.

Having said that, you would have struggled early on to spot the Thistles as the international squad, taking up where they left off in Hong Kong and Adelaide, their last two stops on the world circuit, where they got bombed out early on, even contriving to lose to China on the way.

They struggled to beat a Currie side coached by Ally Warnock, the Thistles fly-half, but started to find their feet against Roma, got better against Ulster and by the final, were flying. "We still have a point to prove when we play the next international tournaments in London and Murrayfield, our home event," said Forrest. "We wanted to take some momentum into that. We had not been doing terribly, just a few things were going wrong. In sevens, when a you make little mistakes, you can lose the match.

"We knew we could to it. As the level went up, so did our intensity. Every time the challenge went up, we rose to meet it. It is brilliant, exactly what we want. We will be the only 125th anniversary winners, it is a great honour."

This article was posted on 14-Apr-2008, 07:51 by Hugh Barrow.