Gordon Tietjens: Six years to Rio is not a long time
Nov.01.2010
Source: (IRB.COM) Wednesday 27 October 2010
By Gordon Tietjens
From Auckland, NZ
In his latest column for IRBSevens.com, the New Zealand Sevens coach of 17 years Gordon Tietjens reveals his dark horse for this year's HSBC Sevens World Series and looks back on another Commonwealth Games gold medal-winning performance.
I always look forward to a new World Series and this year it’s no different. Obviously I have had a lot of enjoyment over the years being involved - it’s eight good tournaments, all of them really enjoyable, and I am really looking forward to it.
The pools were announced this week for the first event in Dubai, which has to be one of my favourite places to visit, and I often get asked what I make of our pool. The truth is that you just don’t know, you are going into the unknown.
I don’t know what Argentina are going to be like, I don’t know what the USA are going to be like and I certainly don’t know how Zimbabwe are going to shape up. It’s the very first tournament where everyone is feeling out what everyone has got until you get out on the track. And I will have a new team as well so it is going to be different for all the teams, particularly on day one. After that we’ll sit down and have a look at the DVDs but, we won’t really know much until day two.
I’m excited too that my boys will be defending our title in Dubai. It was a great performance first up last year, one that made me really proud, and winning the Commonwealth Games has upped the ante for us.
People might see us as the team to beat and clearly we'll be going all out to win in Dubai and win the World Series, but I think the sleeping giant is Fiji this year. They weren’t at the Commonwealth Games, which was a real shame for them, but they’ll go quietly about their business, they play Sevens week in and week out in Fiji and I think that they will bring a very good side.
Defending Series champions Samoa will be strong too, England will be good and Ben Ryan has already said to me that he’ll have the same side that he took to Delhi, and then of course Australia you mustn’t forget. They got better and better with every tournament last season, ended up winning one in London and made the final in Edinburgh. They also pushed us very close in Delhi, so they’re also a threat, a very good team.
So what’s the secret?
I get asked a lot what the secret is to winning Commonwealth Games and to be honest it’s just a lot of hard work, and knowing how special the prize is if you do win. The most memorable moments in my rugby coaching career have been seeing a player being presented with a gold medal to the raising of the flag and listening to your anthem – there is nothing better than that.
It is quite sentimental but you are not just representing rugby, you are representing New Zealand at all sports. There is a little bit of added pressure, particularly after you have won the first three gold medals at the Games - Kuala Lumpur in 98, Manchester 2002 and Melbourne 2006 - and the expectation within the NZ sports team was right up there, and I had a pretty good side.
I still thought we may have to battle to win it because obviously the game of Sevens has closed dramatically over the last few years and everyone was going there with ambitions to win the gold medal, but we managed to do it, which was really pleasing.
I turned up with four former All Blacks, using Sevens perhaps to get back into the main side, which two of them did – Liam Messam and Hosea Gear got themselves back in the All Blacks through good performances at the Games. But the other two players, Ben Smith and Zac Guildford had never really played much Sevens outside of club level and one had played at provincial Sevens, so that was that. But they are good rugby players.
“I had to smash them..”
We had to work particularly hard, especially in Dubai before we went to Delhi. I had to smash them for a couple of days there because we hadn’t been playing in any tournaments whatsoever. Some of the other teams had played in Darwin the week before, Australia and Samoa, so I felt we were behind the 8-ball. We worked particularly hard in 40 degrees in Dubai and I think those two days we had there was the winning of the tournament.
And these Commonwealth Games are becoming more and more relevant to us all. I was told the other day that we’re now less than 70 months until the Olympics in Rio and when you put it like that you start to realize that it’s not too far away in terms of a player’s lifecycle.
We’ve had some meetings in New Zealand looking at where the players are going to come from that will play in the Olympic Games in Rio in 2016. Those players are basically coming through the secondary schools now so we’ve got identify them and encourage them to come into Sevens. We’re also fortunate to have players like Zac Guilford and Ben Smith, who will be around in six years time very much pushing for that Olympic team.
There’s a lot of research and work to do in the next two years though. We’ve seen how successful Sevens is at a multisport games in the Commonwealths, not just because we’ve been winning but just the support, the crowd, the excitement and it’s only going to get better going to Rio.
Six years isn’t a long time at all and you can see the interest even now that there is in China and Asia, and it’s not just men it’s women too. There’s no doubt, it’s all very exciting working towards the Olympics but in many respects the work’s only just beginning, and Dubai is another major building block.