“WHEN DAVID NUCIFORA came into the programme, he set it up. None of this would have been possible without him.”
It’s not always the case that a sportsperson is quick to thank a boardroom suit straight after a major success, but that’s what Harry McNulty did after the Ireland Sevens booked their place at the Paris Olympics via their win at the European Games in Poland on Tuesday night.
Ireland will send both men’s and women’s teams to compete at the Games next summer for the first time. This achievement will bring the sport to a bigger audience than ever before, and both squads will board the plane with dreams of bringing home a medal – the men’s side (who competed at the Tokyo Games) are now eighth in the World Series standings, with the women fifth.
There will be a feel-good atmosphere around the IRFU offices today and nobody will be more pleased than performance director David Nucifora. The Sevens project has been his baby since he joined the Union in 2014, the Australian making it a priority to relaunch a men’s programme which had been inactive for five years and pump more resources into the women’s team.
Anthony Eddy was hired as director of Irish rugby Sevens shortly after Nucifora’s arrival. More than 300 athletes took part in a series of talent identification and screening days for the men’s team in January of 2015.
That summer, the men’s Sevens programme was officially launched, with Tadhg Beirne, Adam Byrne, Tom Daly, Dan Goggin and Alex Wootton just some of the familiar names in that first 26-man selection. Harry McNulty, Terry Kennedy and Mark Roche – who were all on the pitch in Poland last night – were also involved.
The programme was launched at a time when Sevens was on the up. In 2009, it had been confirmed Sevens would be added to the summer Olympics, and Rio 2016 saw the sport played at the Games for the first time.
Yet the early days of the rebooted men’s Sevens team were low-key and far removed from the glamour of the Olympics and World Series. Their first tournament came at a Rugby Europe Division C event in Bosnia and Herzegovina in 2015, in a pool with Turkey, Belarus and Montenegro. Ireland won all of their six games there and slowly began to climb the world rankings ladder.
In 2019, they entered the World Series as a core team, giving them frequent exposure to the best sides around. In late 2021, they qualified for the pandemic-delayed Tokyo Olympics by beating France in the final of the Olympic qualification repechage in Monaco.
Yet Ireland struggled to perform at the Covid-restricted Games in Japan, finishing third in a group that included South Africa, USA and Kenya, before losing 22-0 to Kenya in a play-off for ninth place.
With a much longer lead-in to Paris, James Topping’s side will be better placed to give a proper account of themselves. The experience of 2019 should stand to the players still going strong since those Games, while new players have brought fresh energy to the group.
For the women’s team, it will be a totally new experience. After the bitter disappointment of not making it to Tokyo, they sealed qualification for Paris with victory at the Toulouse Sevens event in May.
The women’s programme has, at times, come in for scrutiny given the issues that have hit the 15s side in recent years. The IRFU had been contracting women’s Sevens players long before the first pro contracts were introduced for women’s 15s players last summer.
The 15s have also suffered due to some players moving between the two squads. As Greg McWilliams’ team struggled through this year’s Six Nations, the likes of Beibhinn Parsons, Lucy Mulhall, Amee-Leigh Murphy Crowe and Eve Higgins were all unavailable due to Sevens commitments.
Nucifora would see the Sevens’ subsequent qualification for Paris as justification for what McWilliams’ described as “the elephant in the room” ahead of the 15s’ Six Nations opener against Wales.
It’s worth remembering that while the women’s Sevens can now look forward to Paris, the 15s are preparing to compete in the third tier of the new WXV tournament, where they will play Fiji, Kazakhstan, Kenya, the winner of a play-off between Colombia and Brazil and the loser of a play-off between Italy and Spain.
The IRFU see Sevens as a way of growing the game at all levels, and qualifying for the Olympics also opens the Union to more state funding. Given the smaller playing pool in the women’s game, the issue isn’t likely to disappear for the 15s squad anytime soon. There’s been more synergy between the men’s programmes, with players such as Hugo Keenan and Jimmy O’Brien representing Ireland at Sevens level before establishing themselves as internationals at 15s.
The split of resources doesn’t sit well with everyone, but the IRFU are serious about making Sevens work, and with both squads heading to Paris, the programme looks stronger than ever. And with Nucifora expected to leave the IRFU next year, the Paris Games could allow the Australian depart the Union on a high, having lifted a dying version of the game in this part of the world to the biggest stage in world sport.
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