On Wednesday morning the Scottish Rugby Union in collaboration with Welsh Rugby Union and English Rugby Union announced the discontinuation of Scotland’s individual participation in the World Rugby Sevens Series in favour of a collaborative Great Britain Sevens squad.
The move announced via a press release on scottishrugby.org confirmed that the move applied to both the Men’s and Women’s teams which would no longer be scheduled to appear in Hong Kong and Dubai respectively, later this year.
The release seemed to indicate that Olympic qualification for the GB team necessitated this.
The mandating of Olympic teams from the 2023/24 season means all three Unions acknowledge the importance of transferring to GB from the forthcoming campaign (2022/23) to embrace this new era with GB as the representative team on the World Series moving forward.
scottishrugby.org
The statement also indicated that fans of Scottish Rugby Sevens would still be able to see the team compete individually once every two years at the Commonwealth Games and World Cup events.
The move was labelled an “exciting opportunity” by the SRU but was immediately greeted with negativity on social media with, “is this a joke?” and “what a farce,” leading the responses to the SRU’s Twitter post.
How do you feel about this move? Excited to see more coherent British teams compete at the Olympics, or disappointed that the country that invented Sevens will no longer be featured at the World Series?
Let us know in the comments.