In the eyes of national sevens coach Craig Pain, DeA looked like the side most familiar with the abbreviated version of the game. No surprises then that they swept away the First Division title at the Heineken Union Sevens at the Aberdeen Stadium yesterday.
'They actually looked like the only team who had trained for sevens. They played really well,' said Pain after watching DeA finish the five-team round-robin competition unbeaten.
DeA, bristling with players who are in the sevens pool, met Aberdeen in a winner-take-all final game and won 33-10 to emerge deserved winners of the 2002 competition.
'Everything clicked for us. We combined well. I guess the fact that we have been training and playing sevens as a unit recently helped,' DeA captain Rob Naylor said. With six players in the national sevens pool - Naylor, Mark Solomon, Ricky Cheuk, Andrew Chambers, Chan Fuk-ping and Terence Ng - DeA turned on the style yesterday defeating Valley 33-10, Football Club 40-12 and Kowloon 35-12 to march into the last game of the day against Aberdeen.
Aberdeen, rising to the occasion, had defeated Kowloon 46-0, Football Club 27-17 and Valley 38-5 on their way to what turned out to be a final. But DeA easily warded off the Aberdeen challenge, winning by five tries to two.
Although the tournament has been scheduled in the middle of the 15-a-side competition - to give Pain and the other selectors a chance to pick the squads for the Beijing Sevens and the Hong Kong Sevens - DeA smoothly slipped into sevens mode. Four of their players had just returned from Darwin where they won a sevens tournament against local clubs. While DeA were at full-strength, Valley were missing sevens stars Carl Murray, Rodney McIntosh and Jason Going while Football Club were without their Hong Kong duo Warren Warner and Chris Gordon. But despite their absence, they all seem certain to figure in Pain's plans when he names a 15-strong squad for the two IRB World Sevens Series tournaments.
