Chippy to serve up a tasty treat
THE PERCEPTION remains that sevens is the love child of rugby union and basketball – only grudgingly welcomed into the family after last year’s joyous carnival at the Rio Olympics.
Talk to any one of those who play it, though, and their surprise is not that Fiji’s captivating moment of glory turned out to be a gamechanger. It is more that the rest of the world took so long to catch on.
Take Richard Alexander de Carpentier, predictably known as ‘Chippy’, last week voted the Rugby Players’ Association’s England Sevens Player of the Year and this week preparing for the season finale at the HSBC London Sevens. A useful back-row forward, first for Leicester and then Worcester, he got his first taste of international sevens in 2011 and was immediately seduced.
“Anyone who says sevens isn’t more enjoyable than XVs is mad,” he says. “You get more of the ball, you get to play more rugby rather than just running lines and sometimes never getting the ball.
“If you took people to a game up north in December when it’s hammering down with rain and it’s box kicks and more box kicks, it doesn’t sell rugby that well. But watch
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any sevens tournament and it’s frantic; you see tries, tackles, one-on-one collisions.
“When you’re a forward in XVs you sometimes just go round hitting rucks and, as fun as rucks are, they’re not the be-all and end-all of rugby. It’s not really why I got into it – to stick my head into the floor and break my face.
“It’s a different ethos compared to club rugby because of the way you work. In XVs, you’ve got a couple of hours every weekend; in sevens you’ve got to go again and again and again. If you are not switched on, that’s when you fall. The mental side is tough. When you have had a bad game the ability to bounce back from it is so important. There’s no time for moping.
“What is setting the top teams apart is the ability to be mentally resilient and go again, when you’re tired.
“We do a 45-minute session about two hours before the games begin – a blow-out. The aim is you play on your second wind. It helps us to get psychologically switched on for the first game… but it’s horrible.
“It’s a long day. Some days we’re up at 7am, doing fitness by 8am, and if you’re the last game on you’re not getting back in till 11.30pm. And even then you have to get up the next day and do it all again.” Chippy just missed out on selection for the Rio party, where GB lost to Fiji in the final, but has become a mainstay of Simon Amor’s outfit. A knee injury kept him out of last weekend’s Paris outing, where South Africa wrapped up the title. England go into this last round at Twickenham – dubbed the ‘Feast of Rugby’, with top chef Neil Rankin spearheading a street-food festival – lying second overall, with Chippy determined to face Scotland, France, Argentina and Russia on day one. He said: “London last year was such a cool atmosphere. With the food festival, this year will be amazing, but I’m not sure about having a burrito in between games. You may see it again on the pitch.” FOR a chance to see Neil Rankin and taste gourmet street food, visit the HSBC London Sevens at the ‘Feast of Rugby’ at Twickenham this weekend. Tickets start at £30 and are available ticketmaster.co.uk/ HSBC-LondonSevenstickets.