Rugby Sevens

Sevens is the game rugby you can watch in the commercial break - well almost!

In the last few years the general tendency in the media has been to cater to the shorter and shorter attention spans. We used to have feature articles in newspapers than ran for pages - now its rare to have anything longer than a page. TV current affair shows used to have a 1 story in an hour, now they have 3 or 4.

The same shortening of attention span has occurred in sport. Cricket used to take 5 days, then it was 1 day, now it's 3.5 hours for 20/20 cricket. The same thing has happened in rugby - a full match is 80 minutes. Sevens is the ultimate short match - 2 halfs of 7 minutes each. A game takes 15 minutes. Perfect for TV! An entire tournament can be played in a day or a weekend.

The best known Rugby Sevens tournaments are the Hong Kong Sevens and the Dubai Sevens. Other tournaments are regularly played in Wellington, New Zealand, Adelaide, Australia, Edinburgh,Scotland, USA, South Africa and London, England.

Sevens may be a short game but it's an incredibly athletic game with only 7 players per a team on the same size field as normal rugby, which has a team of 15. Scrums are limited to 3 men. The game emphasises speed, control and fitness. Scores are often similar to that of the traditional game because of the greater difficulty in defending with only 7 players.

Men's rugby sevens is currently a Commonwealth Games' event and is attempting to become a Olympic sport. The women's version of the game is also due to become a Commonwealth game and is also being added to the Dubai Sevens Tournament from 2009

One of the features of a 7's tournament is the crowd. Tournaments feature great sound systems and the sound track is a feature of the event. The crowd responds by dressing up, with a huge unofficial contest to get on TV wearing the most outrageous costume. In the last Wellington Seven's tournament a group of large middle age men came as "Borats" complete with a green unikini and chest hair and very little else - it was a head turning sight down town at 10am! Unfortunately unikini's are now banned at Wellington and are probably not suitable for viewing on HubPages!