England 7s take on Olympic rivals

The top four teams in the World Series qualify for the Olympics, and with France currently fourth while England fifth the traditional rivalry between the two nations has an extra spark. So when England visited Marcoussis, home of the French sevens team, this week for a two-day joint training session it resulted in four very competitive matches.

The FFR have produced a great video of the session (below) for whichKathryn Watson(ex-Vale of Lune, now Perpignan)has produced an English transcript.

David Courteix (Coach): We got back from Sao Paolo just over two weeks ago. The girls have had period of fitness training, the first week was a recovery period of individual training and the second was more intense. We wanted to keep up the intensity in our training so to get this opposition was great.

Fanny Horta (Captain): It was to have an opposition so we can get ourselves game ready, and also England are a team with whom we are often rivals and we almost certainly we risk facing them in the upcoming tournements so to face them in a friendly match was useful.

DC: After a lot of thought it is extremely hard to train at the same intensity as an international level game. The fitness side we can replicate with training exercises however the rugby side its very difficult to simulate the conditions and the physicality of game play in training. So I think its really important to meet a nation like England, they are not far from us geographically and have 21 proffesional girls and its relativley easy for them to come to us or equally for us to go to them. We have wanted to train together for some time and the opportunity has arisen and we are happy to have taken it.

FH: They are quick girls and are above all strong which makes us have to defend in two's to close the door on them so with regards to defending it can be hadwork. One of the objectives of these two days has been to work on and correct our mistakes and errors in order to give us a much more solid defense against stronger and bigger teams than ourselves.

DC: With regards to improving our organisation we now have the girls regularly at Marcoussis, although throughout the year they are training part time. We have training camps and competitions and this has certainly changed things for the better although of course compared with other nations its less. I feel I need to point out that as other nations have full time athletes we are still part time. Despite this we still feel it is a good thing and we have all these training facilities and camps.  One thing we need to improve on is with the girls who aren't selected to play as often, we need to make sure they are correctly evaluated and tested in the same way as the others. They stay and train and play/compete with each other but to play and train against international opposition is something that is missing so to be able to give this opportunity to train and play against England to those girls has been great.

FH: Its been a really good level of work these four matches and we have benefitted a lot from it by giving us the time to work on our weaker points as well as allowing us to really improve on  our stronger points which we will continue to work and and get better.