‘We’ve dropped the ball’: Sir Gordon Tietjens slams state of New Zealand men’s sevens

Thursday, 27 March 2025

The All Blacks Sevens losing three times in a row to Spain, and also being tipped up by Uruguay, may have come as a shock to many, but not to Sir Gordon Tietjens.

The Kiwi coaching guru, who enjoyed a wildly successful reign with the national team from 1994 to 2016, has slammed the current state of the New Zealand men’s game, from pathways to player fitness, which has the All Blacks Sevens languishing in a lowly seventh spot on the SVNS world series ladder.

Tomasi Cama’s outfit are still highly likely to make the top-eight cut for the winner-takes-all finale in Los Angeles on the first weekend of May, following the final two rounds in Hong Kong and Singapore the next two weekends. However, their results have been underwhelming at best, unable to reach even the semifinals of the past three tournaments, in placing fourth, sixth, ninth and sixth.

It follows similar struggles in Cama’s first campaign as coach last season, which included ninth- and 10th-place efforts, before back-to-back triumphs in Hong Kong and Singapore lifted them to third overall, with then a fourth placing in the grand finale in Madrid, and a fifth placing at the Olympics in Paris.

But Tietjens feels for his former charge, who came in on the back of Clark Laidlaw signing off by guiding NZ to the 2022-23 world series title (the last under the old format), and has this season in particular had to deal with the retirement of three veteran players, a handful of exits to Super Rugby, and even the NRL, as well as a big injury toll.

Instead, Tietjens, who later spent time as Samoa’s men’s coach, then recently worked a 12-month contract successfully getting the China women to the Olympics and world series, and is now assisting the recruitment of China’s new men’s coaches, points the finger at the hand Cama is being dealt, which has ultimately led to stumbles which not long ago would have been considered unthinkable.

“Of late they’ve been matched by a lot of the lesser teams, and it’s disappointing,” Tietjens admits to The Post.

“Because I just feel that we’ve dropped the ball in that we don’t have a national sevens tournament now, we don’t have any provincial sevens tournaments.

“My biggest concern is there’s no tournaments for players to get out and say, ‘I’m good enough to be in the All Blacks Sevens team’.

“So you’ve got to ask New Zealand Rugby where do they really view sevens? Do they just see it as purely the Olympics?

“If they’re really serious about the game, and they want the men to win a gold medal at the Olympics, then they need to put some real emphasis into sevens, and take a different pathway, perhaps, to make it strong again.”

While the women’s game is something of the opposite, with New Zealand’s top talent generally heading down the sevens path as opposed to 15s, the men’s depth is now being severely found out, Tietjens feels.

The last national sevens was staged in 2019. It was thought Covid put an end to it for 2020, though NZR that year went on to hold a third edition of Ignite7, a tournament for emerging talents which on that occasion also featured contracted players.

There has been nothing since, though NZR say they are planning for Ignite7’s return in 2025, while also noting that last year they hosted a new event called Elevate7, which saw the national teams play a tournament with the Blues, Chiefs and Hurricanes.

It’s largely left the Global Youth Sevens (under-18) in Auckland, and Condor Sevens (national secondary schools) in Mt Maunganui, as the places to pluck the talent, and far from the likes of the strong Taupiri Sevens club tournament that Tietjens used to be sure to attend.

“They’re all these really young kids, sure, potentially exciting footballers… but it takes a long time to grow those players,” he says, recalling how he nurtured one Christian Cullen through just one game at the 1995 Hong Kong tournament, before he returned a year later to light it up with 18 tries.

“You still need the experience of playing at that higher level… we’re promoting new younger players without a lot of experience and they’re getting exposed at that level, even though it is Uruguay, even though it is Spain.

“I feel for Tomasi. He’s a very, very intelligent coach, he’s been there, done that, he knows the levels you need to get to, he understands the game tremendously well. But he hasn’t got the same opportunities to go out and select players that perhaps I did, Clark did.

“Now, they haven’t got that luxury. You’re just hoping that someone within the system [the NPC, for example], who’s a talented rugby player, can play sevens.

“To be good at sevens, you’ve got to be playing it regularly.”

That then leads Tietjens to identify another key area where the national side is falling down − the fitness stakes.

While he holds the reputation of being the hardest taskmaster going in that area, Tietjens notes that was largely because, in his time, the programme wasn’t centralised, and without seeing the players day-to-day, the rigorous testing was a big requirement in order to see what he was working with.

Now, there’s plenty of other teams who have usurped New Zealand in that space, he believes, including Spain, who he notes last year spent three months in Fiji − “probably the hardest place to play, yet the best place to learn” − to further develop their footy.

“They’re very quick, they’re very fit, they’re conditioned to the levels that are needed in the game of sevens now,” he said of the Spaniards, who sit second on the series ladder, behind Argentina.

“And we’re not as fit as we used to be, in my view. We’re not conditioned as well as we possibly could be.

“Don’t worry, the odd game you’ll be right, but we used to win a lot on the last play of games. How many times does that happen [now]?

“I see players, when play goes on for a very long time, we may score a try then that player’s signalling to the bench, ‘I’m gone’.

“In my view, when I was coaching the side, every player should have been capable of playing every minute of every game, without even thinking about being subbed.

“I was really cautious around my substituting as well. I felt the game needed to be won before I made subs. These days, coaches, I feel, are feeling they have to give players game time.

“When there’s a big gap between the ability of your starting seven and the players that are on the bench, that’s where you get found out.

“If I coached the team now I’d probably be up before the players’ association, because you’ve got different athletes these days, they’re always challenging you… leadership committees are going to say, ‘Why do we have to do this?’,

“In the past, the coach had sole control… if you had to do 10 80-60-40s, or 10 150s, you just did it.

“To get the best out of the players, to perform at the best they can be, you need to get them to the levels they need to be at. And I don’t feel that the players are at the levels they need to be at to be competitive.”