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Ben Gollings under increasing pressure to hold onto head coach role
By Chris Jones
Ben Gollings, the Fiji sevens head coach, is under growing pressure to deliver a win at the Cape Town leg of the HSBC SVNS this weekend to convince the doubters he can lead the team to a third successive Olympic gold medal in Paris next year.
Heading into the opening SVNS round in Dubai, where Fiji finished fourth last weekend, Gollings, the record points scorer in sevens amassing 2,652 is his England career, said: “Last season was tough. We didn’t quite hit our stride and we didn’t win a cup final. This year we need to press and get some wins on the board. We have to build now towards the Olympics, being gold medal holders, we want to retain that title.”
In Dubai, Fiji beat USA, France and Ireland but failed in their pool game with Great Britain going down 24-0 and they also lost to eventual winners South Africa, and then New Zealand in the third place play off.
Fiji fans have made their frustrations known on social media following the Dubai event and now the focus is on what Gollings and his players can deliver in Cape Town, where they are in a pool alongside beaten Dubai 7s cup finalists Argentina, France and Spain.
According to the Fiji Sun, Gollings was given his KPIs - Key Performance Indicators - when he was appointed head coach in December 2021 with the key element to replicate the gold medals won in Rio under head coach Ben Ryan and in Tokyo with Gareth Baber pulling the tactical strings.
It was always going to be a massive challenge for Gollings to reach the targets set when he was appointed, with the Fiji Sun claiming the KPIs were:
- Win the gold medal at the 2022 Commonwealth Games.
- Win the Rugby World Cup Sevens 2022
- Win the 2022/23 HSBC World SVNS
- Win the gold medal at the 2023 Pacific Games
- Win the gold medal at the 2024 Olympic Games
To date Gollings has achieved;
- Fiji won silver at the Commonwealth Games
- Fiji won the Rugby World Cup Sevens 2022
- Fiji won gold at the Pacific Games.
There are also concerns being raised about the pathway to ensure the country’s top talent does get recognised and brought into the sevens programme. Former Fiji 7s player Isake Katonibau has highlighted key areas that required attention to improve 7s rugby in the country.
He told local media: “There is a big gap, it will take us one year to teach all players playing in Fiji to reach that level. Teams from overseas have changed, they have taken 7s rugby heavily, they have set their pathway, their development process but here in Fiji we [are] still depending on grassroots level.”
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Your links are private if you were intending them to be shared.
URC us doing very well with it’s competitiveness given that each group has it’s own salary caps and entirely different makeups, from clubs, to provinces, to franchises and regions. One group might be teams from the most populace country with the biggest rugby base while another the smallest, with the least amount of rugby players to chose from.
I would also be interested in a average clock length (don’t need to go into the whole BIP hole) showing how long the last phases are taking (because one team is trying to still alter the match points outcome in some way) to complete before the game finally ends. I don’t know if its more common this year but in general I wonder if its a stat that can show how good games are/were?
You really had the same reversed 10 points lead % as you had lead changes after the 75th?
Some of these values while standing out numerically against each other have a much less correlative impact than some that tighter differences which might only stick out a small amount. While SRP’s ones might not necessarily be such examples (and here I’m still going off the basic principle that everyone knew this was happening, even though I was challenged about that assumption) they have had the advantage of the fixtures being were doctored even more than normal. In this instance its irrelevant whether they were doctored or not of course, but I think it’s pretty safe to say that there hasn’t been a lot of cross over of worst v best yet. Maybe it just feels like that because the worst are so much better this year? I definitely think that it is undeniable that all the bottom teams (that remain) have gotten better.
So I would be very interested in another weight graph of the games still, but regardless I don’t think it’s fair for SRP to claim anything over the other leagues yet. Certainly as I have said numerous times about the Top 14, it’s sub par compared to what it’s billed up to be, but that is the only league in this group that has promotion and relegation, which is the antitheses of a competitive league, so a trade off there.
Thank you very much for sharing your research though Dmitri, I hope you find another topic to get interested about!
Go to commentsI can’t believe Rugby Australia thought the NZRU would accept 1-12 split. I’m sure if the split was more even then the NZRU would’ve made it work.
It’s even worse when the NZRU relatively recently gave Rugby Australia a bigger cut of the Super Rugby broadcast.
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