Loose Pass: Experiences that remind you why you fell in love with rugby

This week we will mostly be concerning ourselves with a fantastic weekend in the south east of France…

With the URC conjuring up a set of likely one-sided quarter-finals (Glasgow v Connacht excepted) and the Prem play-offs looking secure (we did NOT see Leicester’s defeat coming), with the Top 14 not yet into its final weekend and with Super Rugby’s final round also largely meaningless, Loose Pass took up a friend on an offer and trotted off to the Alsace for a weekend of sevens.

The offer was courtesy of Dallen Stanford, once briefly a team-mate of Loose Pass in South Africa before paths once again diverged. Stanford went on to become a US Eagle and sevens player before settling in California and partnering up with an actress. Loose Pass did not.

Loose Pass visits Alsace

But after his career he went into broadcasting, quickly becoming one of the faces, but more importantly, the voice, of American rugby, eventually becoming a lead commentator on both the Major League Rugby and World Rugby sevens circuit, before taking a lead commentator role at the last World Cup.

And during that journey, he noticed that there was no established or clear and obvious pathway for aspiring voices of rugby, which, considering this is hardly a simple game that any old duffer could commentate on, he found to be a bit of a miss.

So he established the Broadcast Academy, a rugby-specific online commentary course designed to springboard those who might both aspire to be the next Bill McLaren and be able to string a few words together lucidly and even wittily into a commentary booth somewhere local. Loose Pass was one of the lucky students in one of the first online courses; there have been dozens since. You get to call clips, learn to regulate your vocal energy and reach the right crescendos at the right moment, and suffer the ignominy of identifying a player wrong while live on air and all sorts of other fun stuff, and you may, if you cast your minds back, find yourself sort of half-fulfilling a childhood dream. Not the one about scoring the winning try, but definitely the one where you commentate on it.

But offered the chance to actually go to a tournament and call it? Well, that one was a little too good to pass up. One of the really good bits about the broadcast academy is that Stanford also acts as a bit of an agent, plugging in people to commentary opportunities wherever they might pop up, should you be deemed to have the requisite vocal fortitude during the course.

And so it was that one morning in late March, Loose Pass found himself on a WhatsApp video call with Mike Mulroy, the founder of Sevens Referee, a company initially set up to provide tournaments with good teams of officials but which has now expanded to tournament planning and co-ordination, accreditation, registration, event management and broadcasts and live streams, talking about heading down to Hagenau to be the commentator at the EAAST Sevens tournament in late May. Childhood dream fulfilment opportunities do not come around often. So, you know. Off I went to help Mike out.

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The EAAST Sevens was in its third year of existence this year, having been founded in 2024 by former All Black Sevens player Teddy Stanaway, who settled in Alsace after seeing out his professional career with Oyonnax. It was initially conceived as a warm-up platform for the 2024 Olympics as well as a shop window for players needing a bit of higher-level exposure, but the success of the initial event in Haguenau was such that last year there was a tournament in both Haguenau and Cognac, while the quality of the entrants is such that it is now considered one of the premier tournaments outside the official circuit.

This year’s was in Haguenau again and was twice the size of last year, with 12 men’s teams and eight women’s teams toughing it out in 30-plus degree heat over two days. And not just any teams. New Zealand’s development side, Italy, Georgia, Belgium and Germany’s development side were all in attendance in the men’s competition, along with China, who won a lot of fans and were almost the surprise package. More on that shortly.

Meanwhile, the women’s competition featured Canada’s development team along with Germany, Denmark, Belgium, Georgia and the Czech Republic and Poland, who fought out a thrilling final claimed with the last play of the game by the Czech Republic.

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‘It’s a shame the game is not pushed more from above’

It was the men’s competition which raised the eyebrows the highest, though. China started slowly but shredded the Rugby Tens – Frankie Horne’s international high performance academy – team 33-5 in a breathtaking quarter-final on the second day. Racing 92’s sevens team was left fuming at a thrilling last-minute defeat to Belgium at the same stage.

Those were nothing compared to the semi-final, though. New Zealand, who had won through to the last four having barely broken sweat at times, found themselves up against the 7Fantastics, a team drawn together two nights before the tournament from players across the region’s Federale-level clubs; that’s France’s fifth and sixth tier. Yet ably marshalled by the stepping and playmaking skills of Drancy half-back Mathew Ford, aided at restarts by the Inspector Gadget arms of Nicolas Pouplot, and displaying one of those collective efforts of punching above your weight reminiscent of Japan’s victory over South Africa in 2015, the 7Fantastics clung on for an extraordinary 21-19 win.

Which meant that the Final was between the two fans’ favourites: the 7Fantastics and China. Sadly, it proved a step too far for the Chinese, who succumbed to a 49-7 defeat to an inspired 7Fantastics display. Not that the Chinese appeared too disappointed at the presentations after, taking to the stage with a beatbox and to great acclaim. “I think there was a little bit of conditioning missing by the end,” said Rodney Gibbs, China’s coach, who is heading back to the Bay of Plenty this year. “But it was so good to get these boys out and show them what is possible. A lot of these guys come to rugby because they’ve been athletes in colleges and rejected from other sports. It’s great to show them a positive experience after that. It’s a shame the game is not pushed more from above.”

As for the 7Fantastics, Ford, who moved from London as a child with family and who limped off injured two minutes before the end of the final, was still taking it all in two hours after the final whistle. “We’re just a bunch of players from around the region,” he said. “Which makes it more amazing to have done this I guess, the way we’ve done it. We just came together.”

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Reminder of why you fell in love with rugby

And as for the tournament and broadcast experience: it ended up being one of those rugby experiences that remind you why you fell in love with the game in the first place. The tournament was only open to local schoolchildren for the Friday until 4 pm, meaning there were some 1,000 kids aged up to 12 years old lining the touchlines. Each school had been given a national team to both back and spend a week learning about; some of the presentational displays from the kids were better than some media brochures. By the time the tournament finished on the Saturday, 4,000 fans had come through the turnstiles, creating a belting atmosphere in the way only a French rugby ground can.

Behind the scenes, Mike fizzed all over the place like a nugget of sodium in a glass of water, rollocking, cajoling, praising and occasionally even laughing. Most importantly, however, he was a ruthlessly efficient procurer of ice-cold beverages. The referees covered some 17km a day at high speed and in 35-degree heat as they worked their way through the rota, in many ways a more impressive achievement than the performances of the players. Ably assisted by a wonderful local father-daughter partnership of Yan and Erine on camera two and time/score-keeping respectively, the tireless Nathan on camera one, and the equally inexperienced but ferociously focused Dutch video Producer named Koen jabbing at the buttons to manage the stream picture, Mike and team streamed and officiated their way through 12 hours of action on day one and eight on day two. The results are on YouTube somewhere; they’re not perfect but if nothing else it’s worth checking out the 7Fantastics’ win over New Zealand on day two.

And the after-party… well, let’s just say this, it’s now an open debate in Loose Pass’ mind who can party harder, players or referees – never mind the referee manager.

Back to the elite game this week, then, with some enticing URC semi-finals, some intrigue in the Top 14 and Prem final days and at least one Super Rugby qualifying final looking worth a watch. There’ll be plenty to chew on. But the weekend past was a happy reminder that it is not always the biggest occasions that are the reason we all love the game.

Many thanks to Mike, Yan, Erine, Koen, Nathan, Dan, Rosie, Alex, Chris, Dean, Darryl, Pierre, Adrien, Mathieu, Thibaut and Tifien and any others the wine and heat have vanquished from memory, for a cracking weekend. Were you not entertained?

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