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Indra Singh, reporter for the Fijian Times, offers his thoughts and opinions on the state of the national sevens team

Getting Fiji to play the basics of rugby right was even harder than growing a garden of black roses in the middle of the deserts of Dubai during the Sevens World Cup.

A week on and we are still coming to terms with the quarter-final exit of a World Cup-campaign best forgotten. This was the first time in the five World Cups that we bombed out so early -- Kenya humiliating us 26-7 in the most lop-sided quarter-final. That result has seen many fans throw the kitchen sink at the Fiji Rugby Union and the coaching staff. Calls for the sacking of the FRU board and Iliesa Tanivula have been the hottest talanoa this week.

Most people calling for heads to roll want Waisale Serevi back as the mentor of the team, mistakenly expecting victory to fall into our laps with the maestro at the helm. Landing in the concrete jungle that is Dubai on the Wednesday before the tournament, the first thing I was hit by was the heat. The second was the foreign media clamouring to know whether Fiji had the wherewithal to retain the World Cup?

Help!

Then came the next query -- is Tanivula good enough to coach the star-studded World Cup team and had he proven his worth in sevens. The only answer I could give was the truth -- that Tanivula had proven his worth in the full code with Nadi but was a relative new comer to sevens.

Compared to the likes of Gordon Tietjens, Paul John, Paul Treu, Rudi Moors and Duncan Forrester, Tanivula is still a greenhorn. Suddenly it struck me, if Tanivula, who admittedly did have the experience of playing for Tietjens' NZ side, was a coaching rookie why did he not have an assistant who could help him make crucial decisions at The Sevens. It could have made a world of difference and retained boasting rights until the next quadrennial defence of the sevens title of titles.
Serevi, in his time, had Wayne Pivac and Jo Savou to help him out, or was that the other way around. Since the glorious 2005 victory in Hong Kong, sheer economics probably led to assistants being phased out. Savou and Tanivula have paid the price of going it all alone.

Even Serevi, for all his worldliness, was a failure as a coach, hardly the saviour people are proclaiming him to be. Ask any of those in charge of teams at Sevens World Cup and they'll speak in one voice -- it is a tough ask to go all alone. Even our conqueror, Kenyan mentor Benjamin Ayimba, had assistants. Tanivula was thrown in the deep end after the sacking of Serevi and had only two tournaments under his belt before being expected to gain dominion over the world.

It is a fact that Tanivula does not yet have the sevens coaching savvy and will definitely need time to grip the sevens world by the nape of its neck. He needs an assistant or better still a manager with seven nous, someone he can run his thoughts by for a second opinion from the sideline. Such an expert could sit in the stands for a bird's eye view of events unfolding to give a another perspective to Tanivula's ground-level eye-balling of his charges.

Tanivula was repeatedly seen with earphones hooked up and with a communications giant like Digicel backing the team it would have been easy to have two conversations with an aide de camp, so speak. In this professional age, a coach can not do all things on his own.

Ilivasi Tabua helped the side in the build-up to the World Cup but did not travel with the team. Perhaps he should have, even if meant for the cash-strapped Fiji Rugby Union taking a loan. Hindsight always provides 20-20 vision so it is now easy to say that with no technical advisor, Tanivula was hobbled the moment he left our shores. On the training pitch, Tanivula was left to grapple alone with difficult decisions and choices.

He had to deal with the forwards at any given time and leave the backs to their own devices. When he did concentrate on the backs, the forwards had a walk in the park, so to speak. Relying on senior players in the team to help is a good idea but even the best of the best need some guidance at some time.

In 2005, Serevi, Pivac and Feeney worked together and that made the task easier. Not that working alone is an excuse for the loss to Kenya but Tanivula needed an extra hand, an extra pair of eyes, simply a like-minded expert.
At times no one knew what Fiji's starting seven was and who would play where. The powers that be at Rugby House need to re-look at the composition of its sevens entourages and think of the value of having a Plan B in place for every situation. Tanivula or whoever comes in the future will need a dependable partner to work with, certainly not someone who questions the ability of the men he is supposed to lead.The coach should not and cannot be expected to go it all alone and get the results our rugby-mad fans demand.

Let the past be the past

So the question that needs to be asked is simple -- do we have proper procedures in place to bring the sevens world to heel. We are a proud sevens nation accustomed to winning all the time.

But, as we have learnt, pride comes before a fall. Now that we have fallen -- the Melrose Cup gone without a whimper and 23 months since any silverware has been added to our trophy cabinet -- we have to ask whether we are a spent force.

Are we yesterday's heroes? But yesterday is gone and we must not stop thinking about tomorrow. There is not a single sevens title stored at Gordon Street -- cause for alarm by any standard. We can talk until the sugar is harvested but the fact is we are not the powerhouse we think ourselves to be. Questions like whether the World Cup team was our best, were the right players chosen, was the backing the team needed there and were the players played in their right positions - will -- will forever haunt us. We brought in six overseas-based players for the tournament and it did not pay dividends.

Most importantly we cannot go on living in the past. We must learn from our past, deal with the now and plan for the future. So will rules change now? Or will we revert to yesterday's heroes every time an event of note -- World Cup, Commonwealth Games perhaps even the Olympics -- roll around. It is time we not put all our cards on overseas players coming in from the cold to bring us glory. If we are to rely on them, we can not expect to have them join the team as late as it was left this year. Otherwise we will only get a result like the collective kick to the psyche we got in Dubai.

That is why the young team to the Hong Kong Sevens is vital to our future well-being. It is the first step to delivering ourselves from the sevens destruction we have thrown ourselves into, the result being senseless rhetoric and outright threats of physical harm and property destruction being futilely bandied about. That is not our nature. Our nature to play a wonderful, running game.

We have to find our way back to that and the winning, feel-good feeling will come back. Are we warriors enough to suffer a while to re-establish our dominance of the game we like to call our own. Now we will find out, the hard way.