Percy Keane, Fiji Times

It's the Seven-a-side season and the focus will be on the Suva International tournament which starts tomorrow at the National Stadium in Laucala.

This is indeed a good initiative shown by Suva Rugby Football Union to host a festival this weekend involving international teams.

Yes, Suva RFU must be commended for the initiative taken and the resolve to spread the lead-up tournaments across the country, beginning with the Suva event then including Lautoka and Labasa.

All these tournaments provided an excellent platform for the Sevens selectors to assess talents that can be considered for future international commitments.

And organiser Jeremy Duxbury should also be commended for the work he did in getting sponsors. As my primary school teacher liked to say after a job well done, "you deserve a medal JD".

Of course the success of this inaugural event can be attributed to the many volunteers who have spent their time, effort and money for the love of the game.

The Suva Rugby Festival actually began with the Suva Sevens series and will culminate with the International 7s this weekend, when the best of the best teams come together to compete for the trophy and US$10,000.

The best of the best local players, sometimes do not come up to this final tournaments because their teams do not make it however, having the lead-up tournaments help selectors in seeing everybody and it is also a fair way to all players.

This international tournament will involve top clubs that played qualifying rounds. Just the winner and runner-up from the Suva, Lautoka and Labasa series have qualified for the 16-team format.

So definitely it will it be a good ground for selectors to see the cream of Fiji Sevens talent up against the international teams like the USA Eagles, Canada, Papua New Guinea, Samoa, Hong Kong and Tonga while provincial sides Western Force (Australia) and Manawatu from New Zealand will be just as competitive.

The three Suva Sevens tournaments so far have provided a good platform for the national selectors.

This weekend in particular shall be excellent because the level of the competition is at another level, similar to any major tournament including the IRB Sevens because of the many different teams in the tournament including overseas.

Not only the selectors shall be able to see the Sevens talents they are looking for but, importantly, they shall be able to see those top calibre players that can take the pressure of playing with top teams.

The mental side of preparation and playing do come to the fore when the level of competition is raised to such a level and it is also very useful to get the selectors to be able to identify those players who have the mental toughness; rise to the challenge every time and not to give in too easily.

Yours truly and members of the St Johns Marist Rugby Club, a pioneer side in the abbreviated code, were fortunate to have as their mentor, former rugby great Pio Bosco Tikoisuva who stressed and was a great believer in this mental side of preparation and playing since the early 70s.

"I did it in my training and playing throughout my playing and coaching career, I did it to the players when preparing for the British Lions in 1977 and I applied it again during the overall preparation for the 2007 RWC and it worked; getting the players to believe in themselves," Bosco said.

As reported in the London newspaper The Independent quoting Brian Ashton: Want a winning team? It's all in the mindset. It supports Bosco's belief of the mental side.

The mindset matters. History and experience tell us that when all other things are equal in the pressurised cauldron of elite sport, those with the ability to think clearly, stay on-process in the face of distraction and exert some control over the way decisions are made at important moments are the ones most likely to succeed.

These are the gifts that separate the world-class player from - for want of a better word - the "ordinary" international. So how is it that in rugby, less time is spent working on the mental side of the game than on any other area of high-level performance?

It seems to me that there is an absence of logic here. Specialists in mental skills tend to be called upon as a last resort when things are going badly wrong, as opposed to going well.

Surely, it should be the other way round. Instead of starting from the negative base of playing catch-up in addressing serious problems, it seems more sensible to spend time maximising players' mindset potential when there are positive aspects of performance that require consolidation and development.

England's Rugby World Cup winning coach Clive Woodward used to say that the clever coach learnt more from winning than he did from losing, and he was right.

It seems that National Sevens coach Iliesa Tanivula's is on that track. His Fiji Barbarians team will no doubt be the team to beat at this weekend's international tournament because they have an edge over the other teams in the psychological and physical departments having played and trained together since November.

Tanivula already has his contracted players but one can ask how hard it will be for him to leave out exceptional talent that will definitely be on show.

In a way it won't be too difficult.

There maybe clauses in the contract that can accommodate any new players; one of which can be that if a player does not perform as expected both at training, results of fitness and performance etc are automatically removed.

Also, if any player misbehaves according to the camp rules etc can also be removed.

Hence, taking these into considerations there may be also provision in the agreement between the FRU Board and the Sevens coach/management that there can be a pool of players on the side that players can be called in at any time.

The contract is like any other contract, it has certain conditions.

It brings us to the debate raised by former national rep Tomasi Cama that 7s players were only playing for money and lacked the passion to play for country. Cama is right in a way but, this was the Fiji 7s team culture before Tanivula took over.

So, the biggest task Tanivula did when he came aboard was to rid of this.

Because of this culture and poor leadership, the two very prominent imminent problems Tanivula confronted were; indiscipline and poor time management. It took Tanivula the whole of the first season to get rid of these and he was ably assisted by the Manager. (Tanivula has confirmed this in previous interviews).

The culture, at the time, central to it were two major elements;

(1) Money - allowances etc, contract and of course the tour and outfitting.

(2) Rugby Star - this was ably demonstrated in the way players were reacting after scoring a try.

It became very obvious to players that the TV eye was on players when scoring a try.

This was also responsible in the lack of team play because instead of passing to another player to make the try, the ball carrier wants to score himself and most times, he cannot, the try was not scored but, a try could have been scored if he had passed the ball.

Former CEO Bosco has also written to the FRU before he took came up his posting in London, expressing his personal assessment of the sorry state of the Fiji Sevens team.

He concluded that if FRU does not get rid of that culture then, Fiji shall not win again.

Thanks to Tanivula and manager Alivereti Malo the Fiji Sevens has changed for the better both on and off the field.

It would be good and worth the money to see the players live in action. So the place to be beginning tomorrow and this weekend is the Laucala Bowl.