Charlotte Caslick and the ‘aussie 7s’ succeed in Seville

Back in Victory Lane. The Aussie 7s put the finishing touch to the HSBC World Rugby Seven Series of Spain with a meritorious victory over a strong Ireland side. After Russia stood in the way of the Australians in the Malaga semifinals, the HSBC World Rugby Seven Series leaders gained the third gold medal of the season in Seville.

A historical event for Spain. On the first ever ‘visit’ of the World Rugby Seven Series to the country, a player, a star of the Australian rugby, took the field for the wallabies in both, the Málaga and Seville series, and continued extending her illustrious career. After 9 years on duty for the international side, the 26 years old player, keeps on adding achievements to her curriculum. To the many triumphs on the HSBC World Rugby Seven Series and the Olympic Gold medal in Rio 2016, Charlotte holds the best rugby 7 player of the year 2016 award, a fact she understands as: “it was awesome! I had a really good year in 2016, it was great. However I had some really great players alongside me like Alicia Quirk and Emilee Cherry we were really good together and I think that was also part of the success that I had and the team had”.

With the dream of living a new olympic experience, and directing all the efforts towards the Tokyo 2020 meeting, the Covid pandemic wrote a new chapter in history. Playing in empty stadia all through the season, living in a covid bubble and the cancelation of tournaments were just followed by the postponement of the Tokyo olympics. With a delay of a year, and after all the impact of the suspension of the ‘games’, the aussie 7s ended up ranking 5th. “It was really disappointing. I guess that postponing it was hard and we lost a few really key players in that time and then we didn’t play our best in the quarter final. It was pretty hard and we really worked on that since then and I think we all learnt a lot from that experience and we are kind of learning from that still”, Charlotte explains. Moreover, due to the success on the Rio games, the Australian player explains that “we definitely thought we were capable of getting on the podium, so we were really disappointed with the 5th place, but I guess that’s rugby sevens, you can lose one game and end up in that position so I think that what we took away from that were some really key learnings and really improved ourselves as a group”.

Putting into value the Spanish experience, Caslick claims that: “ It has been awesome. We have loved it here. Obviously Malaga was great on the beach, we really enjoyed that. And Seville is such a beautiful place! Plus the weather has been awesome so we had a great time”. 

Two weeks to which the Australian 7 side put the finishing touch defeating Ireland in the final for the gold: “we were really excited to face Ireland. We missed the final last week so we were really excited to play Ireland. I think they had been playing very well on the last two weeks, so meeting them in the final was really good. We knew we had to play our best to beat them”.

With some recovery weeks ahead, the aussie 7s will ‘hit the road’ again in April, with the clear goal of keeping up the momentum and looking forward to a new final.

Anuar Gómez.