Ireland men's 7s secure Olympic quarter-final place with game to ...
It doesn’t seem all that long since an Irish rugby team was leaving this iconic venue with their ambitions in tatters, defeat to New Zealand in a World Cup quarter-final bringing an end to a riotous couple of months for the team and its fans in France.
Nine months later and another Irish rugby squad has set an upbeat tone for all 133 athletes set to represent their country at these 2024 Olympics by winning their opening two sevens rugby games and sealing their place in the last eight.
James Topping’s men have set themselves up perfectly for what’s next. They did it without anything in the way of scares, their dominance of South Africa in their Group A opener not nearly reflected in a 10-5 scoreline.
That was followed with a straightforward 40-5 victory against Japan later in the evening, Terry Kennedy catching the eye in both games and Hugo Keenan playing his part having switched from Leinster and the Ireland XVs for the summer.
There was only a small but significant smattering of green around the stadium this time but the opening bars of ‘Zombie’ blared from the public address yet again. Maybe this time it will play all the way to the end.
Their last group assignment is a doozy, Thursday’s meeting with a New Zealand side containing some newish faces but still favourites for the gold medal when the end games come around on Saturday.
Beat the Kiwis and the path to the final would be so much smoother. That’s a big ask but this is an Irish team that finished second - and one place above New Zealand - on the regular HSBC sevens circuit earlier this year.
Zac Ward, another to play a major role on day one, had a chat with younger brother Bryn before all this. Bryn was on the Ireland U20s side that lost to the Baby Blacks in the World U20s Championship recently. He’d love his bro to get some revenge.
“It was mentioned, the first thing he said to me.”
Whatever comes next, James Topping’s side has exorcised some demons from Tokyo in 2021 when they lost their first two games to South Africa and the USA, a belated defeat of Kenya proving too little too late on the way to a premature exit.
A clutch of players spoke here of the long wait before this opening chapter, the team having arrived in their holding camp in Tours two weeks ago and moved up to the Olympic Village earlier this week where distractions can proliferate.
Ward was at a water fountain when an awful commotion broke out around him and found that tennis stars Carlow Alcaraz and Rafa Nadal were standing beside him. So what could he do other than get the obligatory selfie.
“Oh yeah, definitely, and straight into my family group chat!”
Captain Harry McNulty touched on the same issues later, how they had waited patiently for this day to come, and all in the knowledge that their results on the global stage have marked them out as a real medal hope.
“We were in the Village waiting, and ready to go, ready to go, and I’m so glad we were able to get that win and release some pressures,” he admitted in the mixed zone. “Yes there’s expectation, yes we came second in the world.
“It’s unbelievable, but I still know that every team in this competition can beat everyone else, so it’s hard to push that out to the public and for them to understand there are nations here who might not be known as rugby strongholds from a 15s point of view.”
Argentina and Morocco got these Olympics officially underway with the opening football group game at the Stade Geoffrey-Guichard in Saint-Etienne earlier in the day, but it was Australia and Samoa who started the party in the capital with the first sevens tie.
For most of those present at the Stade de France, though, it was the sight of the French team sprinting from the corner tunnel here in Saint-Denis before the third game that signalled the true starting point for Paris 2024.
This was set up to be a grand opening for Team France in general with their golden boy Antoine Dupont on hand to steer a side that had claimed the HSBC Grand Final this year to the promised land of the Olympic podium’s top step.
Nobody told their opponents.
The USA are ranked ninth in the world but proved to be sticky customers first up. They led 7-5 at the interval and had a kick to win it at the end. The end result was a 12-12 draw and France lived dangerously again in their second tie.
Uruguay had been hammered 40-12 by Fiji earlier but they ran the hosts agonisingly close, losing out in the end on a scoreline of 19-12. Proof again that McNulty’s warning about the pitfalls inherent in this form of the game can never be taken lightly.
