When this season began Dougie Fife would have expected to be on the Gold Coast right now, preparing to represent Scotland in the Commonwealth Games.
Since this season also contains a sevens World Cup, while he thoroughly enjoyed globe-trotting with the Scotland sevens squad last season after being deemed surplus to requirements at Edinburgh, he admits to some mixed feelings about missing out on those glamour trips.
“There’s been loads of chat about it,” he said. “At the start of the year the chat was that with the World Series, the Commonwealth Games and the World Cup it was a massive year for sevens. We had a few Commonwealth Games open days with all the other athletes. It’s something different, something special being in that multi-sport environment, so it will be brilliant for the boys who are involved and fingers crossed they do well.”
While Scotland are in a tough pool, drawn alongside world No.1-ranked South Africa with only one team qualifying for the medal matches, Fife believes they have given themselves every chance of doing so by sending a full strength side to last weekend’s Hong Kong sevens tournament while some of their rivals opted instead for training camps, since Scotland squads have a track record of performing better on the second competitive weekends of overseas tours.
“You’ve got to top that pool which is a bit different compared with the World Series where the top two go through [but] they’ve had that week together, whereas South Africa have obviously been in a training camp with a different squad out in Hong Kong and that’s precious in sevens.
You need to be playing together, so I think it’s good that they did that and didn’t just take a team to the Gold Coast,” he observed.
So would he prefer to be in Australia, having fun in the sun, rather than facing the defending champion Scarlets?
“Tough question, but I’m with Edinburgh now. It’s great to be back and I am enjoying it. It would be awesome to be part of the Commonwealth Games but that’s where I am. We’re lucky to be in a good position to do something special this year,” he replied.
The winger cum full-back knows that in rugby’s grander scheme of things he is involved in much more important matters this weekend as Edinburgh seek to close in on a PRO14 play-off place, albeit last weekend’s defeat to Ulster left them further away than they began since a solitary win in that match would have seen off the Irish province, instead of which Edinburgh may now need a win and some bonus points to get there.
“We’ve let ourselves down at the weekend and we were all really gutted about that, but luckily we’ve put ourselves in a position where we’ve got another shot to push Scarlets for second place and hopefully get away from Ulster in third.”
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