Jeff Probyn: Team GB face so many problems on road to Rio

When I first read Clive Woodward’s call for the 2016 Team GB Sevens squad to be playing together for two years before the event, I must admit agreeing with his point of view.
The chances of any team turning up at the Rio Olympics without the sort of intensive preparation that many athletes who competed in London put in winning any sort of medal let alone gold, seems to be remote if not impossible.
Given the qualifying criteria and the time scales involved which I was told will start two years before the Olympics,  it would seem that even Woodward’s assessment wouldn’t give sufficient time for the squad to be firing on all cylinders before facing the prospect of an ‘all or nothing’ qualifier.
While I agree with Woodward that in order to give Team GB the best shot of a medal they need to be playing together for as long as possible, there is one rather insurmountable problem facing Team GB’s prospects of managing it, which is that the players come from three separate Unions representing three separate countries.
Worse still, none of those Unions – England, Wales or Scotland – actually control the destiny of their players. In other words, unlike the majority of the competing countries, they don’t have central contracts.
Most of the rugby nations that will compete in Rio will have their players under the  control of their Unions as most are not professional.
The professional major Unions – Australia, South Africa and New Zealand – that Woodward has identified have already put in place the various systems needed to develop their Sevens players and have teams that are currently playing in the HSBC Sevens World Series.
In many ways that gives them a huge advantage over the likes of Team GB, because they have systems that allow them to separate those players they see as Sevens specialists and those they think will benefit from the Sevens experience before ‘stepping up’ to fifteens.
It also allows them to take players out of their regional setups and dedicate them solely to the Olympics without any distractions and no extra excessive financial cost to their Unions.
At the HSBC World series level, that is exactly how England work, and Scotland and Wales do the same, with young players being centrally contracted directly to the Unions for that series. But the Olympics will be different.
In England, most of the Sevens players are identified before they make it to a Premiership first team so they are not contracted to any Premiership club. This enables the Union to contract them and take them away for the most of the season.
This has helped England consistently to maintain the highest ranking of any of the Home Unions in the Sevens game, which is testament to head coach Ben Ryan’s skill as a selector as well as a coach.
The problem that Team GB face is that they would have to get the agreement of each of the Unions involved for the release of any centrally contracted players for the duration of the two years of preparation and the Olympics.
Then they would have to approach any of the Premiership clubs or Welsh and Scottish regions for the release of any of their players that were thought to offer a little something special to the squad.
As a result, they would in all probability have to take over the contract payments of all the players for the duration of their involvement as it is unlikely that anyone would want to continue to pay someone for a two or three year period while they were effectively working for someone else.
That would raise another complication, which is that most of the XV’s players would be on substantially more money than their Sevens counterpart (for instance, I would guess that George North earns far more than England Sevens captain Rob Vickerman).
The question is who would pay, and would the pay be the same for all squad players or would the XV’s players get more – even though they would not necessarily have the specialist skill set needed for the abbreviated game?
Then there is the fact that even if  Team GB were able to get the players, they would have to ask the IRB for permission to take part in the World Series, which would effectively be like asking turkeys to vote for Christmas given that the IRB is made up of those nations that stand to benefit should Team GB fail!
Even some of the XVs star players who have been identified as potential Sevens stars and have voiced a desire to be a part of this historic occasion, have done so with conditions and questions about the preparation time needed. Many, like Ben Foden, have baulked at the idea of potentially not being able to take part in the 2015 RWC here in England because of preparing for the following year’s Olympics and are asking if it would be possible to have their cake and eat it by playing XVs up to and including the RWC and then moving to Sevens with just under a year to prepare.
Even if all these obstacles could be overcome, there still remains the daunting task of gelling the players from three separate nations (Irish players, north and south would play for Ireland not Team GB) into a squad and delivering a world beating performance against nations that have had  years to perfect their systems that were put in place before Sevens rugby was an Olympic sport and built their squads.
As Woodward pointed out it is all about winning, but given all these factors it is going to be incredibly difficult and sadly, may prove impossible to win.