‘Bloody hard sport’: Hutchison addresses Aussies’ finals hoodoo

Henry Hutchison has become a highly regarded figure across his decade on the sevens circuit, becoming Australia’s captain, most-capped player and leading try-scorer.

Now, freshly back from an elbow injury, the veteran hopes to turn around Australia’s promising form across the 2025-26 series and deliver a blistering final fortnight of action to push deep into the HSBC SVNS World Championship.

The Australian men’s sevens side came into the year in the midst of a massive shake-up in the program, with a new coach in Liam Barry and a flurry of new faces joining the side.

However, the side has shown enormous potential, with podium finishes in Dubai and Perth, and strong showings in Vancouver and New York, finishing third overall on the table.

While the pool stages have shown how high the Aussies’ ceiling could be — the side regularly besting the likes of South Africa and New Zealand — progressing deep into finals and managing knock-out rugby has proven a different beast for the side to overcome.

“It’s a bloody hard sport,” Hutchison said in an interview with svns.com.

“It’s pretty unforgiving, physically so difficult and mentally pretty draining, but sevens is full of players who are very internally motivated, which is a great skill set to have as an athlete but also as a human moving forward into your life and to your next chapter.”

Hutchison believes that Australia can overcome their issues when managing finals rugby, believing the results in Hong Kong have led to the side achieving some breakthroughs in their preparation for Valladolid.

“I feel like we’re probably the best team in the pool stages, but we just don’t quite back it up in a semi or a quarter,” the Australian captain said.

“We’ve been consistent and we’ve been making semi-finals but we haven’t been able, besides Dubai, to progress past that semi, so that’s a massive area of focus for us.

“We’re also aware that it doesn’t happen overnight – the competition is just so tight and so close, and we’re still in a growth phase from a really new team last season that developed massively.”

Hutchison had to work back from elbow surgery following New York, the skipper himself not happy with his own form in the Fragrant Harbour.

However, he has been impressed with the latest crop of incoming players – and believes that should their side overcome their finals trip-ups in Spain, they are well placed to capitalise in the final leg in Bordeaux, and beyond.

“I had just 12 days of training, and the game is so fast and so elite, two weeks of not catching a ball and not running with the team, I just felt a little step behind,” he admitted.

“The team’s playing really well, which makes it easy for me to play well because we can all just focus on our own backyard, doing our own job, which wasn’t always the case last season.

“I feel like we’re always kind of scratching the surface, and if this group can really stick together and push through, we can do some good things for the men’s programme here in Australia; put ourselves on the map.

“It’s so great to be playing sevens back in Europe, but we know we’re right in the mix for the World Championship if we perform in Valladolid.”