Selkirk rugby hero Fraser Harkness tells of joy at winning Melrose Sevens final with Shogun after over 20 years of trying

Shogun, coached by Harkness and Nick Wakley, beat former Selkirk head coach Scott Wight’s South of Scotland Barbarians 21-5 in the final at the Greenyards on Saturday to end the Souter’s 20-plus-year wait for silverware there and he was chuffed to bits to see that day arrive at long last.

Harkness, a full-back at XVs, helped Selkirk win the Kings of the 7s title in 2007 and 2008 but never won at Melrose in 11 attempts and always left there empty-handed during three seasons with Jed-Forest from 2015.

The 39-year-old’s now broken his duck, though, and he couldn’t be happier, telling us: “I’d played in one final and I’d coached in the last two with Samurai and now I’ve finally got over the line after knocking on the door since I was 16 or 17 to try and win it.

“I had 11 seasons at Selkirk so I had 11 years at Melrose with them, and I had four there with Jed and got beaten in the semi-finals by Glasgow Warriors in my first year with them and then got beaten in the final by Edinburgh the year after.

“It’s superb to finally win it. It’s hard to put into words.

“It means a lot when you come from the area. I was saying that to the boys at the weekend.

“Some of those boys were playing for the first time and they won it at the first time of asking. It took me over 20 years.”

Harkness, Wakley, performance director Terry Sands and team manager Neil Hinnigan managed to fit in two training sessions with their squad, last Thursday and Friday, ahead of Saturday’s sevens, as well as a social outing, and the Souter reckons that time together gave them the edge over Wight’s Barbarians, only assembled earlier the same day.

“We had a few team meetings but very little apart from that,” said Harkness, a player and then coach for Samurai, renamed Shogun last year, for the last decade and a half and currently an under-16s coach at Selkirk too.

“I thought it was a decent final. They’re always nervy affairs finals – you never quite know how they’re going to go.”

Shogun’s starters in Saturday’s final were Will Glover, Jamie Farndale, Tom Roche, Freddie Rodrick, Matty Davidson, Paddy Kelly and Jordan Edmunds, with Will Hendy, James Reed, Harrison Friday, Max Pepper and Ross McKnight as replacements.

Their route to the final consisted of a 50-0 first-round knockout of Edinburgh’s Heriot’s, 19-7 round-two win against the Eric Liddell 100, 38-5 victory over Selkirk in the last eight and 45-7 dismissal of the OG 7s in the semi-finals.

Saturday’s was their third final on the bounce as, in their Samurai guise, they lost out to Monaco Impis in last year’s by 26-12 and to a British Army side by 26-14 the year before.

See also …

https://www.thesouthernreporter.co.uk/sport/rugby-union/head-coach-scott-wight-hoping-to-bring-back-south-of-scotland-barbarians-4592351

and …

https://www.thesouthernreporter.co.uk/sport/rugby-union/south-of-scotland-barbarians-lose-out-to-fellow-invitational-outfit-shogun-in-final-of-rugbys-2024-melrose-sevens-4590514