Shogun rack up back-to-back Melrose Sevens wins

That was the first successful defence of the event’s 1883 Centenary Cup since Glasgow Warriors’ back-to-back wins in 2014 and 2015 and Shogun – also finalists under their previous name of Samurai in 2022 and 2023, losing out to a British Army side by 26-14 and Monaco Impis by 26-12 respectively – are now targeting matching the hat-trick of victories recorded by Gala from 1970 to 1972.

It was also as close as a Borders club have got to winning at Melrose since the hosts made it to 2018’s final, losing 19-14 to Watsonians.

This year’s final was Melrose’s third in the last ten years, having also lost to Harlequins, by 31-19, in 2017, and a South of Scotland Barbarians team overseen by their co-head coach Scott Wight also made it to last year’s, losing 21-5 to Shogun.

Melrose had already been confirmed as this year’s Kings of the 7s champions by their last-four placing at Jed-Forest Sevens a week prior but the seven points they picked up for making it to the final in front of a crowd of 7,000 took them 22 clear of Edinburgh Academical at the top of the competition’s leaderboard on 72.

It was their seventh final of this season, four of them yielding wins – at Peebles last August and Hawick, Berwick and Earlston in April – accompanied by two quarter-final exits along with their last-four knockout in Jedburgh.

Their route to the final consisted of a round-two knockout of London Scottish by 5-0, a 22-19 win against Currie Chieftains in the last eight and a 19-14 dismissal of an academy team from United Rugby Championship outfit Edinburgh featuring Borderers Nairn Moncrieff and Ross Wolfenden in the semi-finals.

Shogun got there via wins by 20-7 versus Edinburgh’s Heriot’s in round one, 31-7 against Selkirk in round two, 29-5 facing Monaco in the quarter-finals and 33-26 against Ayr in the last four.

Melrose were the only one of the seven sets of Borderers competing, all given byes to round two, not to fall at the first hurdle, with losses for Peebles to Currie by 24-12, Hawick to Breadalbane Storm by 45-10, Kelso to Monaco by 31-12, Gala to New Zealand’s Te Awamutu by 47-0 and Jed to Ayr by 31-5, as well as Selkirk’s defeat by Shogun, and coach Callum Anderson was pleased to see them negotiate three rounds on their way to a final decided by a single score, saying: “I’m immensely proud of all of our efforts.

“I’m just really, really gutted because there was so much effort there. We were just so close.

“I just thought we could have had a moment that could have turned the game for us. Unfortunately, it fell to them but I couldn’t be more proud of my boys.

“They came out with confidence to show what we’ve done over the season and I think we showed up really well. We controlled the ball brilliantly.”

Roly Brett put the hosts in front in the final with an unconverted try but Shogun hit back with two scores, one of them converted by Francisco Cosculluela, from Gabriel Rocaries and Will Hendy to clinch victory.

Shogun’s Cosculluela, 24, a Spanish sevens international, was named as player of the tournament.

Accompanying Brett in the hosts’ squad for the concluding round of this season’s Kings of the 7s, captained by Patrick Anderson, were Corey Goldsbrough, Keiran Clark, Declan Mulcahy, Ruairidh Lindsay, Connor Spence, Donald and Douglas Crawford, Callum Henderson, Scott Clark and Matthew Bertram.

Shogun’s squad, mostly made up of Spain sevens internationals, included one Borderer, Kelso’s Archie Barbour, and was coached by another, Selkirk’s Fraser Harkness, alongside Nick Wakley, with Kelso’s Neil Hinnigan and Sara Davies as team managers and Terry Sands as performance director.

Former Scotland sevens internationalist Harkness, 40, was delighted to win at Melrose again after breaking a duck stretching back over 20 years last time round and he hopes to be able to try for a third title on the trot in 2026, telling us: “We’d definitely be up for another shot at it if we’re invited back.

“We’ll just need to see when the invites go out if we get one but it would be great to go for three. That’s not been done very often and it’s certainly not been done for a long time.

“Winning again was just as good as first time round.

“It was a funny old day as we were in the preliminaries and started really early. That made it a long, intense day and we had a very different squad to last year, with only two players having played then. It was very different but just as enjoyable.

“It was a competitive final and I thought Melrose did really well. They kept the ball well but we were really patient. We had to be because they look after the ball so well, like an old-school sevens team trying to tire their opposition out, but we just caught them at good times to get our tries.

“We know it’s a bit heartbreaking if you keep the ball for, say, six minutes and then it’s turned over and 30 seconds later the opposing team are under the sticks but that’s kind of how it played out for us.

“We knew it was going to be like that and we’d spoken about being patient and biding our time and taking our opportunities when we got them.”

Last year’s ladies’ cup victory was Harkness’s first after almost a quarter of a century of trying, first with Selkirk, then Jed-Forest, then Samurai.

Making up the rest of Shogun’s squad were Ross McKnight, Tom Burton, Charlie Coe, Angel Bozal, Noah Canepa, Jaime Matta and Manuel and Tobias Sainz-Trape.

McKnight and Hendy were Shogun’s sole survivors from their 2024 Melrose Sevens squad and Matta was the only member of their Spanish contingent to have played at Melrose before.

Explaining that turnaround in personnel, Harkness, an under-18s coach at Selkirk, said: “It’s pretty much down to who’s available. It’s who Terry can get hold of at the time.

“I think it was about a month out that we had a couple of call-offs, boys pulling out to play for other teams, but then we got contacted by Spain wondering if we’d take some of their boys, so we had eight of them arrive on the Wednesday night.”

They managed to fit in two hours’ training between then and Saturday and that turned out to be enough.

“You don’t really coach these guys, you just kind of facilitate them,” said Harkness. “They have a way of playing and they understand the game, so you just try to manage how they go about it.

“You only get three hours in the paddock with them before games and that’s not a lot of time, so you’ve got to back your systems and allow them to do what they want to do.”

Another Borderer given cause for celebration was Jedburgh’s Chris Laidlaw as his Harlequins side won the women’s final, seeing off Shogun by 28-7.