they take the leggings and feather collars of when they play, apparently.
If you hap­pen to see a group of large, fit, young lads wan­der­ing about the Welling­ton streets this week, chances are you’ve either stum­bled across the cast of Down­stage’s lat­est play ‘The Boys in the Band’ , or, and more like­ly, one of the Rug­by Sev­ens teams that are in town for this week­end’s tour­na­ment.

More info here, draw here, results here. Quick ref­er­ence for Fri­day’s pool play: New Zealand plays Kenya at 3:12pm, the Cook Islands at 6:08pm, and wrap up the pool play by tak­ing on Samoa at 9:56pm (those lat­er games all look to be cork­ers in fact, with South Africa v. Argenti­na, Fiji v. France and Eng­land v. Aus­tralia com­ing imme­di­ate­ly before the last NZ game).

And don’t hold your breath on the NZ team defend­ing their crown. Poor old Titch is lament­ing (and right­ly enough) his inabil­i­ty to get a full-strength team togeth­er when the Super 14 teams are already play­ing pre-sea­son warm-ups, and won’t release play­ers for what is the high­est pro­file sev­ens event in New Zealand (and one of the top two or three in the world). As a result, the NZ Her­ald reports that…

More than half of the squad to defend New Zealand’s IRB Welling­ton sev­ens crown have nev­er played for their coun­try and coach Gor­don Tiet­jens will be “pleas­ant­ly sur­prised” if his side can win the tour­na­ment.

“Pleas­ant­ly sur­prised”? Still, we were hav­ing the same pes­simistic thoughts before the announc­ing of the host of the 2011 Rug­by World Cup, so per­haps there is some hope.