A few days ago I found myself thinking that we were surely due some news regarding this summer’s Premiership Rugby 7s Series. Perhaps Premiership Rugby have hired a psychic as when I looked on their website Tuesday evening, there was a story giving the dates and venue for this season’s tournament.

Unfortunately this news did not leave me as happy as I was hoping, and from reading the first paragraph, some of you may have already guessed why.

In previous years the competing teams – originally just the 12 teams in the upcoming Premiership year, but also the 4 Welsh Regions since 2014 – took part in pools of 4 teams, each pool being hosted by one of the teams in that pool. The final was then played at another venue, with the top 2 teams from each pool progressing to the final. This means that each of the previous tournaments have featured at least 4 host venues from around the UK. This time, however, Premiership Rugby have decided to change the style to what we saw during the Rio Olympics, with the 12 Premiership clubs competing over 2 days at Franklin’s Gardens.

While I think that it is a shame that the Welsh regions are no longer involved, I can understand the decision to copy the Rio format as this will make it easier for more casual fans to follow and understand. However, I feel that this is a mistake as we are now expecting everyone to make their way to Northampton for the tournament.

I’ve been lucky enough to attend a number of the pool stages at Kingsholm and have noticed the increase in popularity over the years as more people get into 7s. However, this was often helped by the pools often containing local rivals, so travel was less of an issue. Now that fans are expected to travel to Northampton, I would be very surprised if the tournament gets the same level of attendance as in recent years. Putting the first day of the tournament on a Friday will not help either, as fans will have to contend with work commitments and rush hour making travel to the event even more difficult.

If Premiership Rugby do decide to keep this format, then I would like to see them make it into – as the name suggests – a series, much like a Premiership version of the World Rugby Sevens Series, with legs held at each of the Premiership clubs. This way, casual fans can choose to attend their local leg of the tournament, while more dedicated fans could choose to attend multiple legs. It would also be easy enough for clubs to add their home leg into their season ticket package in order to help encourage high attendances, as the cost for a ticket in the past has never been that high. Granted, we probably wouldn’t be able to hold the entire series in the preseason, but we could have weekly legs in the preseason and perhaps even the opening weeks of the Premiership season, then complete the tournament towards the end of the season as the weather begins to improve again.

Playing legs during the season would also encourage teams to use players from their academy or ‘A’ teams as their stars will be otherwise engaged, which gives younger players more chance to gain experience in front of a big crowd. This would also surely be a good way for national team coaches like Simon Amor to identify future players for the World Series and other international tournaments.

Whatever happens, I will be interested to see how successful the new format of the tournament is and also to see what the next step is moving forward.

What are your thoughts on the new format? Is there anything you want to change about the Series? Comment on here or feel free to tweet me @PS_tetheridge