Australian sevens coach Andy Friend will not select Quade Cooper in Rio Olympics squad

​AUSTRALIAN sevens coach Andy Friend will not pick Quade Cooper in his Rio squad, saying the star playmaker has not spent enough time in the Aussie program.

Quade Cooper will not be selected in the Australian sevens squad for Rio.

​QUADE Cooper’s Olympic dream is over with Australian sevens coach Andy Friend announcing the star playmaker will not be considered for selection in the Rio Games.

Friend pulled the pin on Cooper’s sevens experiment after deciding the Toulon-based playmaker had not spent enough time with the Aussie program to win a place in the squad for the last two world series tournaments in Paris and London.

Without the ​final ​chance to press his claims later this month, Cooper’s hopes of playing at the Olympics effectively ended and Friend has made an early call so the “will or won’t he?” debate doesn’t drag on unnecessarily.

Quade Cooper won’t be catching up with BFF Sonny Bill Williams in Rio.

Cooper joined the Australian program in a non-playing role in Sydney in February, and played two tournaments in Las Vegas and Vancouver.

He had mixed success but unlike fulltime Kiwi Olympic converts such as Sonny Bill Williams, Cooper then went back to Toulon and was thus unable to convert promise into potency.

“There’s no doubt Quade is a quality player, but put simply, we just haven’t had the opportunity to work with him as much as we would have liked over the past five month,” Friend said.

“Each day I have a group of 20-plus players working on different structures and patterns of play and I don’t think we would have got the very best out of Quade had we just thrown him into a tournament with limited preparation — particularly for an event as momentous as the Olympics.

“As many players have found out throughout this season’s World Series, it is no easy task to transition from fifteens to the Sevens form of the game.

“Although we are still a few months out from the Games, I think it offers the fairest outcome for everyone by making the call now. Quade can channel his energies into Toulon while we can enter the next phase of our preparations for Rio knowing the direction we want to take.

“I have complete faith in the players we currently have in the Sevens program and their ability to perform on the big stage.”

​Cooper’s road to Rio may have hit a dead end​ but fellow Wallabies converts Nick Cummins and Henry Speight remains in contention.

#Aussie7s statement: Quade Cooper. https://t.co/59NXyFNnRE

— Aussie 7s (@Aussie7s) May 5, 2016

Cummins, a former Australian sevens player when younger, picked up an ankle injury in his first tournament back in Hong Kong but he has recovered and is expected to be named in Friend’s 12-man squad for the Paris tournament on Friday morning.

Speight is currently out injured with a facial fracture suffered in a Brumbies game but the winger is training fulltime with the Australian program at Narrabeen.

Quade Cooper will not be selected in the Australian sevens squad for Rio.

The Wallaby speedster won’t play in Paris or London but Friend has set up some scratch matches against invitational sides in June for the likes of Speight and other injured players Pama Fou, Tom Cusack, Lewis Holland and Greg Jeloudev to get game time and stake their claims.

Former Waratahs backrower Pat McCutcheon is still in the mix and will play in either Paris or London.

Cooper suffered from a clash of commitments with Toulon, who were only prepared to release the 58-Test Wallaby for two tournaments. They extended it to three but Cooper’s hopes of playing in the Olympics were also going to be slim given he couldn’t train with the team.

Legendary Kiwi sevens coach Gordon Tietjens said Cooper would need five or six tournaments before Rio to be capable of playing at the Games, and to be a dependable squad member.