HSBC SVNS Play-off: German sevens speedster Amekuedi ready to fly in Madrid

Makonnen Amekuedi is the speedster Germany 7s have been missing for a long time. In fact, he’s the type of speedster they’ve never had before. 

He’s the unreadable player at a poker table, the hacker who lives off grid. In a team whose every ounce of sweat is measured and whose technical ability has been carefully coached, he is a question mark. The best kind of question mark in rugby: what’s he going to do next?

At the recent HSBC SVNS Challenger tournament in Munich, very few teams could answer that question, let alone stop him scoring tries. Which he did seven times through a multitude of different means: flying finishes from the wing, line-breaks through the middle, chipping ahead to regather, and burning opponents around the edge with his flat-line speed. He did it all. 

Amekuedi, however, insists things are more ordered than they seem. He plays, he says, according to Germany’s game plan, constructed by coaches Clemens von Grumbkow and former Spanish 7s legend Pablo Feijoo.

In his words: “I am a winger and this is what wingers should do. I did my job well, I think.”

It would be hard to describe his role in Munich – just his second international sevens event – in any more humble terms than that.

But humility is something that the 21-year-old has had to draw on deeply to get to where he is at such a young age.

His learning curve has been steep. He picked up the game relatively late, at 14, when a rugby coach from SC 1880 Frankfurt suggested he try the sport. He had been a track and field athlete until then but converted to rugby after just one session.

By 17 he was a German U18 international. He then spent three years out of the game with a meniscus injury in his left knee – a period in which he ‘chilled, worked, and played street basketball a lot’.

For work, he mostly chose service sector jobs, including working in an ice cream parlour. 

He was then lured back to rugby in 2022 by Germany’s U20s coach Samy Füchsel, who asked him to consider getting fit for that summer’s Rugby Europe U20s tournament.

Which he did – and although Germany only won one match, Amekuedi impressed enough to earn a trial with the senior sevens team. The trial went well and Amekuedi was invited to join the national sevens programme based in Heidelberg.

Against the backdrop of Heidelberg’s mediaeval turrets and cobbled streets, Amekuedi’s eyes were opened as to what it would take if he were to truly excel at sevens.

Hard opening

One particular internal tournament sticks in his mind, his first.

“I was awful,” Amekuedi chuckled. “I was just unfit, I didn’t know the game enough, I was very surprised at how hard it was.

“It was a pretty humbling experience, and that motivated me. I knew I had a lot of work to do before I could dream of playing important matches.

“Before going to Heidelberg I wasn’t motivated in the gym, I wasn’t as eager to learn as I am now. I didn’t see rugby as something I had to learn. I saw it as a game but now I see it as so much more. Growth is about: the more you know, the more questions you have.”

After Munich, it’s safe to say Amekuedi has caught up on his rugby education. Assessing what his strengths are now, he is typically level-headed. 

“My ball carrying is quite good,” he said. “I’m pretty fast, I can round most of the players. I can jump very high so that’s good for kick-offs.”

Indeed, Amekuedi’s flying skills become obvious after watching him for a matter of minutes, either at restarts or when he takes to the air to score tries. It’s a facet of his game that has its origins in his street basketball days.

“I wasn’t one of the tallest guys but I loved to dunk,” he said. “I can dunk quite well. The first time I jumped for a try, I did it because I just wanted to be sure of scoring. I’ve seen a lot of South African guys do it and it looks cool, it’s fun. So after that, I did it a bit more.”

Amekuedi lists Cheslin Kolbe as one of his rugby idols but he is aware that this weekend – with the USA in Germany’s group – he will likely be up against another star of the world game, and one of the best sevens finishers of all time, in Perry Baker.

Although he’s excited by that idea, he doesn’t see sevens as a game of one-on-one, and instead highlights how much work his team-mates do to pull opponents out of position and create openings.

“These are teams [the USA] that you watch on TV – so it’s a big chance for everybody,” Amekuedi said. “I’m going to play against them, probably, so I’ve got to analyse their game and see how I can do my best against them.

“But it depends on how we set-up, we might play a couple of phases here and there and then we’ll attack their weakest point. It can just be coincidence that I’m there.”

Coincidence is one way of putting it. And an appropriate one given the threat that Amekuedi poses. Because how do you defend against a coincidence?

Certainly no-one on this year’s SVNS Challenger Series figured out how to defend against the coincidence of Makonnen Amekuedi. 

Madrid, you have been warned.