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Business News/ News / Business Of Life/  Sri Lanka’s rugby connection
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Sri Lanka’s rugby connection

Rugby is without doubt the No.2 sport in the country, after cricket

Waisake Naholo (in black) of the New Zealand All Blacks during the Rugby Championship. Photo: Hagen Hopkins/Getty ImagesPremium
Waisake Naholo (in black) of the New Zealand All Blacks during the Rugby Championship. Photo: Hagen Hopkins/Getty Images

NEW DELHI :

It’s been three weeks in Sri Lanka and the sports pages of its English dailies look familiar. Certain sporting themes, you remember, remain constant across countries. Sri Lanka’s top men’s marathon runner is at odds with his federation for not supporting his push for an International Olympic Committee scholarship to prepare for the 2016 Rio Olympics. He has qualified for Rio, lives in the UK and trains by running to and from the bakery store he works at. A Ceylon Today headline reads “Deplorable Behaviour Stuns Official"; the article details a fight following the Sri Lanka Body Building and Fitness Federation election. But past Usain Bolt’s eye-goggling world championship feats and European football, there is another headline which wouldn’t have made the Indian papers, but is a staple in Sri Lanka—“Wonder cure puts Naholo in World Cup".

Who is Naholo? Which world cup is this? It belongs to a sport in which Sri Lanka can argue that it is the world’s second oldest playing nation. In which it is ranked higher than India. This is rugby. A 2011 study, conducted by the Centre for the International Business of Sport at the UK’s Coventry University, put the number of registered rugby players in Sri Lanka at 103,325. A 2014 mapping of the sport by World Rugby, which runs the global game, puts the figure at 47,000 registered players and more than 74,000 total players (including the recreational).

Regardless of the exact numbers, Sri Lanka’s connect with rugby runs deep. It is without doubt the No.2 sport in the country, after cricket. Sri Lanka are ranked No.37 in the world and fourth in Asia, behind Japan, Hong Kong and Korea (India, in case anyone is interested, are a humble 74), according to the latest rankings. The national team’s performances in the Asia Rugby Under 20 Sevens Series recently was followed in detail in the papers; at ThePapare.com, a slick multi-sport website for Sri Lankan sport, rugby features as the first left-hand “home" link, with cricket and football following it—much like Espn.com offers National Football League first or BBC.com does news before sport and weather.

Rugby came to Sri Lanka like cricket did, through British colonizers, and grew in its schools. The country’s first rugby club, the Colombo Football Club, was formed in 1879 and a match was played that year on 30 June between Colombo and a “World" team. It is this, Sri Lankans say, that makes them the second oldest rugby playing nation in the world after England. Sri Lanka’s formal “Union", its official ruling body, was formed in 1908, making it the first Union in Asia. Often, you hear people refer to the sport as “rugger" in a nice old-fashioned way.

Apart from the history and club structures, the details of which are freely available on the Internet, I wanted to find out what the sport means to Sri Lankans today, given its utter physicality and Anglo-Saxon mythology going back more than a hundred years. I asked Shanaka Amarasinghe, lawyer, radio host and the country’s leading rugby analyst, to explain. Amarasinghe runs a weekly sports show, The Score, on a Colombo FM radio channel, on which anyone can be pilloried or praised, and to give Sri Lankan sports officials and athletes due credit, they are willing to turn up and take the flak.

As a sport, Amarasinghe says, rugby represents to him “the future" if it is properly funded and managed. He believes that rugby is able to showcase character, skills and discipline “on a much larger scale at every level". The “much larger than" comparison is naturally made with cricket, in which he believes demands of temperament and ability need to be summoned mostly in Test cricket. The footmen of first-class cricket everywhere will burst into tears at this notion, but never mind.

Sri Lankan rugby must feel isolated in a region where the closest kindred souls, he says, lie about 2,300km east, in Malaysia and Singapore. The region, Amarasinghe says, is “dwarfed by Indian cricket. It is an ugly rash that has spread across the subcontinent. There is no room for anything else." Sri Lankan cricket fans would be outraged at being bracketed with their bigger, richer, flashier Indian cousins. That debate over identities is best conducted between Sri Lankans over arrack, ginger beer and devilled beef by the sea, with any Indians in the vicinity staying quiet and merely taking notes.

But does rugby in Sri Lanka remain a posh-school sport? An upper-class pursuit, featuring all body types and much manly gut-busting? Amarasinghe, who has played rugby “considerably" but not cricket, will have none of this stereotype. It has, he says, changed over the last decade, and the sport is becoming more popular because the kids from posh schools move on to other career opportunities. “Also because the hungrier, more rural kids are stronger, faster, and need rugby success more." My Espncricinfo colleague in Sri Lanka, Fidel Fernando, disagrees. “Is anyone seen playing touch rugby on Galle Face Green?" he asks, referring to the vast open space on the Colombo seafront where families gather to fly kites and play cricket. Ask a trishaw driver, he goes on, to name one rugby player in Sri Lanka and other than the sons of former president Mahinda Rajapaksa, they will not remember any. Almost as if to challenge that theory, the last trishaw I got into on Tuesday had photographs of local rugby players stuck on its windshield, and the driver, a die-hard fan, was happy to name players from the Kandy and Colombo clubs.

It is not that Sri Lankan rugby does not find itself on the front pages, though; in a completely unrelated twist that has haunted the game recently, members of the presidential security division staff under Rajapaksa are being linked to the murder of a leading rugby player, Wasim Thajudeen, in May 2012. For those interested, Sri Lankan cyberspace will continue to reveal more.

And that story about Naholo’s wonder cure? That is Waisake Naholo, winger for the All Blacks, who was doomed to miss the Rugby World Cup after he fractured his leg during a match in July. The wonder cure happens to be one Indians will be familiar with: Naholo’s uncle in his native Fiji wrapped the broken leg in kawakawarau leaves for four days. When the leaves were removed, the pain reduced. Naholo was named on the All Blacks World Cup squad, and his movements will be followed at the Rugby World Cup, which opens in England later this month. Enjoy.

Sharda Ugra is senior editor at Espncricinfo.

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Published: 02 Sep 2015, 08:48 PM IST
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