Hong Kong

For decades, the Hong Kong Sevens has been the epicentre of rugby in the region, but now, with the support of the world’s most famous tournament for the abridged game, the South China Tigers are changing the landscape.

When Britain took control of Hong Kong Island, and later leased Kowloon, the New Territories and some 135 islands from the People’s Republic, it knew it had a gem. Long before it was the modern, shiny metropolis it is today, Hong Kong was always a centre for international trade, with the Portuguese among the first to create a hub back in 1514, and others soon followed. Money has always been made here. It’s ranked sixth in cities with the most global billionaires; 1,530 global businesses have a Hong Kong home; 2,800 new companies started up here in 2018; its GDP is US$341 billion and Forbes list it as No.3 in the world for business [Sweden is No.2 and, remarkably, UK is No.1].

Today, Hong Kong is evolving as part of the Greater Bay Area – the collective name for southern China’s Pearl River Delta region and encompassing the nine cities of Guandong plus Hong Kong and Macau. The area is being woven together with high-speed transport links with bridges literally being built to bind cities together. And it’s sharing collective goals too. This 56,000 square kilometre patch of China is worth a GDP of US$1.5 trillion and is where five per cent of China’s population resides, around 69.5m souls. The potential is vast, not just on the business front, but in sport too. Football has grown with an estimated 300m fans in the country and the likes of Guangzhou Evergrande attracting average attendances of 47,000 and among the biggest spending clubs on the planet. 

Rugby hit the Chinese headlines as recently as two years ago with talk of investment by big companies into the fifteens game, but the silence since has been deafening. The same can’t be said for the shortened version of the game as the carrot of Olympic Gold is giving China a focus on sevens it’s never had before.

Fifteens development, meanwhile, and the development of a grassroots base, or any element of a rugby pyramid for that matter – top or bottom – has seemingly ground to a halt. The fanfare of imminent investment has long since faded, but rugby has made inroads, and like so many things in China, it’s found its way via Hong Kong.

The office of the Hong Kong Rugby Football Union sits in the shadow of the state-owned Hong Kong Stadium that hosts its annual sevens bonanza every year. Locked up from everyone at other times – we even struggle to get access for pictures when we visit – it’s as if this giant white metal hulk of a stadium spends half of its year waiting for the Fijian magicians and the sevens circus to arrive, and the other half recovering from the experience of hosting 120,000 fans that boost the local economy by some HK$380m (£38m). It does occasionally get roused in between for the odd exhibition match of football or rugby, perhaps even a concert, but basically everything fails to live up to the Hong Kong Sevens. 

You can apply that to the world game too, aside from the Rugby World Cup, as a one-off tournament, nothing in rugby competes with the Hong Kong Sevens. It’s not only the showpiece of the world sevens game, but also the lifeblood for rugby in Hong Kong and China. If there had been no rugby in Hong Kong, rugby in China would be even further back than it is now.

Sixty-eight-year-old Hong Kong-born KK Chiu can explain further. He learnt to play rugby when he studied for a PE degree in Taiwan and returned in 1976. 

He barely played a game on his return, but when he did, he was spotted by former Hong Kong technical director George Simpkin in the 1980s. “When Hong Kong was facing the handover back to China, the Hong Kong RFU was worried that if we didn’t get any local people playing rugby after 1997 [the date of the handover] then rugby would be in Hong Kong no more,” he explains from the offices of the Hong Kong RFU. “So they brought in George Simpkin from New Zealand – who had coached Fiji and Waikato – to promote the game to local Chinese people. They ran a touch course, I went along, he saw I could play and asked me to help out.”

Three decades on and KK is still ‘helping out’, having long since given up his job as a PE teacher to work in developing rugby. Together with George, his remit had been to take the game from a smattering of army, police and ex-pat teams to something understood and enjoyed by the locals. Given the future was now very much one involving the People’s Republic of China, they also knew developing the sport in the mainland was key. “I think it was about 1990 and I was watching the sports news on television and they said Beijing had a rugby team,” recalls KK. “The next day I tried to find out more, so I rang the reporter, the news agency, and found out the side was based at Beijing Agricultural University. Eventually I found the professor in charge of the team, Professor Cao Xi-huang, and wrote him a letter.”

Four weeks later, a response arrived welcoming any help. “George managed to get some funding and we started to recruit all of the agricultural universities,” continues KK. “We sent a coach to Beijing to host a coaching course for all of the teachers and we then ran a competition between the universities.”

Before then, China had only ever seen occasional games and nothing at all since World War Two, so setting up an inter-university competition was a major step. It continued into the 1990s, and KK’s next aim was to get a union up and running. “Every year we had one or two tournaments, just for a couple of days, and I was in contact with the Chinese Sports Commission to try and encourage them to form a rugby union.”

The first stumbling block was a minor one. “They said there could only be one ‘union’ in China, the workers’ union, so they’d have to be the Chinese Rugby Football Association,” says KK. 

That was easily solved, the second issue was a bit trickier. “I had a phone call from the PA of China’s Secretary General for sport who was in Hong Kong and wanted to see the president of the Hong Kong Rugby Football Union,” says KK. “We met, and he knew everything about rugby and that we were trying to set up a union and said, ‘we’re happy to have rugby in China, but there’s one thing you have to do’. 

“He said, ‘you can only have one China’. At the time Taiwan had registered as the Republic of China with the IRB, so he said, ‘if you want China to join you can’t have the Republic of China’. We had to let Taiwan know that they had to change their name to Chinese Taipei Rugby Football Union.”

Taiwan had agreed in principle. “We’d sent them the form to fill in and waited a year, but nothing happened. Eventually, when I next visited, I went into the office and saw the form on someone’s desk, I asked them why they hadn’t done anything and they just responded, ‘ah, yes, we don’t know how to fill the form in’. Under KK’s guidance, the form was filled in, and China joined the IRB [now World Rugby].

Relationships between the two unions remained, with the People’s Liberation Army even sending a team down to join the Hong Kong leagues. Progress since, however, has been slow. “I expect more from China,” says KK. “They have more people to choose from and, compare the size too, people in south China are a lot smaller than people in the north, so they have physicality on their side too.”

Like many developing nations, that route seems to be through the sevens where women are showing the most potential. “One day we’ll have Chinese on the world stage of rugby,” says KK. “I think in twenty years’ time women’s rugby will be there.”

Fifteens and Hong Kong doesn’t seem to sit well. At least not when you say it out loud, Hong Kong without a Sevens suffix just feels wrong. It’s why George Simpkin had to change things before the handover. He started by bringing in players from overseas to parachute into Hong Kong’s top sides, strengthening the club game while also using them to coach local Chinese. Coupled with a unique one-year-eligibility rule for Hong Kong at the time, it also meant the national team could step up a peg or five. “We almost qualified for the 1995 World Cup,” explains Robbie McRobbie, the unions’ chief executive. “George left one of the biggest imprints on Hong Kong rugby, he brought in players from New Zealand, Australia, Tonga, the likes of Vaughan Going and Isi Tuivai (two Tongan caps, 14 Hong Kong). Almost overnight, players who had been playing in our first division were suddenly in the second division as George’s gang arrived.”

Funded by the ever-growing sevens event, Hong Kong were becoming big players. “We were playing in the Pacific Rim and beating the likes of USA, Japan and Canada,” continues Robbie. “We would have qualified for the World Cup, but we thought Korea was going to be easy, put out a weakened side and ended up losing. We had an outside chance to qualify on the final day but had to score a lot of points, we were playing Singapore and beat them 164-13. One of our players scored ten tries, I think it’s still a world record. We still didn’t qualify though, Japan went through.”

That was Hong Kong’s first dalliance with professionalism and, as that era faded, the work at grassroots started to pay dividends. Robbie himself joined on the development side and found some innovative ways to encourage local engagement. “We said to the police, ‘let’s do a youth prevention programme – you identify schools, we’ll go into the school and teach rugby with a positive, healthy, anti-crime theme’. 

“So all the kids would come along, get coached and get a ball with a pledge not to join the triads or take drugs. We’d use police rugby players as mentors and that started the ‘Don’t drop the ball’ programme.

“On the back end of working with kids from disadvantaged backgrounds, we’ve had 25 of them become police officers which is pretty phenomenal,” explains Robbie. “Four of them have also come through and now work for us as development officers and as well as those that have played in the Premiership, we’ve got two in the sevens programme.” 

The initiative with the police was joined by other education-based programmes, covering everything from learning English with rugby, to themes based around respect. Mixed ability, deaf rugby and wheelchair rugby followed to ensure rugby wasn’t just accessible, but accessible to all. 

As a result, numbers grew, with Hong Kong now home to around 6,000 minis up to the age of 12 (doubled from when they started), a league of 81 teams, men and women, and a premiership of six sides, all coached by professionals with semi-professional players. 

More importantly, the growth has been through developing local talent with 270 primary schools playing rugby – more than half of the city state’s total, helping to achieve the goals that were created through fear of the sport’s demise in a post-Britain Hong Kong. 

At the elite end of the game, four years ago, they took a second step into professionalism, around 20 years after George’s first attempt. A squad of 32 Hong Kong-qualified players were handed professional contracts and put on an elite programme with the aim of qualifying for the 2019 Rugby World Cup. 

Obviously, the perennial Asian shoo-ins, Japan, were already there as hosts, so it should, in theory, have opened the door for another nation but, sadly, in the absence of the 25-time Asian champions, World Rugby removed Asia’s guaranteed qualification spot. Hong Kong were going to have to do it the hard way.

The Hong Kong professional rugby model is unique. “We’ve got 32 professional players that train as you expect a professional to train but they’re all involved with six different clubs,” Andy Hall, the union’s head of elite rugby tells us from the South China Athletics Association building, where many of Hong Kong’s rugby professionals are based. “So they train with us during the day, then on Tuesday and Thursday evenings they all dissipate to the clubs for training, then play against each other on Saturdays before coming back together with us on Monday to recuperate – I don’t know anywhere else but Hong Kong you’d find a model like it.”

The former Glasgow lock, who was capped by Scotland, has been in Hong Kong for nine years, and heads up the professional set-up alongside former Nottingham captain Craig Hammond. 

Together with head coach Leigh Jones and chief rugby operations officer Dai Rees, they helped take Hong Kong to the very brink of this year’s world cup, before losing out, together with Germany and Kenya, in the repechage to Canada. “I was having a good day until you brought that up,” laughs Andy. “It was a blow, we saw genuine momentum and improvement, and off the field belief, it was all there. 

“Leading up to the first game against Germany, that belief was tangible, but we didn’t get our first game right [losing 26-9]. That knocked the wind out of us, we managed to smash Kenya which was credit to the players, but then it was all on the Canada game who were the highest ranked side.”

Hong Kong had gone into the repechage as top seeds having won all of their games. “We had to win every game to get to that stage, which is fair, because we’re the weaker region and it led to our belief. For everyone else it was last chance saloon.”

Defeat to favourites Canada ended the dream.  “We weren’t good enough, we can moan but simply we weren’t good enough against Germany,” says Craig. “We’ve now got to look at what we can do for the next one.”

Focus quickly switched, thanks to Australian billionaire Andrew Forrest. Having tested his new World Series Rugby last year by playing games at home to sides from Asia and the Pacific, this year he launched Global Rapid Rugby in a more structured format. 

Two conferences, both including Western Force, with one comprising sides from Fiji (Fijian Latui) and Samoa (Kagifa Samoa), another with two Asian sides, the newly formed Asian Pacific Dragons in Singapore and the South China Tigers in Hong Kong. 

Whereas Asia Pacific Dragons had to build a side entirely from scratch and featuring no local players, the South China Dragons already had the core in place; the Hong Kong national side. “This is great for us because we didn’t have enough intense games leading up to the repechage,” says Andy. “If we’d had this, playing Western Force, going into Canada and Germany, we’d have done pretty well. This for us, if it keeps building, is going to be great for Hong Kong rugby.

“We’ve been searching for this next level for a while now,” he continues, “and perhaps four or five years ago we weren’t ready because we didn’t have a professional programme in place, but now after three or four years of embedded professionalism we’re ready for this.”

Not that they had a lot of time to prepare.  “It was a bit of a moving beast, feast – both,” laughs Andy. “It was on, it was off, it was eight teams, then it was four, then five, then it was rubber stamped and it was a pretty quick turnaround and, ‘this is happening now, these are the games, here we go’.”

“It wasn’t long, was it?” agrees Craig. “It was bang, bang, bang, then ‘Jesus Christ you’re playing in three weeks’.”

South China Tigers played their first fixture, a 45-22 away defeat to Western Force, in March and then in April, a back-to-back double header against Asia Pacific Dragons, saw the spoils shared with a win apiece. “We had ten training sessions including two walk-through team runs to get ready for the Force and they’d started training in November,” says Craig. “We knew we were up against it and 45-21 actually was okay.”

The nucleus of the South China Tigers was the professional playing group, but topped up with the best of the non-Hong Kong qualified players from their domestic league and then four marquee players who were mostly funded by Forrest and Global Rapid Rugby. “Tom Varndell has come in and we’ve also got six guys from the [Hong Kong] Premiership,” says Craig. “There’s also Samisoni Viriviri (who won Gold with Fiji) and two guys from the Chinese national side, Ma Chong and Liu Junkui.”

It wasn’t just a short preparation time that South China Tigers had to deal with, there was also new rules, including nine points (no conversion) for a try that begins in your own 22. “Yeah, it was pretty close [in Perth] until Force scored a nine-point try – the pricks!” laughs Craig. 

Kicking out on the full, even in your own 22, isn’t allowed either. “We didn’t realise the impact of the kicking rule and just how long the ball would be in play for,” admits Craig. “It tripled the ball in play time that we’re used to. After the first half, in the oppressive heat, the lads were blowing, and it was, ‘shit, we’ve got to be a lot better, fitter and stronger’ – the Force and Asian Pacific Dragons are big men too. We didn’t know what to do with the review afterwards, we were just glad nobody died.”

Other rule changes, all designed to increase the ball-in-play time and entertainment factor, include 70-minute game time (to allow for extra ball-in-play time), ten rolling subs, a 10/22 rule where you can kick the ball before your own 10-metre line and if it bounces in the opposition 22 before going out, you win the lineout. “There’s not as much bullshit,” says Craig. “People are still trying to figure each other out but basically you can’t piss around too much in the scrums or lineouts either – there’s an aim to speed up the set piece so they each last less than a minute, but it’s not being exactly policed yet. 

“It’s the way you’ve got to go though,” he continues. “You can’t have a three-minute scrum war, it’s boring as shit isn’t it? Nobody wants to watch that. 

“That side of it, the nine point try, run from your own 22 – it’s an attacking mindset, so you’re going to have a crack, aren’t you?”

Next year, the tournament moves into a more traditional format with all the sides playing home and away and more teams expected to join. There’s talk of a Malaysia-based side being formed from a South African Currie Cup team; Japan are expected to enter a side, possibly the Sunwolves; and there’s also speculation about new Australian sides entering the fray, based out of Newcastle and Townsville. 

As Global Rapid Rugby begins to gather pace, there’s hope it can change perceptions in Hong Kong. “Sometimes people forget that we play rugby,” admits Andy. “We’re not an events company, we need people to not forget the fifteens guys. 

“Sevens is so important from a resource point of view,” he admits, “we wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t for that. But things like the repechage and South China Tigers are hopefully changing things, it’s a bit more, ‘yeah they do the sevens, but weren’t they that close to getting to a World Cup?’ and, ‘isn’t that where South China Tigers are based?’.”

At this point, Dai Rees joins us, adding immediately to the conversation.  “South China Tigers have had more media exposure in the first six weeks than anything we did with the repechage because of how it’s been broadcast,” he says. “It’s impacting on SANZAR (South African, New Zealand and Australian Rugby) , players and agents are now going, ‘right, I’ve got a guy born in Hong Kong’ so we’ve got people asking our domestic sides, ‘if I come, is there any chance of getting into the South China Tigers?’. Of course it’s about money, but it is improving the quality of eligible players coming to Hong Kong.”

Either way, Hong Kong have achieved big things considering their player base. “There’s a mass fall off at twelve years old,” says Dai. “The culture is academia and money and becoming millionaires and you’ve got to do that through degrees and business plans – you can’t make money out of sport in Hong Kong. 

“That’s why lots of kids at twelve years old drop out of the game, we’ve got in excess of about 5,000 or so minis but at secondary school their parents make them focus on education. To the point whereby, in the under-19 age group, we’ve only got 170 registered players. 

“Then we have 1,200 registered senior males of which only 184 are in our performance Premiership. Narrow this down with eligibility and then unavailability due to retirement, and we’re talking about Hong Kong and South China Tigers operating off about sixty players. We punch way above our weight.”

Nothing makes a party like a giant wavy blow-up man, like the ones you see on American TV at car lots. This, together with the speaker-breaking strains of a guitar band, greet you when you enter Aberdeen Sports Ground, the home ground for South China Tigers. A big part of the Global Rapid Rugby concept is the off-field entertainment and it’s all here for the Western Force Game. The merchandise stand is doing brisk business for replica shirts and, although only the second home game, there’s chanting in the stands too. 

Matt Hodgson, the former Force captain, who runs the league on behalf of Andrew Forrest, is at the game. “Our best stat is from our last game against Panasonic [of Japan] when we had 47 per cent of ball-in-play game time, which is high,” he tells us. “We want to get to 52 per cent, I think the average is sub-40 and we’re averaging 43-44 per cent, but as all the sides work on conditioning that’s when we’ll see the benefit and regularly hit 48-50 per cent.”

Global Rapid Rugby, despite it starting off the back of Western Force’s omission from Super Rugby, isn’t a rogue tournament, its working with both Australian Rugby and the game’s governing body. “We work with World Rugby on all rule changes,” explains Matt. “We have to get them approved by the governing body and so we sat down with World Rugby and discussed what they felt they needed in the game, the first is ball-in-play time and the second is player welfare. 

“Our next focus is the scrum area and how we can try not to speed up the actual scrum, but the process around it, because everyone can see some scrums take four to four and half minutes to actually get a result.”

And player welfare? “We’ve brought in an orange card system, so we’re trying to educate players around high tackles. Our commissioner goes through a game and looks at any high tackles that could be deemed a yellow card during the game and sanctions them with an orange card. Once you get three of those you get a warning, then the fourth, and you’ll go through the judicial process. It’s trying to educate players through that process rather than just punish straight away.”

Even after comparatively few games, the rule changes have been noted by others. “We’ve heard talk already that other competitions are thinking about the kicking rule where you retain possession if you kick from the ten-metre line. People thought that rule would increase the amount of kicking but what it actually does is make people defend in back field so it creates more attacking opportunities elsewhere.”

Why Asia? “Aside from the timeline [a lot of matches are played on a similar timeline to Western Australia], the benefit of us working with Asia is that nobody has a stranglehold here, so we’ve been able to work in Hong Kong, Singapore, Malaysia, Japan, Thailand and we’re starting to work  with Taiwan too for 2020. 

“We’ve been doing development stuff with Jake White and Robbie Deans coming to coach the coaches – Jake spent last week with the Singapore national side. The aim there is that, in ten years’ time, we have a team that’s 90 per cent Singaporeans.” 

The commercial aspect also has to be considered. With Forrest currently bankrolling a huge chunk of the league, there has to be a game plan there. “There’s a lot of upsides from working with this population,” says Matt. “Sixty per cent of the world’s population is in Asia, and China is one of our goals – if we pick up one per cent of China on Chinese TV then that’s a big commercial opportunity.”

Back to the issue of China, forever the hottest topic on any news agenda. The South China Tigers is the full-sided game’s first genuine gateway to China. “They did have good men’s fifteens,” says Robbie, who re-joins us pre kick-off. “But when rugby got into the Olympics, they shut down fifteens because they didn’t see the point. 

“It’s a case of, ‘we’re never going to beat the All Blacks or Black Ferns at fifteens but on a good day, with the wind behind us, we can probably give their sevens teams a run for their money’. 

“China have put a huge emphasis on sevens, there are now a dozen provinces with professional men’s and women’s sevens teams playing in a domestic series. The women are doing well and at age-grade level the Chinese under-18 girls are the Asian champions.”

Development of grassroots rugby isn’t on the agenda in China, there’s no resource for starters. Whereas the Hong Kong RFU has 108 full-time staff, the Chinese Rugby Football Association has around six. Which is why, in naming their professional side South China Tigers, Hong Kong are attempting to capitalise. “The numbers in China are fantastically exciting,” admits Robbie, “but it’s really difficult to make it work.”

We’re joined by the union’s chief commercial officer Rocky Chow. “We’ve got to start with kids,” he says, “to go in there working with kids and building a fanbase and in Rapid Rugby we now have a product. We can take home games up to China, to Guangzhou for instance – that’s an opportunity.

“It’s an unknown for us, but we know the population [in the Greater Bay Area, which South China Tigers aims to represent] is 70m, so the potential is lot bigger than it is here.” 

To work out the potential within China, the Hong Kong RFU did an audit of men’s rugby in China, and found, across 113 teams, there were just 2,805 players including sevens and fifteens. But if they start local, in the Greater Bay Area with the three clubs in the region – the Guangzhou Rams, Shenzhen Dragons and Guangdong Bulldogs – they can show the way. “Eighteen months ago, the Government in Hong Kong and Beijing announced that one of the big things in this part of the world in the next 50 years is the Greater Bay Area integration project which is the economic, social integration bringing together Hong Kong, Macau and the nine cities from the Guangdong province,” says Robbie. “This will create a 70m population hub which is bigger than the Tokyo Bay hub. 

“The people in that area and the people in Hong Kong have differences but they are very similar: the language spoken is Cantonese, elsewhere in China it’s Mandarin or dialects. 

“There’s similarities in culture too,” he continues, “so working in the Greater Bay Area is a lot easier for us because our coaches can head out to Guangdong and speak Cantonese. “For us this was a light bulb moment because it’s difficult for us to provide any help and support to China rugby in Beijing or Shanghai, but we genuinely can do something in the Greater Bay Area, so for the last 12 months we’ve been working on what that might look like. We’re talking to China’s rugby union, we’re talking to the Guangdong Sports Bureau, so from the start we positioned South China Tigers as the Greater Bay area team, which is 

why we wanted two Chinese national team players – we’re making a statement that this is not just Hong Kong, this is for the 70m, not only Hong Kong’s seven million long term. 

“At the moment the other 63m aren’t rugby fans, but we’ve got an opportunity to change that.”

Amid the sound of drums, the next round of Global Rapid Rugby kicks off and in the first minute, we have the first Power Try as Brad Lacey completes a Force move that started on their own five-metre line. South China Tigers hit back and manage to keep the game within touching distance, just a three-point margin, with only twenty minutes to go. The floodgates open eventually, and four tries in quick succession, complete a 40-16 win for the visitors who just had more in the tank.

Tom Varndell has a lively game, pushing for openings throughout and having a try disallowed that could at least have kept the home side in the hunt for longer.

He arrived in Hong Kong from Tigers of the Leicester variety, which itself was on the back of a horrendous brief spell in France with Pro D2 side SA XV Charenne. “The first day was the worst day,” Tom says, picking up the story. “We’d packed up the house, got the furniture shipped over, and drove from Bristol down to Bordeaux which took something like 14 hours with the kids in the car, an 18-month-old and ten-year-old. We rocked up, called the club, ‘where’s the apartment? Is it ready?’ No response. We had a car full of stuff parked up and there were no rooms in town because of a comic book festival. Nobody was picking up the phone. And that was the start point for what was going to be a nightmare for about six months.”

Sending his family home, he booked into an IBIS Budget. The club found a flat weeks later. “There was no electricity and water,” says Tom. “It was horrendous and the missus was absolutely losing it as she was back in the UK with the baby, while I was in France and didn’t know what was happening. Once it starts on that footing it’s hard to really get your head around it again. It was a mess, from start to finish.”

The rugby wasn’t much better either. “I played quite a lot of the games,” he says. “How much impact I had on those games is probably zero as I touched the ball twice and one of those was an interception, two touches, both interceptions. It was very forwards’ orientated. 

“The rugby was not for me, the lifestyle was not for me, and my family were miserable.” 

He asked to leave in October, and had his wish granted at Christmas, when he returned to Leicester. He made a handful of appearances for his former club, before the Hong Kong offer arrived. With his intention to play at least another season of rugby, signing a three-month deal in Hong Kong also allowed him to scope out post-rugby options. “It gave me a chance to look at what other opportunities there were here,” he says. “I’d like to work in sports events, marketing, that sort of stuff and Hong Kong is a good place for that. Rugby and business go hand in hand, so it’s quite a unique place to be.”

Like many, he’s also been taken with the enthusiasm for rugby at grassroots levels. “It’s a really exciting time for Asian rugby in general,” he says. “I went to a tournament here, and there were 3,000 kids taking part in a youth festival, so there is that appetite for rugby to really grow here. Then you have a Japanese Rugby World Cup, this new Rapid Rugby, I think there’s a foundation for rugby to really explode.”  

Words by: Alex Mead

Pictures by: Christopher Kennedy