Oval Office January 2008

Weekend warriors

By Adam Daff

Many elite international rugby games should come with a disclaimer for first time viewers. The hits are that big.

Most elite rugby players are over 105 kilograms, or they can run, as South African winger Bryan Habana proved, as fast as a cheetah. Or, in the case of Jonah Lomu, they are both huge and can run fast. Players aren’t structurally bigger than they used to be, or more skilful, but they do carry more muscle and are generally fitter. The result is usually serious carnage.

The problem in this equation is that not all good rugby players are in a position to train ten times a week and become professionals. Rugby, after all, at an international level in the professional era lasts five or six years, for most players if they’re lucky. The best rarely spend more than a decade playing first grade, much less internationals, these days.

For those caught up in the office, or with kids etc – there is always social rugby. Social rugby is not about beep tests, personal bests in the gym, or even training. Often it’s more about how many beers you can sink the night before a game and still remain standing for 80 minutes the next day. It’s a standard that remains a vital cog in any form of professional sport, however, because the guys, and girls, who play socially usually end up running clubs, coaching youth teams, or generally just getting people involved. They are the bottom of the food chain, but no less important than what goes on at the elite level.

The Gulf, fortunately, has a healthy dose of people playing social rugby and once a year, at the Dubai Sevens, they all come out to play.

One Dubai-based team that epitomises the best of social rugby is the OKI Warriors. The Warriors have developed an outstanding following in the last two years with the help of their major sponsors OKI Printing Solutions, headed by John Ross, and a few die-hard rugby fanatics who, try as they might, don’t have the time to commit to much else but the Dubai Sevens.

The 2007 Dubai Sevens was a big tournament for the Warriors, manager Jonathan Macpherson and coach Rowan Shepherd, the ex-Scotland international. Macpherson cobbled together a group of old, young and middle-aged rugby players from all over the planet – Abraham Cilliers, Hanre Froneman, Hannes Visser, Baptiste Ithurbide, Sean Nicholson (captain) and Paul Kelly, to name just a few – plus one ex-rugby league player, Dougall Harvison, for good measure.

In preparation for the tournament Shepherd, a friend of Macpherson’s and a professional player manager, brought Jason White, the current captain of Scotland, to Dubai last month and then Duncan Hodge just prior to the Sevens to act as the team’s “ambassador”.

Hodge won 26 caps in the Scotland backs with perhaps his defining match being the first Six Nations clash between Scotland and England in 2000. England were poised to win the Grand Slam, but Scotland won 19-13 and Hodge scored all of Scotland’s points.

Hodge was Scotland’s kicking coach during the World Cup in France but was delighted with the invite and to help with the Warriors’. He also had some tremendous insight into the game in the northern hemisphere and how different the professional game can be.

“I count myself lucky because when I started I played four years of amateur (grade) rugby, because I’m 33 now, and then spent 10 years as a professional and I saw how the game changed. Now there is so much science and nutrition involved with the fitness and it’s constantly changing,” said Hodge.

“I used to be stressed about a lot of that stuff, but towards the end of my career I think I did well because I switched off to it. Fortunately, the Warriors don’t have to be worrying about a lot of that stuff.”

The Warriors started their campaign for the Local Social crown three months prior to the tournament with training that generally involved a lot of emailing about how much training everyone in the squad was doing. Training intensified with six weeks to go though and the weekend prior to the tournament they played and beat the Dubai Dragons, an AGRFU outfit, in some friendly games.

They began the tournament with three straight wins, all to nil, against Dubai Lankans, UAE Falcons and the charity outfit Christina Noble – a sign their fitness sessions had paid off. OKI’s main rivals were the Airmiles V Blacks, a team that’s comprised of players mostly from the southern hemisphere who touch rugby in parks around Dubai on most weekends. The Emirates Airlines Flying Muppets are also a strong side full of “trolleys” who generally have a lot of spare time to go to the gym.

One team that came out of nowhere during the course of the event was the Multiplex Marauders, who were playing in their third tournament. Multiplex is an Australian construction company but they’re associated mostly with Australian Football, or AFL, in the Gulf. Turns out, they also employ athletes who can play rugby.

The OKI Warriors did one better than last year, which was their stated goal and got past the quarter-finals on the Friday against the Beaver Nomads to face the V Blacks in the semi. That was as far as they got though, losing a bruising encounter 12-5, and it was also the last time the V Blacks would win a game in 2007. They were crushed by the Marauders in the final 31-5 in the final, which left some people checking the name sheets for spelling errors, the kind that might have excluded names like Carter or Wilkinson.

Macpherson was happy as any rugby player could hope to be with the performance, however, bar one gripe. This year the IRB and Arabian Gulf Rugby Union (AGRFU) decreed that the local social teams could have, or place, up to three Gulf-registered players in their side, which meant players with regular weekend experience could play against the guys who just come in for the sevens.

“I know all the teams found three players to bring in, but those guys are hard from the regular weekend experience and even if the local social guys are better, it’s difficult to play against the guys who have been toughened up,” Macpherson said. “I just think the Local Social tournament should be just that, only guys who want to play to support rugby and for a laugh in a social side. There are plenty of opportunities for the guys who want to play regularly.”

That said, look for the OKI Warriors to be back next year, led by former all-stars and represented by a real legend, but made up of just ordinary blokes having a go. It’s rugby at its purest.

Showing them the money

Fiji sevens coach Josateki Savou has warned the size of player payments is no longer the issue it once was.

He stopped short of declaring Fiji’s gifted squad were now as well paid as the players from the tier-one nations, but he was certain pay structures had improved prior to the 2007 World Cup.

Fiji, like Samoa and Tonga, is a tremendous stronghold of rugby talent but these tiny island nations haven’t historically been rich breeding grounds for scouts with hotlines to immigration departments in various tier-one nations. Some Fijians continue with the national team, but given a choice many of best athletes like Joe Rokocoko, Rupeni Caucaunibuca and Sitiveni Sivivatu play for New Zealand or Australia, or move to lucrative contracts in Europe and retire from international rugby.

For those who remain eligible to play, many decline the opportunity for fear of injury. But Savou, a former sevens player, said the International Rugby Board had improved the situation for Fijian players who want to move abroad and continue to play for Fiji at the big tournaments – and there is some proof of that. Seru Rabeni, for instance, has been among the best players in Europe for several years in the backs for Leicester Tigers in England. For a time last season Rabeni, who began his career in sevens, was responsible for keeping Tom Varndell, one of the fastest wingers to ever pick up a rugby ball, out of the Tigers side. But despite his contract with Tigers and pressure from his club, Rabeni answered the call to play for his country at the last World Cup and was one of the stars of the tournament.

“I think a lot of improvement happened when Peter Murphy (Australian) came from the high performance unit of the IRB, he is helping Fiji. I think he was helping with funding in Russia for a while, but he is bringing in more money through the high performance unit,” said Savou.

Yes, supporters have heard this before but Fiji has been improving, particularly in the 15-a-side version of the game, and off the field – they no longer travel like a bunch of ramshackle islanders, who have just escaped the village. They look like professional footballers. And that’s an ominous sign, for if Fiji were able to retain all the talent they produce, there wouldn’t be many teams anywhere who could beat them.

Rugby chorus

Prior to this year’s Dubai Sevens tournament I found the Fijian team as they were about deliver a brilliant performance, but this show had nothing to do with running rugby.

To a packed audience at the Toyota stand outside the Festival City mall, the whole team recited several tunes, the kind you could tape and sell during the festive season for a handsome profit.

Had this been the American team singing there might have been some talk about one of the players releasing a rap album, or perhaps a collective shot at American Idol. With the Fijians and rugby, however, things are always simple: “It’s in our culture to sing because we never had radio back in the day,” said coach Josateki Savou. “We’re also happy so we sing and we practise so we’re good at it.”

Away from the stage, there is one other thing Fijians are good at – rugby – just like their island neighbours, Samoa and Tonga. Fiji, however, has a highest percentage of people playing rugby in the world; roughly 10 per cent of the population pull on the boots and socks every weekend.

They have 12 provinces and a national competition sponsored by Sanyo. They also have a national sevens competition and now, a women’s competition. At the last World Cup and indeed in Dubai, the results of these enormous participation rates were there for everybody to see. Fiji were only stopped by the New Zealanders in the dying seconds of the final at the Dubai Sevens, while at the World Cup in France they rolled Wales and were incredibly unlucky to lose to the eventual world champions, South Africa, in the quarter-finals.

Savou said the fruits of their World Cup efforts, in particular, had already been felt throughout Fijian rugby, particularly in rehabilitation and preparation where, up until a few years ago, the answer to most injuries in the Fijian team was some “coconut balm and banana leaf over a fire”.

“One of the things that our high performance unit has helped us progress with on the 15-a-side game is the use of proteins during training and vitamins that are good for your muscles and recovery – and all those things have to be monitored. And the sevens side is on the same program,” he said.

“That really has been the missing link for us when we play against the top nations. We are always fine, but to compete at the highest level and recover you need to have more than just a banana leaf and good water, you need to plan.”

Savou, who is a very laid back prison warden when he’s not coaching or playing rugby, did concede there were several hurdles the Fijian team had to cross which had more to do with social development than rugby.

“The hardest thing is discipline and disciplining the players to perform to their expected level. As a coach we need to get to the players and find solutions for discipline and then come up with the performance.

“Off the field is just as important – in fact I would say with Fiji 80 per cent of it is getting their behaviour right off the field and then 20 per cent is on the field. You can’t be teaching a player much if they’re not disciplined off the field.

“They also come through very young from the villages and sometimes they’re not well educated. These are the areas we want to work on so Fiji rugby can improve. It takes time to mould these players but when you get them on the right track, you see what happens – like what they did in the World Cup, the potential is always there.”

The fact that Fijians have always prided themselves on an undisciplined style of rugby based on amazing individual talent doesn’t help, although Savou appeared well up for the challenge.

“People often ask me about discipline and coaching, so I tell them I work with inmates or prisoners and I take criticism nearly every hour from eight in the morning to five in the afternoon,” he said with a smile.

“The great thing too is that if you look at the World Cup most of the players in the starting line-up started off in sevens and I think in the fifteens you saw how they combined their team work with our sevens style and pattern of rugby. It was great to watch.”