Fertile ground

via CAAI News Media

By Kevin Brown

Published: March 10 2010

At the naval sports field in Phnom Penh, Peter Maley and a few friends are getting ready for a game between two of the four clubs that compete in Cambodia’s domestic rugby competition. As usual, the first job is to strap a couple of tall posts to the crossbar of the soccer goals at each end.

“We don’t have a stadium of our own. We usually rent sports fields from the military, and they’re always soccer pitches,” says Maley, secretary-general of the Cambodian Federation of Rugby. “It’s too much trouble to dig up the soccer goals and replace them, so we just make them taller.”

A thousand miles away, Warrick Dent is preparing the purpose-built Hong Kong sports stadium for three days of star-studded seven-a-side rugby in front of 40,000 spectators. Twenty-four international teams will compete for US$150,000 in prize money when the tournament kicks off this month – roughly three times the annual running costs of Cambodia’s domestic season.

Dent, events manager for the Hong Kong Rugby Football Union, declines to discuss in detail the economics of the tournament, except to note half the audience that comes from outside the territory is thought to pump US$30m into the local economy. Furthermore, 40,000 ticket sales at up to HK$1,250 (US$160) each would raise in the region of HK$40m for the union.

Rugby has big ambitions in Asia – a region where it has been established for more than a century, mainly as a consequence of British colonialism in countries such as India, Sri Lanka, Hong Kong and Singapore.

Jarrad Gallagher, the general manager of Asia’s International Rugby Board, says the past two decades have brought a significant deepening and widening of the game’s historical base, notably in the expansion of the IRB’s Asian offshoot – the Asian Rugby Football Union – to 28 countries.

“Asia has 60 per cent of the world’s population and only 6 per cent of the world’s rugby population. We don’t expect to get every Asian person to play rugby, but we can hopefully improve on 6 per cent,” Gallagher says.

On the field, there have been some major successes. Fiji’s national team moved up to ninth in the IRB world rankings after a strong performance in the 2007 World Cup, while Samoa, Japan and Tonga are just outside the world’s top 10 at 12th, 13th and 15th respectively.

But if the game is to make real progress, it needs significant sponsorship. Fortunately, there are three major successes to build on.

The first is the Hong Kong Sevens, which since its launch in 1975 has matured into the biggest and most successful of the eight annual sevens tournaments run by the IRB around the world.

Sponsors like the sevens because it draws huge crowds and publicity, and because many of its fans are relatively prosperous business people. As a result, the Hong Kong Sevens has a multimillion-dollar sponsorship deal (no one will say exactly what it is worth) with Cathay Pacific, the Hong Kong airline, and financial services group Credit Suisse.

“This has been a very successful event for us because it runs alongside our Asian investment conference,” says Sheel Kohli, the group’s Asia Pacific head of corporate communications. “It really is a great combination of hard work and industry followed by some very enjoyable high-class sport.”

The second big success is the Asian Five Nations competition, started three years ago with sponsorship from HSBC. The name is something of a misnomer, since the competition will this year include 27 of the 28 Asian unions, playing in four divisions with annual relegation and promotion.

However, most attention focuses on the top-five competition, modelled on Europe’s Six Nations championship, which was won in both 2008 and 2009 by Japan. Television coverage – available in 120m homes last year – has raised the tournament’s profile, both for players and potential supporters.

Sandy Flockhart, HSBC’s chairman of commercial and personal banking, says the tournament is a good fit for the bank. “It has a big geographical spread, and we are a bank with a big geography. It would be very difficult for us to get that cross-fertilisation with any other sport,” he says.

The third big success is Japan, which has developed a thriving domestic competition backed by corporate teams such as Suntory Sungoliath, NEC Green Rockets and Toyota Verblitz.

John Kirwan, the former New Zealand winger who is now head coach of Japan’s national team, says the strength of the domestic base makes it realistic for the Cherry Blossoms to aim at an international top 10 ranking following next year’s World Cup in New Zealand – and, more optimistically, a place in the final at the 2019 World Cup, which Japan will host.

He dismisses suggestions that Japan is unable to compete head to head with the world’s best teams because it lacks players with the combination of height, bulk and speed.

“I totally disagree,” he says, pointing out that in sumo wrestling, Japan’s national sport, smaller players often defeat bigger ones if they have the right strategy. “For me, the size thing has been an excuse. It is not an excuse any more. Do not talk to me about size. We need to play a style of rugby that suits us. We need to work out what is the best way to beat the opposition.”

The other great hope for the Asia Pacific region is Fiji, a country of 300 islands where every village has a rugby team of some sort, but where money is so short that young men are often seen playing without goal posts and with a squashed-up plastic bottle for a ball.

Keni Dakuidreketi, chairman of the Fiji Rugby Union, says there is some sponsorship – the biggest deal is with Digicel Pacific, an Irish-owned mobile telecommunications group – but much more is needed if the country is to break into the elite group of rugby nations.

“The game is becoming more scientific with all the complex training routines and body hydration techniques and so on that teams use nowadays,” says Dakuidreketi. “The boys do not understand that. All they want to do is run with the ball. That is why we are so much more successful in sevens than in 15s, because the gruelling training and scientific analysis that is needed in modern rugby is much more difficult for us to do here than in the bigger unions.”

Finance is “a struggle”, he says. “Our financial woes are pretty much facing us every day. It is not cheap to equip a team and send them to a World Cup or on a tour where they can play games against other unions. The last tour to the northern hemisphere cost us F$1m (US$500,000), and that was only for three matches.”

Back in Phnom Penh, Peter Maley is struggling with much the same problem, in spite of sponsorship from ANZ Royal, the local offshoot of the Australian bank; an annual donation from the Dubai Exiles, an expatriate rugby club in the Gulf; and an occasional handout from the French embassy.

“I believe the potential is here, but it all comes down to funding,” he says. “We can have great dreams and strategic plans, but without the funding we can’t go anywhere. It is a vicious circle. We just have to keep plugging away.”