Photos| Barefoot rugby in Vietnam: Building a sport and its vocabulary

Barefoot and muddied, a group of youngsters sprint across a makeshift pitch in rural Vietnam, passing the ball in a game of touch rugby in a country where few people have ever heard of the sport. They belong to Vietnam's only rugby programme for locals, rolled out for kids in a remote commune where some players have to travel by boat to training sessions often held against a backdrop of rice terraces and curious onlookers.

Updated on: Jun 27, 2019 9:44 AM IST

News

Share via

• 
• 
• 
• 

Copy link

• 

1/9

View Photos in a new improved layout

Updated on Jun 27, 2019 9:44 AM

A girl holds a ball during a rugby clinic in the Kim Boi district of Vietnam’s Hoa Binh Province. Few knew anything about rugby when they joined the scheme, marvelling at the egg-shaped ball, but are now keen fans planning to closely follow the Rugby World Cup in Japan, which starts in September. (Manan Vaytsyayana / AFP)

2/9

View Photos in a new improved layout

Updated on Jun 27, 2019 9:44 AM

Girls at a rugby clinic in the Kim Boi district. “I haven’t watched international rugby... but if possible I will surely watch the Rugby World Cup,” said 14-year-old Bao Cham, a player on the Silver Fox team. With the first Rugby World Cup held in Asia, organisers are hoping to boost rugby’s popularity in backwaters like Kim Boi, where most kids count Lionel Messi as a hero but have never heard of New Zealand great Dan Carter. (Manan Vaytsyayana / AFP)

3/9

View Photos in a new improved layout

Updated on Jun 27, 2019 9:44 AM

Vietnam is one of few Southeast Asian countries with no rugby federation, and international games aren’t regularly aired on television. The sport remains on the margins, making the rugby clinic something of an oddity. Launched in 2015, the ChildFund Pass It Back programme is aimed at teaching youngsters life skills, with lessons on health or planning for the future interspersed with rugby training sessions. (Manan Vaytsyayana / AFP)

4/9

View Photos in a new improved layout

Updated on Jun 27, 2019 9:44 AM

The players aged 11 to 16 meet regularly on weekends to play touch rugby, which has none of the full-contact version’s heavy tackling. There are more than 6,100 players and coaches in the programme today, more than half of them female, in Vietnam, Laos, East Timor and the Philippines. Some players will go to Japan in March with ChildFund -- travelling by plane for the first time -- for rugby training and life-skills sessions. (Manan Vaytsyayana / AFP)

5/9

View Photos in a new improved layout

Updated on Jun 27, 2019 9:44 AM

Rugby wasn’t the most obvious choice. Football, volleyball and sepak takraw were floated as options when the programme was piloted in Laos, but rugby was considered the most gender-neutral. “The young girls in the commune wanted to try this new sport that they had never seen before, it wasn’t considered a boys’ sport,” John Harris, regional operations officer for the scheme, told AFP. (Manan Vaytsyayana / AFP)

6/9

View Photos in a new improved layout

Updated on Jun 27, 2019 9:44 AM

Still, some participants in Vietnam had to push back again entrenched sexism. Coach Bui Thi Lan (C) was told by her in-laws that she should give up rugby after marrying and having a baby -- in line with expectations women that should avoid playing rowdy sports. Lan would have none of it. She came back to coaching four months after giving birth and now teaches 60 kids four times per week. (Manan Vaytsyayana / AFP)

7/9

View Photos in a new improved layout

Updated on Jun 27, 2019 9:44 AM

Boys mid-match in the Kim Boi district. Battling inequality wasn’t the only hurdle. There was no vocabulary in Vietnamese for the sport and some terms were coined on the fly. A scrum is “mai rua” which means ‘turtle shell’ in Vietnamese, while the name for rugby is simply “bong bau duc”, which translates to ‘oval ball’. (Manan Vaytsyayana / AFP)

8/9

View Photos in a new improved layout

Updated on Jun 27, 2019 9:44 AM

Rugby wasn’t always so foreign to Vietnam, though it has never been widespread. The French are believed to be the first to import rugby and an excerpt from a 1933 phone book describing the Saigon Sports Stadium notes a rugby pitch with stands for 3,000 spectators. Today there are no professional Vietnamese-born players abroad and just a small group of expatriates play recreationally in Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City. (Manan Vaytsyayana / AFP)

9/9

View Photos in a new improved layout

Updated on Jun 27, 2019 9:44 AM

Girls taking a break during a rugby clinic. The game isn’t totally unfamiliar either, as it echoes aspects of the traditional “vat cau” new year festival that sees shirtless men wrestle for possession of a large wooden ball on a field. Now Vietnam’s budding young rugby stars hope the sport will start to gain popularity and participates in the Rugby World Cup one day. (Manan Vaytsyayana / AFP)