Photos | Little Dragons: Myanmar kids glory at rugby

Sidestepping cowpats and garbage, Myanmar's only home-grown junior rugby side train on the outskirts of Yangon, preparing to take on children from the city's well-heeled international schools. Every Sunday, boys and girls aged five to 18 from Yangon's North Dagon township can be seen playing touch rugby, an incongruous sight in a country where the sport is barely known.

Updated on: Jul 22, 2019 9:53 AM IST

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Players from the Little Dragons rugby team take part in a training session in the North Dagon township, located on the outskirts of Yangon. Sidestepping cowpats and garbage, Myanmar’s only home-grown junior rugby side train on the outskirts of Yangon, preparing to take on children from the city’s well-heeled international schools. (Sai Aung Main / AFP)

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Little Dragons rugby team coach Josh Peck pats a cow during a training session. When the Little Dragons aren’t running barefoot on the litter-strewn dirt, the makeshift field on the outskirts of Yangon is sometimes used as a cockfighting ring or a fairground. (Sai Aung Main / AFP)

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As novice monks file past collecting alms, the players shoo away cantankerous cattle to begin warm-up drills under the tutelage of their coaches, a mix of locals and expatriates. (Sai Aung Main / AFP)

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Youth worker-turned-coach Aung Kyaw Lin, 24, helped set up the team four years ago to run alongside English and math lessons, and workshops on fire safety and health.”Children here used to spend their free time in gaming shops,” he says. “When they started playing rugby, they stopped arguing and worked together.” (Sai Aung Main / AFP)

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Although the organisers ran out of funding to keep their education centre going, the rugby continued. Few women play sport in conservative Myanmar, yet half of the 40 or so Little Dragons are girls. Nann Shar Larr He, 15, was usually scolded by her older sister for wanting to play with the boys, but now most of her family come to watch the training sessions.”There’s no difference between girls and boys when we play rugby,” the 15-year-old smiles. (Sai Aung Main / AFP)

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Players from the Little Dragons rugby team choose pairs of donated secondhand shoes during a training session. In the monsoon the training ground is shin-deep in mud, but during the hot season the surface is baked into an unyielding, crusty mosaic. Yet many of the Little Dragons play in bare feet. (Sai Aung Main / AFP)

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As the only homegrown junior team in the country, the Little Dragons look to Yangon’s international schools for matches. In May, they took part in Myanmar’s first junior tournament -- partly played on a full-sized, artificial grass pitch at one of the schools. Out of 10 teams in each age group, Little Dragons finished second and third in the Under-14s, and second in the Under-11s. (Sai Aung Main / AFP)

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“These kids ran rings round them,” says coach Bradley Edwards. One baffled team even tried removing their trainers to see if that was the key to the Little Dragons’ agility -- an experiment that lasted only a couple of minutes on the hot, rough surface.”We felt like crying when they scored, but we just tried even harder,” says 12-year-old Dragon Kyaw Kyaw Lin. (Sai Aung Main / AFP)