Where are the local Chinese players of the future?
If the IRB Junior World Rugby Trophy is supposed to be a harbinger for the future, then the two Asian sides in the competition – Hong Kong and Japan – have worries they must confront.
If the IRB Junior World Rugby Trophy is supposed to be a harbinger for the future, then the two Asian sides in the competition – Hong Kong and Japan – have worries they must confront. The home team does not have a single player of local Chinese origin in the squad and this bodes ill for the game’s development.
The first question is why aren’t the local players good enough? If this same question had been raised 10 or 15 years ago, one could safely have answered it takes time for them to come through. But with the Hong Kong Rugby Football Union having placed so much emphasis on grassroots development over the past decade or more, surely we should see some progress by now?
The inevitable conclusion will be that rugby has yet to take root among the local Chinese schools
Where is the next generation of players like Salom Yiu Kam-shing, Kwok Ka-chun, Tsang Hing-hung and Fan Shun-kei? Examining the list of the 26 players in the JWRT squad, only one player, Tigers scrum-half Jack Combes, has a nationality which says Chinese. The majority are British.
There is nothing wrong with that as most are born and bred in Hong Kong and have every right to represent our city. Yet it would have been encouraging if there had been a couple of Yius and Kwoks in the mix. Their absence suggests local players are still not capable of holding down a place on merit. This is worrying, for the inevitable conclusion will be that rugby has yet to take root among the local Chinese schools.
The HKRFU is valiantly trying to fast-track the game’s development in these schools. Last year, Confucius Hall Secondary School in Causeway Bay became the first local Chinese school to sign up for the union’s School of Rugby programme.
At the time, principal Dr Yeung Wing-hon said: “It’s an opportunity for our students to learn more about what has always been seen as a middle-class, expatriate sport.”
There have been a few encouraging signs of local children coming through in the abbreviated version. Hugo Chui Ho-ching, 17, a Form Four student at St Stephen’s College, was part of the Hong Kong team that won the inaugural Asian School Boys’ Rugby Sevens Championship last year. This year the Hong Kong women’s sevens team included Cindy Yuen Lok-yee, who at 19 was the youngest member of the squad.
But progress has been slow. Right now, youth rugby is very much still dependent on the ESF and international schools for players, as demonstrated by the selection of the squad in this IRB tournament. We can only hope that with changing times, rugby will no longer be viewed “as a middle-class, expatriate sport”.
Japan, meanwhile, have another problem. The third seeds’ opening loss to Uruguay highlighted the lack of big and skilled forwards, which is a problem the senior side has faced at World Cups.
The Japanese youngsters – a team labelled “Generation 2019” by the Japan Rugby Football Union with some expected to figure when the country hosts the Rugby World Cup in 2019 – struggled at the set pieces and breakdown during their 33-28 loss to sixth seeds Uruguay.
We can only hope it was opening-game jitters, but if Japan’s forwards don’t pull up their socks, then the future looks bleak for Generation 2019.
