Colombo International Rugby 11s Tournament to be held in September

John O’Brien, Dilip Kumar, Dilroy Fernando and Patrick Cotter at the press conference

Sri Lanka will become a part of the rugby revolution when the newest format of the game – 11s – will be held at Racecourse Stadium with the participation of several foreign teams.

The Colombo International Rugby 11s Tournament to be held on September 27, 28 and 29 has been endorsed by Sri Lanka Rugby, Sri Lanka Schools Rugby Football Association, Ministry of Sports and the Ministry of Education.

World Rugby is yet to formally embrace the newest version of the sport which is equivalent to T20 cricket but the 11-man format is fast catching up in the South East Asian region with tournaments being held in Thailand and Malaysia.

Rugby union has 7s and 10s apart from the traditional XVs game but 11s could be the future of the sport because the rules have been tweaked to open up more try-scoring opportunities and encourage running and passing.

“Rugby has now become a big man’s sport. You take the top league in France, there’s a club called Toulouse, where the pack weighs more than a tonne and the forwards averaged 6 foot 4. That’s the average, you can imagine the size,” points out Dilip Kumar, a former Trinity and Dimbulla rugby player domiciled in Australia.

The new concept was conceived by former All Black player and former Wallaby coach Robbie Deans. “We realised in South East Asia, we’re not built for that, to compete with these guys. He’s come up with a fantastic concept of rugby, which gives the Asian rugby players an even chance,” reveals Kumar, a former chairman of the Australia Rugby Union (ARU).

“We trialled it in Japan. He (Dean) got the Panasonic Wild Knights to play each other, and they loved it. With 11s you do away with the two breakaways (flankers) and the two wingers. You’ve got so much more space and gives the smaller built Asian rugby players a big chance,” he points out.

The inaugural Phuket 11s tournament was organised in Thailand last year. “What was interesting was, the Asian teams beat the fancied teams in the finals. That gave us a chance to expand this game. Since then we’ve run a Chiang Mai 11s, we’ve got competitions in Kuala Lumpur and Vietnam. We’re more excited about coming here to Sri Lanka,” declared Kumar at a press conference held on Wednesday at the CR and FC.

“If you watched the final of the Rugby World Cup, you would have seen that South Africa, basically, of their reserves only had one back and all the rest of them were forwards. They rolled effectively a new pack on just after half time,” said John O’Brien, a former board member of ARU.

“What used to be the joy of rugby, which was running, passing and kicking, has been taken over by collision. That’s not what I like. I want to see the ball pass and players run and score tries. The current game, from my watching, does not have enough game. There’s too many stoppages,” he points out.

“The idea of 11s rugby we came up with was ‘let’s build a game that’s basically the same as what we play, but make it faster, easier to play and simpler’.  Scrums are still six players and effectively the number eight at the back is allowed to pick the ball up. Unlike sevens and tens, the number eight is allowed to pick up the ball and give options to the back line to actually go through and play,” he explains.

“The forwards have had a few things taken away. Rolling mauls are almost impossible to stop legally. That’s not what we want. We want to have tries through. The whole game is about getting tries and players to have an exciting time. Run, pass, catch, and tackle. That’s what we want in the game,” emphasised O’Brien who was awarded the Australian Sports Medal by Prime Minister John Howard for his services to Rugby Union in 2000.

Patrick Cotter, who founded the Phuket International Rugby 10s in 1997 and organised the inaugural Dimbulla Rugby 11s tournament in Phuket, noted there’s a buzz around the sport now in Thailand.

“The Thai community now, from basically being zero engaged, are now daily putting out social media posts and having more game time and looking forward to the next season. This year, we’re doing the Phuket 11s again. We’re going to do the 11s in Vietnam in August. The culmination of all this will be Colombo, the Colombo 11s in September,” says Cotter.

“At the end of the year, the big plan is to have a tournament with national sides from Thailand, Malaysia, Vietnam, India, and Sri Lanka,” he added.

Former Isipathana, CR and FC, and Sri Lanka fly half Dilroy Fernando bemoaned the fact the traditional CR-Havelocks match attracted hardly 400 spectators. “The ball in play was less than 10 minutes each half. For a 40 minutes game, you think people would want to go and watch a game, if the playing time is only 10 minutes long,” he points out.

“It’s sad that in the last three to four years, we didn’t have international rugby in Sri Lanka. Our youth need to be participating in these type of tournaments,” said Fernando who organised the CR Sevens and St. Peter’s tournaments last year.

“This type of tournament, I’m sure, will attract crowds to come back to watch rugby football,” says Fernando, Tournament Director of the Colombo International Rugby 11s tournament.

A total of 38 teams (under 20, men, women, and veterans) and 78 matches will be played during the three days with a carnival atmosphere prevailing.