Sevens: Football-mad kids from Rio's favelas take to oval ball with skills to rival experts

Rugby Sevens makes its Olympics debut in Rio next year. Photo / Mark Mitchell

Ahead of Rugby Sevens’ debut at the Olympics, the sport has found a captive audience in the favelas.

The boy can be no more than five years old. Wearing a vastly outsized fluorescent bib that swamps him, giving him the appearance of an altar boy in a flowing cassock, he has in his hands a rugby ball. And it is clear from his expression that he has never seen anything like it. His first instinct is to bounce the strangely shaped object at his feet. When it bucks and jumps, spinning away across the dusty ground, he chases after it, giggling. Within 20 minutes, he is joining in a game of touch rugby, flinging the ball around and catching it with aplomb, a broad grin playing across his face.

This is not a scene in Twickenham or Gloucester, or even Bridgend or Llanelli. This is happening high in the hills above Rio de Janeiro, in the Complexo Do Lins favela, a place where majestic scenery meets grinding poverty, where average family incomes are barely a dollar a day. Here, in the very heartland of football, the place where seemingly every 10-year-old has the skills to bamboozle any English adult foolish enough to take them on (and believe me, I tried), Premiership Rugby and the British Council are introducing the oval-ball game.

To coincide with Rugby Sevens making its Olympic debut in the city next summer, they dispatched 15 coaches to Brazil two years ago as part of the Try Rugby initiative, to evangelise the sport, to sell it in the country where football is king. And judging by the reaction of the dozens of squealingly excited children, tearing around after the ball on their communal football pitch, it is not the hardest of sells.

"They love it," says Dom Caton, a former Exeter Chiefs community coach who is bringing the game into the favela. "They pick it up incredibly quickly. They've got such physical literacy, their running and footwork is amazing to see."

This is an unpacified favela, one where criminal gangs still hold sway. And Caton and his team of volunteer, largely expat Antipodean coaches have been escorted by a cohort of heavily armed police to the dust-bowl pitch where they are conducting their session.

At first glance, it is hard to see why the cops are needed, given the only people in evidence are gaggles of noisy youngsters. The lawmen stand around the fringes of the pitch paying the action no attention, staring at their smartphones, their automatic weapons holstered. But the coaches have been warned that word of outsiders can quickly spread, attracting those who would use whatever means necessary to relieve them of their valuables. Not to mention the bag of rugby balls they have brought with them.

It may be risky, but this is partly the purpose of the programme. Not simply to raise awareness of the game in a land with no history of engagement with an oval ball, but to take it into places starved of sporting investment and infrastructure. And there to pass on the values integral to the game: discipline, respect, sportsmanship. Plus, the British Council hopes, some of the traditions of the country that invented it.

Although it is no more than a couple of miles from Rio's glorious beachfront, most of the children throwing the ball around have never left this favela in their brief lives. The only way to introduce them to the sport is to take it to them.

"We host taster sessions on the beach here every week," Wayne Morris, Premiership Rugby's director of community, says. "But for these kids, that might as well be on Mars."

Try Rugby has been running in Sao Paulo for two years. More than 14,000 play every week there - 38 per cent of them female - which has doubled the rugby playing base in Brazil. The hope is that the move into Rio will double that number again.

"This sport is not going to come to an end in this country in 2016," Morris says. "That is just the beginning."

There are, inevitably, initial problems. "Most of them think it's American football," Juliet Short, an Irish international who has been coaching in Sao Paulo since January, says. "All the boys initially throw the ball like quarterbacks. I'm shouting 'no Americano' all the time."

Though, she adds, language is not an issue. "If you're really animated, it's like a cartoon picture, if something's really bright and loud it's easy to understand, people are mesmerised. If you're confident, people believe in it."

There are certainly aspects of the game the youngsters are quick to adapt, however steeped in football they might be.

"You have girls who know about soccer and the merest brush on the shoulder or tap on the ankle and they're down, rolling around," Short says. "It's like, 'aaagh'. I have to say, 'no fraca', no weakness. And they're like, 'okay'. So now, they shrug it off and carry on."

Brazil will enter teams in both the men's and women's sevens competition next summer.

The men are unlikely to be anything other than cannon fodder. But the women, 10 times South American champions, could make a huge impression on the country if they come close to the podium. Not that most of the children in the favela are even aware rugby is in the Games.

Just as if you had asked a group of primary school pupils in Hackney ahead of London 2012 if they knew about handball, the Brazilian youngsters are blankly indifferent. Get them involved in a game, however, and they love throwing and catching and running with the ball.

Indeed, later, on Ipanima beach, watching a game organised by the Try Rugby coaches, it is quickly evident that sevens rugby is a sport ideally suited to local conditions. With the ball in hand, the group of locals and expats move across the sand with speed and grace, drawing a crowd of impressed onlookers.

It works much better than beach football, for the simple reason the ball is not slowed by the sand all the time.

There is a real sense that this could catch on. And, the 21st-century sporting equivalent of the 19th century missionary, Short, for one, is convinced it will.

"I feel really blessed I can share my passion for the sport," she says. "Share what it means for me. Rugby has saved me, helped me with respect and solidarity, I really believe in the values.

"For me to share my love is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity."

- Telegraph Group Ltd