THE HERALD REPORTS

Italy: a country starting to wake up to rugby

NEIL DRYSDALE March 15 2008
CommentIt might seem strange that Italian rugby boasts a mounting vibrancy, considering the Azzurri are in danger of collecting their sixth wooden spoon since being admitted to the expanded Six Nations Championship in 2000.

Yet, for the likes of Claudio Tinari, president of thriving Rome-based Super10 club Capitolina, optimism is justified by the way in which, year by year, the national side are edging closer towards the pack, just as ambitious youth development programmes across Italy start to bear fruit with sufficiently rich pickings to suggest that if their first decade in the Six Nations has been a painful learning process, the next may see them challenging for honours.

Certainly, Capitolina exemplify the admirable radicalism which underpins the sport throughout Tinari's homeland. Only founded in 1996, they quickly sped up their structure, both unearthing a clutch of local talent which saw them become Italian under-19 champions in 2003 and securing the requisite sponsorships, community funding and partnerships with schools in Rome to become a thriving part of the Stadio Flaminio landscape.

advertisement"If we have to work harder than the traditional countries to gain any reward I have no problem with that, and my attitude is that being invited into the Six Nations has been the best thing that has ever happened to us," says Tinari, a genial but endlessly industrious fellow who has just spent a fortnight in Argentina viewing how the Pumas have adapted to professionalism. "It has been a bit of a frustrating championship because we ran Ireland close, we only lost 23-19 to England - and could well have won - while we gave the French a decent match.

"But, if we want to raise the profile, victories are very important, and that is why I think we have to move up to a new level against Scotland. I think we'll win because we have a terrific set of forwards and players such as Sergio Parisse and Martin Castrogiovanni are world-class internationalists. But we are also under no illusions about where our main problems are - we have a fly-half Andrea Masi who can't kick, we are pretty weak at full-back have a lack of pace on the wings.

"However the new coach Nick Mallett has steadied things and, behind the scenes, all Super 10 clubs are implementing youth policies to generate interest in rugby. It used to gain a paragraph or two in the newspapers and we had a hard core of players whose efforts went largely unnoticed. But now we have over 30,000 adult players, that figure goes up to 65,000 if you include the kids who have been introduced to the sport, and our aim is to push these numbers up to 50,000 and 100,000 by 2020.

"From a club perspective, Capitolina are still in contention for a place in Europe next year, though it will have to be in the Challenge Cup rather than the Heineken Cup. I don't really understand why Scotland should be allowed to send all both their teams into the main competition - maybe that's where it helps to be part of the old establishment - but we have nothing to complain about if we build on what we have achieved."

Tinari concluded by asking me the size of the Scottish population. After proffering my answer, he replied that Italy has 56 million, which prompted him to comment: "The Scots are doing very well with what they have". To some extent, he's correct. But how long before we risk being overtaken in the global stakes by the newcomers to the party?

This article was posted on 15-Mar-2008, 11:32 by Hugh Barrow.