TRAINING CAMP IN BERLIN:ON A freezing Berlin night, the shouts from the floodlit all-weather pitch have attracted an audience of two: a curious boy on his way home from the swimming pool and a lonely rabbit.
It’s another Friday training session for the rugby team of Berlin club BSV 1892, but this time with a difference. The man calling the shots, in his familiar green anorak, is former assistant coach to Eddie O’Sullivan, Niall O’Donovan. Germany is a long way from Ireland; here rugby is an unknown sport in a country where soccer is king – for O’Donovan, a maddening state of affairs.
“If Ireland can pull a team together from four million people Germany must be spoiled for choice with 80 million – you can’t beat the numbers,” said O’Donovan.
“It’s a game that could suit the German psyche, they have a lot of big people here.”
Rugby isn’t entirely unknown in Germany, but it is woefully under-represented and often confused with American football.
The game’s roots go back to the 19th century, but it remains a long way from a national sport. Teams struggle to find enough players to field teams, even in the two main pockets of the game: in the north-east of the country around Berlin and further south around Heidelberg, where Germany’s first rugby team was formed back in 1850.
The German national side played its first international match in 1927, losing 5-30 to France. The first post-war international game was against Belgium in 1952; an East German rugby team followed a decade later but, like the westerners, spent its time playing friendlies and insignificant leagues.
In Berlin, the rugby team of Berlin’s BSV 1892 sports club has a speckled history. It was founded in 1936 but, like the other eight teams in the city at the time, was decimated by the war and its consequences.
The team reformed in 1949 but suffered a second blow when many players were cut off by the building of the Berlin Wall in 1961.
Rescue came in the form of the British and French soldiers stationed in the western sector of the city. Today, the team is a multi-cultural mix of Berliners, German-Turks and foreign students, based in the western neighbourhood of Wilmersdorf. The club has one and a half men’s teams, a women’s sevens team, an under-16 team and an under-12 side.
Foreign players like Jérome Morin continue on the tradition began by his father, a French soldier who played for the team when he was stationed in Berlin. He is optimistic of the chances of rugby taking off in Germany.
“People forget that, in France, there are huge areas where absolutely nobody is interested in rugby, it’s only soccer,” he said.
Lovers of rugby here say the game is trapped in a vicious circle in Germany: a non-existent presence in the media resulting in lack of interest from sponsors, aggravating a lack of funds that perpetuates a low profile and low quality.
“Germany suffers from a soccer monoculture that destroys everything else,” said BSV 1892’s team coach Marek Sniowski. “As in nature, it’s never a good idea to have one variety of anything dominating.”
Rugby suffers, too, from a lack of access to schools. “Teachers see the sport and think it’s too rough and violent, and they’re only interested in the sports they’re interested in,” said team veteran Manfred Neumann, who began playing in the 1960s.
The main sponsors of the team are Berlin-based Irish property developers James Guerin and Adrian O’Sullivan.
“I don’t know why the game hasn’t caught on here, my 11-year-old son is dying to get started,” said O’Sullivan, founder of European Property Investments, who has happy memories of the scrum back in Clonakilty.
“There’s plenty of big Bavarians, sneaky Swabians, and military precision Prussians. They have the making of a great team.”
The weekend training camp was the brain child of Berlin-based Irish actor John Keogh, also director of BSV 1892. “There’s an over-capacity in Irish rugby and an under-capacity here, so our motivation is to try and establish a connection with Ireland,” he said.
After his weekend in Berlin, O’Donovan says rugby in Germany still has a long way to go, but he’s optimistic Germany can one day build a rugby team to wipe the smile off France’s face forever.
“Germany needs to work hard to build the game and get into the B-Division six nations playing against Portugal and Georgia,” he said. “The fact that rugby is being introduced at the Olympics might entice the Germans back.”
