Jutting out from the southernmost tip of Spain, the unreservedly British Gibraltar shares many things with its mother land, not least a passion for rugby. Their ground would be the envy of international sides, if only they got to showcase it on the global scene. Instead, they find themselves in rugby’s no-man’s land.

In Estonia, just south of Finland, next door to Russia, Rugby World Cup winner Graham Smith ponders thirty years of coaching. For a slaughterman who almost had to literally fight off the bailiffs, the Black Country boy has done well.

For decades, the Hong Kong Sevens has been the epicentre of rugby in the region, but now, with the support of the world’s most famous tournament for the abridged game, the South China Tigers are changing the landscape.

Think of Syria, and some think of civil war, or perhaps the four million people fleeing the country fearing for their lives. Others, though, have a different vision. Of lemon trees, jasmine, fountains... ... and rugby.

On a cluster of Caribbean islands off the coast of Venezuela, the first roots of rugby union are beginning to emerge in a country famed for its spice. With the nation’s strongest man in the line-up, Grenada have made a quiet entrance into the world of rugby.

To some Tonga is seen only as an island paradise. To others, it’s a country caught up in a global drugs trade, with an economy that relies on overseas relatives, and is being forced to accept a growing influx of convicted criminals. To put it another way, losing a rugby match 102-0 to the All Blacks is the least of its worries.

“In Islamic society, people normally think of ladies in general as having to stay at home and take care of their families, so whenever men see women playing these sports, they are afraid to see us as fearless.”

At a tournament funded by a company with a $2.43 trillion market cap, rugby was showcased to a crowd of 6,000 in Saudi Arabia. They’ve also relaunched their rugby federation and put a sevens side into the Arab Games for the first time. In a country that divides opinion, so often going big on the sporting front, rugby is quietly taking some small steps in development.

At the heart of China’s rugby ambitions on the island of Hainan in the South China Sea, there’s an obvious outsider. The height of his playing CV reads Edinburgh Accies and Murrayfield Wanderers but this Scotsman, aged just 35, is the driving force behind China’s Olympic challenge at Tokyo 2020. Euan Mackintosh is the most influential Scottish coach you’ve never heard of.

The first time Portugal qualified for a Rugby World Cup in 2007, the campaign had included 83-0 defeats, having guns pulled on them in Uruguay, and then getting drawn against the All Blacks at the main event. This time around, for France 2023, they did it the hard way.

At a Rugby World Cup where the Russians tried to fund themselves by selling contraband, the French barely made it at all, and England and New Zealand were favourites, a USA team featuring the ‘locks from hell’, the ‘mother of rugby’, a stunt woman hand-picked by Burt Reynolds, and coached by a Welsh PE teacher, pulled off one of the sport’s greatest shocks.

Even before the guns stopped firing, and the new country had fully emerged, a Croatian rugby team had formed. A few years later, led by a man who would become a priest, they faced Italy in an incredible World Cup qualifying run.
The biggest star on the pitch wasn’t Italian however, it was a Croatian rugby rock star by the name of Frano Botica.

Literally half a world away from where the sport first began, and with a national side on the periphery of rugby’s top table, Hong Kong is the epicentre of the sevens world, the spiritual home of the abridged game. The Hong Kong Sevens is a must for every rugby fan the world over, and this is why...

It’s been played by the greats of the game, from Lomu and Campese to Habana and Serevi, its atmosphere is the stuff of legend, and then there’s the food, the nightlife, not to mention the ancient history right on its doorstep – it’s for good reason that the Hong Kong Sevens is rugby’s true bucket-list event.

Stories of resistance attacks against the Nazis, Soviet showtrials and the hell of war-time Poland filled their heads. They didn’t need to understand every word spoken by their Welsh coach. This was the team talk to end all team talks. Germany never stood a chance.

One evening in the summer
of 2003, Joe Schmidt, deputy principal of Tauranga Boys College, gets a knock on the door. The visitor was to the point: ‘Vern Cotter wants you to be the backs coach of the Bay of Plenty. Are you in?’ Joe was in and, one year later, he’d help the unlikely contenders to one of the most cherished prizes in New Zealand rugby.

Chris Raducanu and Florică Murariu were in the Romanian squad that played Scotland at Murrayfield in December 1989. During the post-match banquet Raducanu fled from the hotel and claimed political asylum. Murariu didn’t. Instead, he took the flight back home and, two weeks later, was shot dead as revolution tore through their homeland.

A mushroom cloud enveloped the city of Beirut on Tuesday 4th August, 2020. Beneath it, was a world destroyed, 200 lives lost, 300,000 left homeless, and then, as the smoke began to clear, two teams of rugby players joined the effort to rebuild.

For the final of the King’s Cup, Valladolid came alive with tens of thousands of rugby fans, celebrating their city’s utter dominance of the sport. Spain could not only compete at rugby, but maybe conquer it too. If only they had the chance.

When Silvio Berlusconi’s empire finally began to crumble around him in 2011, The Economist magazine ran a headline which captured the zeitgeist. It read: ‘The man who screwed an entire country’. One of the few exceptions to that statement would be rugby in Amatori Milan, which thrived under his patronage in the 1990s. That is, unless he turned up to watch.