Cyprus rugby is a success story that should make the island proud. THEO PANAYIDES meets one of its driving forces, the captain of the national side
Question: Which is the most successful country in the world at rugby? Answer: You’re standing in it.
Admittedly, there’s a bit of semantics involved. Cyprus clearly isn’t the most successful rugby team in terms of winning major competitions. We’ve never played in a World Cup, and perhaps we never will. In the four years since our national rugby side was formed, however, it’s played 17 competitive matches and won 16 – a record unmatched by any other national rugby side. Meanwhile, in so-called ‘rugby sevens’, i.e. seven-a-side rugby (due to be an Olympic sport from 2016), Cyprus was recently ranked No. 12 in Europe, having claimed some notable scalps. “We’ve beaten Georgia, drawn with Italy,” recalls Tony Thoma. “We ran Wales close, and Wales were the world champions! We were actually beating Wales, the year they won the World Cup. So, you know, everything is possible.”
Not many people know of these exploits (rugby is a tough sell in Cyprus) – but Tony does, because he’s the Cyprus team captain. He plays hooker in the national team, and prop forward in the Paphos Tigers (one of three non-Bases local sides, the others being the Limassol Crusaders and Nicosia Barbarians). He doesn’t play sevens – a much faster game – because he’s too old (he’ll be 35 in April) and, frankly, too big. He actually seems on the small side for a prop, sitting in a conference room in the Olympic House in Nicosia, but in fact – to my surprise – he claims to weigh 108kg. Obviously, most of it is muscle.
Tony’s round-faced, with thick lips and legs like tree-trunks. He works in Paphos for a company called Shadeports Plus (“an exciting new concept in exterior weather protection,” says their website) and lives with his English wife Elizabeth and two children, four-year-old Isabella and two-year-old Thaddeus. Beyond his work, his sport and his family, he seems to have no other passions (and wouldn’t have time to pursue them, even if he did). We spend an hour talking about rugby, but I’m not sure how much I got of him as a person – or indeed how much I missed. It’s hard to know how best to summarise him.
One way is to view him as an accountant, with many of that breed’s characteristics: correctness, precision, respectability. He studied Accounting at college, but never finished his degree so he went to the UK last year to complete the course – which of course is very accountant-like behaviour in itself – meanwhile playing semi-pro rugby with an English club side. He’s trying to make rugby in Cyprus more “family-oriented” (four schools in Paphos have agreed to start coaching young kids, with hopes of an inter-school tournament), and lauds its social side: “It’s a good social sport. You sit down afterwards, you talk, you mingle. What happened on the field stays on the field”. The stereotype of post-match drunken brawls he dismisses as “nonsense”. On the field, he prizes teamwork and above all discipline, “the most important thing”.
Then again, you could view him as an older brother, with familiar older-brother traits: solidity, a willingness to take responsibility, a certain bossiness. Not only does he have two younger brothers – the youngest, Chris, plays alongside him on the Paphos Tigers and the national side – but Tony was the one who stayed behind in South Africa, to settle their late father’s estate, when the family moved to Cyprus in 2001; it’s an older brother’s job, and he didn’t shirk from it. On the rugby field, too, the captain acts as a kind of older brother, making decisions and keeping an eye on the other players (it’s a more hands-on responsibility than the largely ceremonial job of the team captain in soccer). If someone has a complaint, the captain is the one who’ll take it to the referee. If someone is aggressive as a person – “most team sports have always got one bigmouth” – the captain is the one who’ll keep him under control. “Every time I see you’re about to boil over, I’ll grab you and pull you away,” he explains.
Being aggressive isn’t necessarily a bad thing. In fact, “that’s the good thing about rugby, you learn to channel your aggression. So yes, you get frustrated – but instead of hitting someone, next time you go into a tackle you go into a tackle harder. Or if you run with the ball, you run harder”. Tony should know, because he’s been playing the game for 28 of his 34 years – starting in Johannesburg, where his father emigrated from Cyprus in 1965. Dad was a carpenter who later moved into retail, running his own supermarket, at least till South Africa became impossibly crime-ridden in the late 90s. Tony’s father had his shop robbed six or seven times; he himself was stabbed in the shoulder. A cousin of Tony’s was shot by a robber: “He’d just got back from America. Stopped off on the way to his house to visit my parents, and he got shot in the shop”. The family finally decided enough was enough, though his father passed away, in South Africa, just a few months before they left.
Meanwhile, Tony himself had been playing rugby; he could hardly avoid the sport, or indeed sport in general. He doesn’t get frustrated when Cypriots betray their ignorance of rugby, he says, not even when they confuse it with American football (“Do you wear helmets?”) – because he knows (and here he hesitates, not wishing to give offence) that “they’re very limited, sports-wise”. His school in South Africa had six rugby fields, three cricket fields, 20 tennis courts, an Olympic-sized pool and an indoor gymnasium. Coaching, equipment, training – everything was free. Here, only soccer is well catered for, and even then promising schoolkids (or their parents) usually have to pay a fee to some football academy. There’s “nothing to entice the youngsters into sport,” he says sadly.
By the time he left school at 18, Tony was being paid to play rugby. He played at club level for about six years, played in the student World Cup in 1996 and made the trials for the so-called ‘Super 12’ (now ‘Super 15’) featuring teams from Australia, New Zealand and South Africa. Then he stopped – not by choice, but because he, his mother and brothers moved to Cyprus. What if he’d stayed? What if he’d been less responsible – less of an older brother, perhaps – and stayed behind to play rugby? How far could he have gone? He shrugs, muttering something about “a lot of competition”.
But surely he thinks about it?
He shrugs again. “I think about it, but I don’t let it eat at me, you know? I’ve made up my mind, I’ve done what I’ve done. There’s no point thinking about what could’ve been.” He pauses, trying to be upbeat: “But my way of doing it is by contributing back to Cyprus rugby.”
Thus begins the tale of Cyprus rugby – a contradiction in terms 10 years ago, when Tony Thoma came to Paphos and met up with other young South Africans, all of them nursing their secret passion for the sport. “We would talk about it, watch it on TV,” he recalls, as if talking of some illicit substance. The Paphos Tigers were founded in 2003, the initial contingent being mainly South African though they’ve now got Brits, and even six or seven Cypriots. The national side also has a smattering of Cypriot-born players, though most are either repatriates or diaspora Cypriots playing in top clubs abroad. In their last game, says Tony, 11 of the 22 players were based on the island, the rest overseas. “We try to promote on-island players as much as we can. If it comes to a 50-50 call, we go for the Cypriot-based player. We have to. It’s the only way the sport’s going to grow here.”
The results speak for themselves. Cyprus started in 2007 in Group 3D, the very bottom of the European league table. Four years later (groups are played in a
two-year cycle) we’re at the top of Group 3C, having almost guaranteed our passage to 3B (we need one more point from three games); after that there’s 3A, then 2B and 2A, then – theoretically – the top flight. “With the current players we’ve got now, we can go through the next two Group stages,” reckons Tony. After that, “we have to start bringing in the big guns”. That means fielding stronger sides, attracting more Cypriot players from abroad, even trying to nurture home-grown stars. And all of that means money.
“We’ve done very well,” he points out. “It’s just – you know, it’s a constant battle. For funding. For players”. Travelling to an away game typically costs around €20,000; organising a home game costs around half that. For the past two years, some of these costs have been covered by two main sponsors, Tony’s employer Shadeports and fish restaurant Ocean Basket – but state support has been scant, local sports authorities clearly having filed rugby away with other ‘minority sports’, a.k.a. sports which aren’t soccer.
It must frustrate him, the way the other kind of football gets all the plaudits (even more so because he lives in Peyia, a village which has spent – or squandered – vast amounts of public money on its soccer team). That kind of irrational behaviour must sit badly with a man so beholden to discipline. He hesitates: “What annoys me,” he replies slowly, “is, you look at sports in general in Cyprus, there’s a shortage of funds, so money is tight. OK? Then, when you look at how many millions are spent on hooligans each year, just for the police to go [to soccer matches]. And who foots the bill? The public. Then you’ve got small federations asking for money to go play in a tournament, or represent the country somewhere, and it’s ‘Sorry, we don’t have money’. But you’ve got four to five million euros a year, just for the police to go to football games!”
“It’s frustrating,” he admits. “We just can’t expand the way we want to. We’ve got ideas, we’ve got plans – but everything’s so time-consuming”. How much is rugby a part of his own life? “Quite a lot. So much that my wife… you know, she… it gets to her.” He hesitates, slightly uncomfortable talking about the personal side. “You know, I’ve got two kids, under five years old, so – it’s a lot of strain on the family, and the wife. It’s very difficult”. He trains on Tuesdays and Thursdays, and doesn’t see the kids at all on those days. There’s often a game on Saturday, so that whole day gets wiped out (though Elizabeth and the kids come to watch him in action). Not to mention all the travelling he does with the national side.
What does it take to be a good rugby player? “Look here, there’s a certain edge you have to have to yourself,” replies Tony Thoma, sounding very South African. But in Cyprus it also takes something else, a certain persistence against the odds. Tony’s middle brother also plays rugby, but had to quit because he had no time (he was working two jobs in addition to playing). One of our three teams, the Nicosia Barbarians, are always “in and out” because they struggle to find enough players. It’s not easy – and makes the achievements of the national side even more admirable.
Tony Thoma’s idol, the player he worshipped as a younger man, was Francois Pienaar, the rugby captain (played by Matt Damon in Invictus) who led South Africa to the World Cup. Not because he was the best player necessarily, says Tony – but “it was the leadership. It’s the way he presented himself in public, also. He was a man. A gentleman, you know? The way he spoke. He was very diplomatic – and he was also a fanatical rugby player. He had an aura about him”. Tony Thoma may not be Francois Pienaar – just as Cyprus may not be South Africa. Still, we’re getting there.
