China

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 Chinese province of Hainan has long been a place for outsiders. The island sits 30km offshore from mainland China, about the same distance Dover is from Calais, and its physical detachment has promoted a cultural non-conformity. 

It was to Hainan that the 11th-century poet Su Shi was banished – for a second time – after one too many pops at the leaders of the ruling Song dynasty. In Hainan though, they liked him. So much so that an academy of classical learning – the university of its day – was built on the site where Su had lived. As rebellious statements go, though, that was subtle by Hainan standards. The locals would get bolder as the years rolled on, knocking up a shrine to central government officials who had been disgraced and banished to Hainan. They called it the Temple of the Five Lords and its numerous renovations up to the present day are testament to a streak of resistance that still exists in this southernmost province in the People’s Republic of China. 

Nowadays though, Beijing has the measure of Hainan, and has harnessed the province’s non-conformity by making it a hotbed of alternative economics. In 2011 Hainan was made into one of the biggest duty free havens in the world – imagine four Bicester Villages dotted about an island serving a population of 9.2 million people, plus day-trippers from the mainland. Then last year, things were stepped up again, with Hainan becoming a free trade port, making it the biggest special economic zone in China, six times larger than Shanghai, and with the potential to one day out-strip Hong Kong. 

It’s unsurprising, therefore, perhaps even appropriate, that Hainan is now where China’s women’s sevens team are based in the build-up towards their participation in the Olympics for the first time. Far from the Olympic hub of Beijing, 23 of China’s best players are hunkering down in an effort to live up to the furiously high expectations that accompany any Chinese sports team when representing their country at an Olympics. 

Their head coach is a Scotsman, Euan Mackintosh, a comparatively unknown former club player who lists Highland Rugby Club on his modest playing resume. 

He now calls Hainan home but his surroundings are a world apart from the countryside he grew up in on the outskirts of the village of Beauly, just west of Inverness, some 9,500 kms away in Scotland.

On the day Rugby Journal speaks with Euan, the temperature back home in the Scottish Highlands is -2 °C, with snow lying on the ground, but he’s just finished taking a training session in Hainan’s capital Haikou in baking 27°C heat.

That could be a step too far out of the comfort zone for many, but not for Euan. “I was brought up in the middle of the countryside outside the small village of Beauly where there are more sheep and cows than people,” he jokes. “It is a big contrast to then live in areas like Nanjing – where I was for a spell after arriving in China – and the population (8.5m) is nearly double the whole of Scotland (5.4m).”

But 35-year-old Euan, who has been playing and coaching his way across the world for almost fifteen years, has never been afraid to immerse himself in something new.

Growing up, he played his rugby at Highland Rugby Club in Inverness, before heading to Edinburgh to study PE. “I was a stand-off in those days and while I was studying I played club rugby for Murrayfield Wanderers and Edinburgh Accies,” he explains. “I graduated and then headed off to Christchurch in New Zealand.

“Then I played some rugby on the Gold Coast in Australia and then I was lucky enough to get the chance to move to France where I ended up playing semi-professionally.

“Sadly, I got injured when I was 26 and that was when my coaching career started to take off with St Etienne.”

A background in teaching helped ease the transition to coaching, despite still being in his mid-twenties. “The blend of having played at a decent level and that teaching knowledge allowed me to slip into it quite well,” he says. “France was good for me and, in hindsight, I think that the language barrier helped my coaching. 

“Sometimes when you’re coaching or teaching you can give too much information over to the players or the pupils and that overload can cause confusion, meaning that you do not get the basics quite right or locked in place.

“However, when you can’t communicate easily you have to get the message across in simple ways with a lot of clarity and that can actually help.”

After coaching full-time in France for two years, he returned to New Zealand in 2017 to coach at Tauranga Rugby Club and also the Bay of Plenty men’s sevens team. “I was also assistant coach to the Bay of Plenty under-19s when they won their first ever New Zealand championship and it was very rewarding,” he says. “What I found is that they share knowledge so readily in New Zealand, nobody keeps things to themselves, everyone is very open to helping other coaches get better which ultimately makes the players get better.”

It was those New Zealand connections that ended up landing him a role on the international stage with China. “Sean Horan, who had coached the New Zealand Black Ferns women’s sevens team at the Rio Olympics in 2016, where they won a silver medal, was coaching with Bay of Plenty and I was also a member of the coaching staff,” explains Euan. “The Chinese Rugby Football Association contacted him and asked him to head over to China to coach and he offered me a role within the coaching team. It was just too big an opportunity to turn down for me.

“I knew Sean well, had a good relationship with him and it seemed like the kind of project where we could really get stuck into things and make a difference to players and I liked that.”

Euan made the step up to head coach last October, during the pandemic, via a sequence of events dating back to January 2020, when the squad had been preparing to compete in New Zealand’s Hamilton Sevens. Before the event began, Covid-19 broke out and the squad had to return to China. Sean decided to stay back in New Zealand for family reasons, effectively making Euan acting head coach from then through to September. 

When the Olympics was then put back a year, Sean left the post for good with Euan appointed head coach in October. “People will look at Scotland and China and straight away think about the massive cultural differences,” says Euan, “but wherever I have called ‘home’ over the last few years I have been there first and foremost to do a job within rugby. 

“When I first moved here, the sole focus was to make sure that the Chinese women’s team made it to the sevens in Tokyo; anything else would have been seen as a failure by those who run the sport in the country.”

Not that he hasn’t had any time to explore. “In those first few days and weeks back in 2019 I was living out of a rental property in Nanjing in the Jiangsu province in Eastern China and trying to take in the amazing history of that area as well as getting a feel for the culture and trying to learn some Mandarin,” he says, adding, “but 99 per cent of my time here was still spent working hard with Sean to plot our way to Olympic qualification later that year.

“We had to hit the ground running because we had little time to assess the players who had been competing for China on the 2018/2019 World Sevens Series and then get them ready for the Asia Rugby Women’s Sevens Olympic qualifier that November.”

One thing his charges never lacked was the right attitude. “What I found out straight away is that the people in China are so respectful and, if you give them that back, then they will respect you and will work ever so hard for you out on the rugby pitch,” he says. “I think, in that respect, my background in teaching really helped me coming into this completely new environment because, albeit mainly through translators, it allowed me to build up key relationships early on and things managed to go from there quite nicely.”

Euan is experiencing first-hand China’s obsession with the Olympics. “Ever since the Olympics were handed to Tokyo for 2020, everything to do with sport in China has been driven towards getting teams and athletes to the Games in as many different sports and disciplines as possible,” he says. “Those at the top of rugby here set high standards and that can bring pressures, but it is a good pressure and everyone is on the same page: we all want the final squad that goes to Tokyo for the delayed tournament to be as well-prepared as they can be.

“I have always liked to push myself outside of my comfort zone, ever since I first headed abroad to play rugby in New Zealand after university a number of years ago. I love a project to focus on – and this is some project for sure.”

Inspiring China to get on board with rugby in a big way has undoubtedly been the pet project of many people over the years, with the potential of its vast population seemingly laying untapped for far too long. False dawns in fifteens have become the norm, with investment never materialising, but in sevens, and specifically the women’s side, there seems to be a realistic chance of China making it to the centre of the world stage.

Back in 2014, it was estimated that there were less than 2,000 registered players who were involved in either women’s XVs or sevens rugby in China. Given that the country’s population back then was estimated at 1.364 billion, it is clear to see that rugby was not really capturing the imagination, especially among females.

However, fast forward two years to 2016 and the Chinese authorities really started making a concerted effort to increase sporting participation from grassroots to elite levels. This came hot-on-the-heels of women’s sevens being in the Rio Olympics and, perhaps pointedly, with China’s Asian rivals Japan among the sides competing. 

“Seeing Japan playing in Rio against the likes of Great Britain on the big stage really made the decision-makers in the game in China decide to put a lot behind women’s sevens over the XVs game,” explains Euan. “With Japan automatically qualifying as the host nation for Tokyo 2020 too, it meant that the route through to the Olympics was slightly easier than it might have been, although they knew that countries like Hong Kong would not be easy to beat to the one and only automatic Asian qualifying place for a twelve-team event.”

A big moment along the road towards Olympic qualification – and all the kudos and opportunities which that would eventually bring – came in April 2018 when China beat South Africa 31-14 in the final of the Hong Kong Sevens qualifying event. The win took them on to the World Sevens Series for the 2018/19 campaign.

The following season, China played in Denver, Dubai and Sydney but, despite reaching the top table of sevens, they had to push on again, which led to the appointment of Sean and Euan. “We came into position in March 2019 with the objective of qualifying for the Olympics, simple as that,” says Euan. “There wereobviously World Sevens Series events straight off the bat [in Kitakyushu in Japan, Langford in Canada and Biarritz in France between April and June that year] and although the team eventually lost core status [and were relegated from the World Series], we saw enough from the core squad in those outings to leave us optimistic for the future.

“At that time, the squad were based in Nanjing and while Sean was flying in and out of China from time to time, I made my base there and it allowed me to get settled and really get a feel for the culture within the squad and how we could make them better.

“We knew that, in the build-up to the Asia Rugby Women’s Sevens Olympic qualifier that November, we could not rip up what had gone before.

“The players had core skills and plays that they had worked on to nail them down and for us it was just trying to get the players to think outside the box a little bit and realise that sometimes, especially in sevens, you have to use different options.

“A lot of the squad had also come from backgrounds in other sports which made them very athletic and fit, but it was more about turning on those sevens brains and getting them thinking about the nuances of that game 24/7 rather than just having basic skills, but maybe lacking in confidence to try things, out there on the pitch.”

Euan put in the hard yards on the training fields of Nanjing and soon it was November 2019 and the big Olympic qualifier in Guangzhou – in the south of China – had come around. “It was a one-off, winner-takes-all event, our contracts were on the line if we didn’t win it, so you could say there was a bit of performance pressure on the girls and on us as coaches, but the team coped with that very well,” says Euan. “We beat Hong Kong in the final [33-0, the superb Keyi Chen scoring two tries again, as she had in the famous South Africa win] and although there was a feeling of relief amongst the squad and the support staff, there was also a realisation that this was just the start of a journey rather than the end of one.

“We knew that the bosses wouldn’t just want us to get to the Olympics, but to go there and do well and from that day onwards that was what we switched our minds to.

“As a group we worked together in training through to the Hamilton Sevens in New Zealand in early 2020 and the plan was always that we would stay over there for a camp for a while after the event.

“Sean had arranged some hit-outs with teams he had worked with before, while the facilities were great and the squad really started to bond.”

With the story having gone full circle, Euan discusses his current set-up. “With everything that is going on in the world just now it has caused unrest for everyone,” he says, “but as a squad we had to get our heads around the Olympics having been delayed, and reset and all get on the same page again and that is why I am delighted we were backed to set up base on Hainan Island for a few months. 

“The core squad stayed together until early this year when I added ten new players into this camp,” he continues. “The idea behind that was to increase competition for places in the final Olympic squad and really make sure that we go to that tournament with the best blend in our playing group so that we can do well.

“I split the thirty players into three squads of ten so that we could play an internal tournament in early February and replicate competitive play, because with the ever-changing Covid-19 situation it is hard to know if we will play any competitive warm-up events or not.

“That internal tournament was really good: they played two games, two games and two games over three days as it will be at the Olympics and I have now cut the squad back to 23 with those players all staying with us for the next three months or so before we have to select our final squad of around twelve plus injury cover reserves.”

In 2021, the 2020 Olympics should hopefully happen – nothing can be taken for granted anymore – and we’ll finally see if China have what it takes on the big rugby stage. Euan, as you can imagine, believes anything is possible. “We are currently ranked 11th in the world, but we are one of the few teams still training full-time together,” he says. “A realistic goal based on rankings at the Olympics would be to finish in the top eight, so getting to the quarter-finals – and if you get to the quarter-final stage, anything can happen. 

“The Olympics is everything for China and if sevens wasn’t an Olympic sport, it wouldn’t have the backing it has had, so I know how fortunate I am, and I’m trying to grasp this chance.”

He knows also that the eyes of the entire rugby world will be on his side. “People may think that China is not a powerhouse of rugby, but the structure for sevens here is way ahead of other nations ranked higher in the world rankings,” he says.

“The potential here is huge and we would like to believe that we have grown and are catching up on the other nations.

“It is an exciting time, especially if China keeps moving in the same direction,” continues Euan. “Over the next ten years, China is a country you would expect to see achieve some special things in women’s sevens.

“However, for the squad and myself just now all we have on our minds is the first tie that we will play in Tokyo in a few months’ time.” 

Story by Gary Heatly

Pictures by Euan Mackintosh

This extract was taken from issue 13 of Rugby.
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