Dubai: As historic sporting milestones go, few can be as emotive as an Emirati rugby player running out on UAE National Day at a packed Dubai Sevens Stadium, to the anthem Ishy Bilady, for the first time.
Next weekend, such dreams will be realised in the first year of the formation for the UAE Rugby Association (UAE RA) since the dissolution of the GCC-wide combined Arabian Gulf Rugby Football Union (AGRFU).
From a game first played here on sand, by oil and armed forces expatriates in the 1970s, rugby has now spread, albeit in its infancy, to include UAE nationals.
Broken up to tap into individual National Olympic Committee funding, with sevens rugby to debut at the 2016 Olympics, the International Rugby Board (IRB) no longer recognises regional collectives like the AGRFU. Instead they sought to spread the game's influence by honing individual member states.
Now with nationals needed to forge a team eventually capable of Olympic or Asian Games participation, it was deemed inappropriate for the sport to be governed solely by expatriates arguably only for expatriates.
Hence the first Emiratis to step foot onto the field for their first outing in UAE colours at their home event next week, will become instant role models for the next generation of Emirati rugby-playing youth. Win or lose, they will be cementing as they go, the foundations of the sport in the UAE.
That's a prospect hooker Yousuf Shaker, aged 24, anticipates with great pride: "Ever since we started to play at club level six years ago, our dream was to play in front of 40,000 spectators at the Sevens Stadium with the big international sides. Just one more week and this dream will be in front of our eyes."
About winning
"It's not about winning, we are only just about to achieve the dream of participation. To win the Dubai Sevens is the dream of our sons," said Shaker.
Since its formation on January 1 this year, the UAE RA's 15s side, featuring expatriates and some nationals, has trumped the former AGRFU outfit to finish third in the Asian Five Nations this summer, behind Japan and Hong Kong. But at the sevens level, where the AGRFU had never progressed beyond the semi-final of the shield and quarter-finals of the Bowl in Dubai, there remains work to be done.
The UAE has come off the back of ninth, seventh and third place finishes respectively at Shanghai, Borneo and Goa in the recent Asian Sevens Series. In Goa, last weekend, they even fielded an all-Emirati squad parallel to the expatriate side for the first time, winning exposure but falling to six straight defeats and finishing eighth overall.
Wayne Marsters, UAE RA team manager, said: "Our Dubai Sevens target is to show people we are a professional set-up despite our embryonic state. Although we're only a year old, we want to show the opposition and the supporters that we are for real. Our goals are not so much connected to overall outcome but individual performance."
Winger Ali Mohammad, 29, one of the first Emiratis to play for the UAE at 15s, said: "We lost all our games in Goa, but what's important is development and improvement as the UAE expatriate side showed us, improving on their overall Sevens Series results as they went on."
"For Emiratis to be involved in the first UAE Dubai Sevens squad is of massive significance and the government will see this and support us more. It doesn't matter which one of us is picked, or how many of us get in the team as we are all brothers, but the wider meaning behind Emirati representation at this stage in our development as a rugby playing nation is huge."
UAE RA CEO Ian Bremner was just as keen to talk about other UAE firsts this coming week, as development pathways aim to widen the game's base among young Emiratis in preparation for the 2014 Asian Games: "Our work in local schools has started, we are up to 16 sessions a week among 200 students in over 15 schools, and it will have its first public outing on November 29 in an HSBC coaching clinic at Dubai College. We are also aiming to get Abu Dhabi schools in line as soon as possible."
Retention is now critical in a sport which has previously relied locally upon the transient expatriate players. Bremner said: "We haven't got the resources to spread our net as wide as possible and hope the cream rises to the top. Instead our focus is on these schools to fully commit to rugby to guarantee talent does come to crop."
The UAE RA is also in negotiations with Abu Dhabi's Vocational Educational Development Centre (VDEC), where 1,700 full-time boarders will become the backbone of the UAE's youth structure.
It's national progression that previously wouldn't have existed to such an extent with the AGRFU, former chairman Andy Cole conceded. "There were Emiratis and certainly Arabs on the fringe of making the AGRFU squad, but with having one single nation now, there is certainly more emphasis and motivation to help the Emiratis progress."
"But until the sport is part of the national curriculum in schools, the UAE will always need expatriates in the side to be competitive," he said.
