She doesn't just work with kids in crisis in countries like Kosovo and Ukraine. In her native Italy, she's teaching them the finer points of this hooligan's game.
ind wanders back to the seven- and eight-year-old girls in her native Italy whom she used to coach in rugby. In fact, she calls her older sister Barbara, who coaches the team in her stead, every Sunday to find out how they played over the weekend.
At 17, Barban was enjoying herself as a competitive butterfly swimmer in her hometown of Vicenza, a small city located an hour from Venice on the road to Verona. Her older sisters Barbara and Cinzia had, four years earlier, started a women’s rugby team, and invited her to join them on the field. The female team was only Italy’s third.
At first, Barban said no. Her hometown was soccer-mad, having spawned the Italian international great Dino Baggio, and the Anglo-Saxon import of rugby wasn’t popular. In fact, many people still think she means soccer when she talks of rugby back home. Also, the idea of going from swimming quiet, solitary lengths in the pool to locking horns on a muddy rugby field did little to whet her appetite for the sport.
“They were completely different,” Barban says of the two sports. “But to force me to play, my sisters refused to talk to me for three weeks.” She relented only because she couldn’t stand the isolation and, though she probably regretted the decision at her first practice (she remembers standing dripping wet on the team’s muddy, poorly maintained field one evening after school), she hasn’t looked back since.
Enjoying the Scrum
Barban’s work helping families in crisis brought her to Kyiv. Before coming here, she worked for a year in Kosovo, not long after the fighting stopped in 2000. First she helped provide relief for families struggling to cope with the aftermath of the bloodshed and ethnic turmoil and then, after the initial relief work was done, she organized job seminars for unemployed and often widowed Kosovar women. Her work in Ukraine is similar, but given that there has been no war here, it’s more relaxed, so her mind has time to wander back to rugby.
While we enjoyed servings of Uzbek lagman soup (Hr 29) and pots of green and black tea (Hr 17 each) at Caravan, Barban told me more about rugby, and how it’s affected her worldview.
“As soon as I began playing, I realized I liked it,” she said. The team captain, an American from a U.S. army base near Vicenza, told her to follow behind her and do everything she did. Barban got a few touches on the ball in her first game (10 days after her first practice session), and was hooked.
“When you play, it’s the kind of sport where you can do everything. It fits for everyone: fast, slow, tall, short,” she says after taking a bite of her bakhor salad of greens, Uzbek spices and mutton (Hr 28). “I played basketball before, but it’s hard if you’re not tall enough. In rugby there are 15 positions, so you can really find yourself anywhere.
“Sometimes it’s like life,” she says of the game. “You always need support.”
Most people have a mental picture of rugby, an English game which in the New World mutated into American football, but little more than that. As in American football, a team tries to move the ball across its opponents’ goal line, with players running forward to support the ball carrier. Unlike American football, the ball can be passed only backward. Constant support from teammates and coaches is crucial, so it’s no surprise Barban played alongside her sisters for nearly her entire career. She’s close to them, as she is to her whole family, including her former cyclist father, and to her opponents, given that this “sport for hooligans played by gentlemen” (and gentlewomen), is traditionally one in which the teams fraternize together after games.
“Rugby’s a very social sport,” Barban says.
After having played for a long time, and taken her share of injuries, Barban decided it was time to change her relationship with rugby. Broken bones, torn ligaments and concussions are common in the game, and every player eventually sees the writing on the wall. Barban now spends more time coaching and promoting the game than playing. She tries to instill in her players the discipline and respect for opponents epitomized by the major international players she’s known, like former Australian international David Campese, who played in Padua and still comes to visit friends there.
One of her best rugby-related memories was of Italy’s participation in its first-ever Six Nations rugby championship two years ago. In a match played in Rome, Italy managed to beat Scotland in front of a mixed crowd of Italians and Scots.
For Barban, the win wasn’t the most remarkable thing, though. Italian rugby, needless to say, doesn’t have the same strong history as rugby does in England, Scotland and elsewhere, so it has adopted songs and traditions from other countries. That created a magical moment after the first Six Nations match, when the entire stadium, Scottish and Italian fans alike, joined together for a rousing rendition of “The Flower of Scotland.” The Scottish anthem represented to her and the other Italians everything that rugby stands for: celebrating and having fun together, regardless of who’s won or lost.
With all that rugby has brought to Barban’s life, one thing bothers her, and ironically it has to do with winning.
In Padua just this past year her sisters – now playing for Riviera del Brenta – played in the league final. For years Barban and her sisters had been involved in losing campaigns against this and other teams; she’d never once won a league title. In 2003, when Barban was already living in Ukraine and was unable to play with her sisters in a final for the first time in her career, they won.
“I was so furious that they won without me,” she says with eyes wide and unblinking. Her last match, also for the league championship, had been right before leaving for Kosovo in October 2002, and it was a personal disaster. But she shrugs it off, as she does most negative things that come her way.
“My dad’s only seen me play one match, he hates the game, and rugby’s not a game I think you can pick up all at once anyway,” she continues. “At half-time he comes to me on the field and says ‘You must do this, and this, and this, and this.’ It was too funny.”
“You know, all the things I remember from playing were bad, so now I want to teach kids the proper things, how not to make mistakes. Most importantly is that I still coach. It’s completely different [than playing], but sometimes it’s better to watch a child play.”
Caravan
10 Klovsky Uzviz,
290-9577.
Open daily
from 11 a.m. to
the last customer.
English menu:
Yes.
English-speaking
staff: Yes.
