One time Sri Lanka rugby great Hisham Abdeen has joined the chorus in exposing the unprofessional behaviour of the conductors of schools rugby by implementing a strict code of conduct for players who will contest his annual Academy tournament at the Race Course ground in Colombo today.
The Sri Lanka Schools Rugby Football Association has come under heavy criticism that has also fallen on deaf ears over a litany of on-field violence and crowd disruptions during the past five years with nothing done to stamp out or control the scourge.
But Abdeen, who has been one of the cleanest players produced by Sri Lanka, will brook no nonsense and made his stance clear with the code of conduct for as many as 75 teams of mostly schoolboys from academies that will contest the one-day showpiece.
“It’s not about winning and losing,” Abdeen told a packed house of coaches and team managers at the tournament’s launch at Havelock Sports Club. “It’s about discipline. With discipline you can do wonders and without it you can’t do anything positive.”
The tournament is conducted by Abdeen’s academy called the Hisham Abdeen Rugby Football Academy (HARFA) which started 10 years ago and become a nursery for over 1200 players who learnt the basics of the game and enrolled at elite schools in Colombo.
At HARFA the students are taught not just discipline on the field of play but how to put it into practice after leaving their respective schools and not many gave the Academy a dog’s chance of surviving this long.
“Some critics said it (HARFA) will not go beyond three months. But it did with a legend like Hisham Abdeen and I have had the pleasure of watching its success and some of the boys have gone on to play for clubs and even the Sri Lanka team,” said Ivor Keerthipala the academy’s director.
While most of Abdeen’s Sri Lanka team-mates took up coaching, refereeing or administrative work, the former flanker counts himself as one of the most successful and yet unsung retired legends who has lent a hand to hundreds of under-privileged kids who would have otherwise had a boring boyhood with nothing to look forward to.
“My only interest is for the benefit of future players who go on to play for their school teams, clubs and country,” said Abdeen, a household name and one of the hottest crowd pullers at Havelocks Sports Club for ten years in the 1980s.
Among Abdeen’s achievements were captaining the Sri Lanka team that pocketted the Bowl trophy at the world famous Cathay Pacific Hong Kong Sevens in 1984 which to this day remains the single most acclaimed trophy for the country.
His HARFA academy has now grown into a corporate-enticing entity that has gone past many sports nurseries in the country thanks largely to his genuineness for fair-play and sporting values.