IT
EN
Wooden benches, langoustines on the grill since five in the morning and a row of legends a few metres away: Martin Castrogiovanni, Gonzalo Canale, Alessandro Troncon, Paolo Vaccari, Fabio Ongaro, Carlo Checchinato and, among the international guests, former All Blacks John Kirwan and Filo Tiatia. The Gruppo Bevanda Malamocco third half on Venice Lido is where FIR president Andrea Duodo chose to talk about the least glamorous side of Italian rugby: the grassroots.
For Duodo this gathering, some forty people who follow Italy away all winter, is “the spirit of rugby” in its purest form: a brotherhood of those who played and those who never did. And that is where he starts his reasoning about the game as a whole: with the clubs and the volunteers.
Hard years, clubs on the front line
The starting point is candid: Italian rugby is coming out of “very, very difficult post-Covid years”, with all the upheavals that hit sport and everything else. Getting through that, Duodo admitted, is “really very hard” for clubs, and his first thought went to those who did it on the ground.
“I am very confident that growth will come, in the long term, through the work and the volunteering that these clubs of ours do.”
The federation, he added, stays close to the clubs and will try to do its part. But the message was clear: the engine of the recovery is the clubs, not Rome.
Mid-term: “resetting the foundations”
Duodo has been president since September 2024, elected in Bologna with 55.9% of the vote in place of Marzio Innocenti. Halfway through his four-year term he described a “very demanding” two years of governance spent “resetting the foundations” of Italian rugby, and a will to keep investing in the game to get “big results”.
How far along is the FIR’s reset of the foundations?
“We’re in a good place,” the president replied: the federation has already laid “a very important concrete base”. The credit, though, he gave to the clubs rather than the federal governance: players are developing and coming through the leagues, difficult as they are, and Duodo sees enthusiasm and a desire to take on important roles in local communities. The results, he closed, “we’ll see at the end”.
“We have already laid a very important concrete base, but I repeat: it’s all thanks to our clubs, it’s not the FIR’s merit, not the governance’s.”
It is a weighty line from the man who runs the FIR. And it shifts the focus from November and the World Cup to what happens on provincial pitches on a Saturday afternoon: if Italian rugby is to grow again, Duodo says, that is where it will start.
Read also: Duodo: “Players Were Wrung Out by the Tour. Now November and the World Cup”
Read also: Castrogiovanni: “Once You Wear the Azzurro, You’re Its Guardian Forever”
The full interview with Andrea Duodo is on the DanPat Rugby YouTube channel. Subscribe and tell us in the comments how grassroots rugby is doing where you live.
DANPAT Rugby