It's a hot day on the artificial turf at King's Park Sports Ground in Ho Man Tin, where 250 youngsters under 12 are playing in 'national' teams mirroring the World Rugby Cup in New Zealand. Among the youngsters are Calvin Harris, 11, and his brother Leighton, seven. The British-born Harris brothers, who have been playing mini rugby for a year, are keen to make their mark at the Te Aka Aorere Mini Rugby Tournament, and for Calvin it's time to try out a strategy for scoring tries that he picked up recently.
'I don't play in the scrum, so you have to wait for the ball to come out. It can be quite frustrating at times,' he says. 'But now that the other players have realised that me and my brother can run quite fast, they tend to pass the ball to us.'
The relatively small number of players who took part in last month's tournament, hosted by the New Zealand Consulate with support from the Hong Kong Rugby Football Union (HKRFU) and the Hong Kong Mini Rugby Football Union (HKMRFU), belies the ascent of mini rugby in Hong Kong. Designed to introduce rugby to children under 13, it features nine players a side and uses a smaller ball and pitch than the standard game. It took root here in the late 1980s, inspired partly by the Hong Kong Sevens. And just as the Sevens has grown into a key international sporting event, mini rugby has also taken off. The city now has 18 mini rugby clubs, with another due to kick off before the end of the year.
The clubs organise six tournaments a year involving thousands of young players, a logistical challenge for the organisers. HKMRFU chairman Case Everaert estimates Hong Kong will have 4,000 mini rugby players by the end of the year - and that about half will be Chinese.
'The Rugby Sevens has created an enormous rugby culture in Hong Kong,' Everaert says. 'It's the premier Sevens event in the world. What people did not know is just how big mini rugby is in Hong Kong.'
Youngsters such as Leung Wai-hing represent the new face of the sport. Now 10, he has been playing mini rugby for three years for the Tin Shui Wai team, often as a centre, and reckons he's pretty good. Yet until he heard about it from his friends, Wai-hing hadn't even watched rugby on television. Now the youngster prefers mini rugby to soccer, which he finds more complicated. 'I can't control the football!' he says.
Mini rugby's popularity here was illustrated last year in October, when 2,610 children set a Guinness world record by playing the sport at the same time - three times the number of youngsters who set the previous record.