Lagos

After two minutes the first nose begins to drip. In an attempt to penetrate head on the goal area of the opponent John crashed against a wall with shoulders and kneecaps with full force. With blood-smeared trunk he is carried out of the field. John sits a while absent minded at the edge of the field and stares at the red puddle, which forms between his legs in the sand. Then he pours himself some water in the face and jumps back into the field of play.

John is one of twenty broad shouldered boys, who meet each Sunday at the beach in Lagos to play Rugball. One does not need to watch for a long time, to be able to establish that that is not a kind of sport for tender creatures. Rugball inherited the goals and the counting method from football, from the Rugby the body contact and the egg-shaped playing device, and from the Megapolis Lagos the tendency for everything extreme. Rugball is fast, strenuous, involving and not completely harmless. Could it be a game, which fits this city better?

The hotel operator Chike Nwagbogu is something like the founding father of Rugball. He is a coach, manager and player at the same time, organizes the start ups, takes over the warming up programme, refines the rules and has for the informal part after playing also a bottle of self brewed herbal liquor ready. Nevertheless Chike does not want to call himself an inventor. He says he invented the play himself - from a logical chain reaction. Well over two years ago, according to the legend, a ball burst during a normal beach play. Chike and his friends first continued to play with a coconut. Because it was not particularly pleasant to kick against a nutshell with bare foot they agreed to take that playing device in the hand. In the long run catching flying coconuts was again not particularly pleasant for the two goal keepers. One day Chike then brought along an oval Rugby-Ball – the new sport was born.

A kind of sport, which has a great future according to its founder. Chike, John and their friends are dreaming of a league system, a federation, a cup, a national championship. But as with every pioneer spirit, they will probably have to dream yet a little while. Meanwhile there are only two teams, and therefore each weekend the same Local derby takes place: “City” against “Language” – the boys from the city centre against the boys from one other suburb of Lagos, where hardly understandable English is spoken. Particularly in the Language-Team many players are unemployed, not a few have no home. What exactly they do in the course of the day, they cannot or will not say. They somehow get through the five useless days until it is again Sunday at 16.30 hrs . Then 18 to 20 players, a referee and some spectators squeeze themselves into a rickety red minibus, which has at best 12 seats, and they all roll out together to the Kuramo Beach.

In effect, if one as a European hears the word “Beach”, one understands something else other than that multicoloured shimmering red, smoked town on sand, which hangs on Victoria Island like an appendix. Directly behind the gate which looks like hurriedly nailed together lie, clustered together, orange coloured hard plastic drums, which judging by their stench have been in use for several centuries as public toilets. On the way to the Rugball field, which essentially consists of two collapsible wooden goal posts with tattered nets, one passes open air discos, lean cows, indescribable types of grilled meat, improvised single family houses made of corrugated sheet, hundreds of beach traders, thousands of people, folding chairs and sun screens and above all: Garbage. Garbage that extends as far as the eye can reach.

So a Rugball match begins traditionally with a collective environmental sanitation exercises at the beach. Some collect larger articles such as oil cans, buckets and dead birds, which accumulated in such a way over the week on the play ground. Others rake the remaining garbage to the side. In this way, after few minutes, a natural demarcation of the playground becomes visible - a small stadium emerges from gabbage.

The actual play is consciously kept simple, the set of rules clear: compliance is total, goals count only when scored with the foot or with the head, no neck grips, no bites, no weapons. The match comes to an end, when a team has ten points or the referee loses control over the actions of the players. Last Sunday it was 7:5.