Reign Of Teros

Uruguay’s most-capped player Diego Magno explains the huge strides made by his country thanks to their set-up at Estadio Charrúa

- Frankie Deges

BUILD IT and they will come.” Coming from deep inside the cornfields, a baffled Kevin Costner heard that a few times during Field of Dreams, the 1989 Hollywood blockbuster about an Iowa farmer who builds a baseball diamond on his farm that the 1919 Chicago White Sox come to play on. He built it and they came.

The growth of Uruguayan rugby can be tied to their own field of dreams, Estadio Charrúa, which has become the centre of their success story. A derelict stadium, all but abandoned by football, had been used in 1989 for a South American Rugby Championship. Having played in that tournament, Marcello Calandra held a meeting about using the stadium on his first day as Uruguayan Rugby Union (URU) chairman. The date was 1 February 2012.

“The plan was to have a home where we could all work and prepare accordingly,” explains Calandra, who is one of the many rugby heroes in his country as a former Teros player and coach, current vice-chairman of Sudamérica Rugby and a great barbecue cook. After that initial meeting, the Tierra de Los Teros (Land of Los Teros) was founded.

The shared control of the stadium between the football association and rugby was extended for ten years as URU invested close to US$500,000 to revamp it. The work done, as well as another half-a-million coming from URU and World Rugby, which has fully supported Charrúa’s High-Performance Centre, led FIFA to choose the stadium for an age-grade Women’s Football World Cup last year. State-of-the-art lighting and an artificial pitch paid for by football bodies means Uruguayan rugby benefits from modern facilities. It was here that they won, for the third consecutive year, World Rugby’s Nations Cup back in June.