It is a strange sight for the middle of Moscow, where professional sports usually involve strikers, Spartak and Snickers, or else pucks, pads and powerplays.


A huddle of players crowd around the coach, who is going over a set piece. The ball in his hand is definitely oval, and the H-shaped posts give the game away. This is rugby in Russia. Or to be more precise, this is rugby at Fili Sports Complex in western Moscow.


It may come as a surprise to find out that this game of colonial British origins took root in the former Soviet Union as long as 60 years ago. But Viktor Belyayev, the coach of a Moscow regional youth team, believes rugby is the most natural game on earth for Russians to be playing.


"Russians are a dashing people," Belyayev enthused at the Fili complex. "Rugby is a dashing game. Rugby strikes a chord with the boldness of the Russian soul."


Rugby first came to Moscow in 1934, and spread to the other former Soviet republics via already existing sports associations like Dynamo Kiev and Dynamo Tbilisi.


The Soviet Rugby Federation was set up in 1967, and a semi-professional league started the same year. When the Soviet Union collapsed, the Russian Rugby Federation was instigated, maintaining a premier league with 10 teams competing annually for the championship.


But the break-up of the Soviet Union has taken its toll on even the best clubs. The old affiliation of club and factory no longer solves the pressing financial difficulties of the day. Sponsorship is crucial now, and teams with no backers have been forced to withdraw from the league. Matches away from home have become a problem, especially when a team must pay millions of rubles, cross six time zones and spend days on the road just to complete a fixture.


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Back in the July sunshine at Fili, the training session splits up. Coach Pyotr Petrovich takes the forwards away to brush up on their rolling mauls. At the other end of the pitch the backs run through a few subtle scissor moves. For part-timers, they display a remarkable enthusiasm.


"They are mostly sports instructors and trainers, who have got interested in the game one way or another," Fili's vice president Fyodor Yusim says in his dusty office. "You can't really call them professionals. They earn a wage and the club tops it up, so to speak," he adds with a smile.


Many of the players have come through Fili's youth training school.


"Our youth rugby school here in the complex was set up in 1968," Yusim said, adding that Fili actively scouts schools for potential talent. It has met with enthusiasm. "Children themselves come and sign up; last year as many as 200 came along."


Russian international Sergei Romanov was discovered in this way. The stand-off is gently cooling down on the touchline looking every inch a sportsman. You can tell he is the star of the Fili show by the way he turned up late and strolled indifferently through the exercises and set pieces.


"I started playing rugby in 1980," he says on his way to the dressing room. "The scouts came round to our school, I had a go and it went O.K.," he adds modestly.


He began with Lokomotiv, and moved to Fili when his club folded. Today as Fili's top player he is one of Russia's few professional rugby players, and even then, like most others, he often has to turn to his qualification as a sports trainer to make ends meet.


After everyone has gone inside, one player is left out on the pitch. He is Pavel Berzin, and he is kicking goals. Each time the ball sails merrily through the posts, Berzin moves his tee a few yards further on an arc across the pitch. Each time he misses he moves it back to its previous position. Pretty soon he has made it to the far side of the field. He kicks. The ball soars easily, curving in between the posts despite the impossible angle. Berzin has obviously done this before.


"It's my life," Berzin, 33, says of rugby. "I have to supplement my income doing a bit of this and a bit of that," the one-time Soviet wing three-quarter adds with a knowing grin, "but in general, I am a rugby player."


Berzin's parents encouraged his interest in the game back in 1975, and after military service, the sandy-haired stand-off came back to join Slava Moscow in 1980. Following tours to South Devon in 1991 and 1992, he decided to stay on in England for a year, playing for Torquay and then later for Bedford in the English second division. The comparison Berzin makes between the Russian and English games is eye-opening but fair.


"The standard is much, much lower here," he says. "The strongest Russian club sides would find it tough in England's third division." Berzin turns to go inside. "Good luck," he shouts in English back over his shoulder. Was there a Devonian twang there somewhere?


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Fili Rugby Club, formerly Krylya Sovietov, was formed in 1967 as a team within the sporting complex that belonged, and still belongs, to the Khrunicheva mechanical engineering factory. A common Soviet-era set-up: the factory owns the sports complex, maintains it, uses it for its own employees, and packs the stadium when its professional teams play at home in one of the Russian leagues.


At Fili the scale is smaller than that of Moscow's Dynamo or Torpedo for example, but the rugby club is nonetheless mighty. Soviet Union champion thrice in a row in the 1970s, the club has always boasted players in the national teams, and last year took the bronze medal in the Russian championship. Yusim believes it is this prestige that earned the club the crucial backing of Mikrodin, a wholesale and retail trading firm, in September 1992.


"For Mikrodin it's more than an advertisement: It's good to be associated with the development of sport at such a club, he said."


With the Khrunicheva plant short of cash in the new economic climate, Mikrodin now bears the brunt of the rugby club's expenses, Yusim said.


"The club has been in reasonable financial shape since Mikrodin came in," Yusim said. "We were lucky. In other towns it's easier to find sponsors. Moscow has its football teams, its hockey teams."


Slava Moscow found it too difficult. The rugby club belonging to the Second Watch Factory on Leningradsky Prospekt had to drop out of the 10-team league this year because of financial difficulties, Russian Rugby Federation president Alexander Latyshev said.


"Slava simply couldn't find the half a billion rubles needed to get a club through a season," Latyshev said. "So now there are only nine teams left in the premier league."


But despite the acute financial difficulties facing Russia's rugby clubs, Latyshev was not receptive to the idea of splitting the league in half to cut down on the huge travel costs incurred by clubs. Fili recently completed a 10-day tour to Krasnoyarsk and Novokuznetsk. The bill: 22 million rubles and two heavy, jet-lagged defeats.


"Siberia only has three top teams," Latyshev said. "Central Russia has five and Western Russia one. You cannot form smaller leagues around that."


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Fili is having an average season. And it is going to have to improve its form if it is to better last year's third spot. This year it lies fourth, or thereabouts, but nobody really knows because everyone has played differing numbers of games, and results take a while to filter through. For Fili, the afternoon home game against an injury-hit Empils side from Rostov-on-Don is crucial.


Empils has made the journey up from the Black Sea by team bus. Its coach Sergei Guguyev insists that the long journey will have no bearing on the game.


"There's no problem coming to play in Moscow," he says. "Now going to Siberia -- that's a different matter."


In the stands it is like one big happy family. Well, one small family, but the 50 or so people who have shown up are surprisingly knowledgeable about the game. As Viktor Belyayev said, Russians are an intelligent lot: If they can put a man into space they can certainly fathom the depths of a rugby rule book.


Fili is soon 8-0 up and looking the stronger side. Its rolling mauls are working well, and behind the forwards everything revolves around Romanov, from the 60-meter kicks to touch from his own 22, to the penalties and conversions that assert the home side's supremacy. It is 13-3 at half time.


Fili widens its lead in the second half. Full-back Dima Mananov runs in two superb tries, on both occasions coming into the line at speed to beat two or three defenders; substitute center Nikolai Yurin adds two more, eagerly demonstrating his genuine pace to make the final score 30-6.


The family is appreciative but coach Petrovich is not.


"I'm not pleased," he said after the game. "We should have really played out there instead of just hanging around on the pitch."


The overall standard of the Fili-Empils match is clearly lower than pro-rugby elsewhere in the world. Players run sideways too much. Passes are dropped a lot. The packs seem reluctant to be first to the ball. Empils cannot throw straight at the lineout.


"In these past two years, the standard has dropped, although there are some very good young players around," says Romanov.


Russia has never played in a rugby World Cup. A first appearance still seems a long way away.