Just two bus stops from the Moncloa metro station, the Complutense field is a week-night hub for rugby players and fans alike.
On a recent Tuesday night the dry sod and trampled grass of el Campo Rugby Central comes to life. It starts slowly with older players who trickle in one by one, dragging sacks of overinflated rugby balls down a set of concrete stairs to the field. The players with the biggest quads, tightest ponytails and most bruises lace up their cleats. They are mostly silent.
One player with an intricate pattern of athletic tape laced across her knee unlaces her cleats entirely. She wiggles her foot into the muddy shoe and pulls the lace firmly and precisely back through its well-worn path. Despite her painstaking preparation, the player doesn’t play at all in the next two hours. She nurses her knee, stretches and yells unintelligible encouragement at her teammates.
Most of these women have been playing on the Cisneros rugby team for years. The team makes its home on the campus of el Universidad Complutense de Madrid where it originated 80 years ago; however, many players attend school at other universities or have graduated and work full time in addition to their position on the team.
A small hoard of younger players who make up the Cisneros developmental team arrive adorned with red and blue Cisneros gear minutes before 7:30 p.m.. They exchange greetings and fall into a rhythm of joking and pushing each other around. Among them is a player dressed head-to-toe in business casual clothing. She makes a Broadway worthy quick change, stopping only to ruffle a teammates hair and ask, “Que tál?”
She is met with a deadpan look, “muerta.” The self-identified corpse and transformed businesswoman smile at each other with a glee very contradictory to their pessimistic exchange. They skip down the stairs onto the field. At some point, they hold hands. They look like two princesses at the end of a fairytale with the pale sunset in front of them – a confusing picture of a classic homoerotic rugby friendship that could turn to marriage during any upcoming practice.
Three coaches take to the field. They are each decked out in team gear, sporting serious faces as one counts down from five to signal the team that practice is about to begin. The players form a circle around the coaches and the once boisterous team falls silent. They wait for direction.
The silence is broken by a cheerful tune that turns out to be the head coach’s phone. She takes it out of her pocket and glances quickly at the screen before shoving it towards the second coach who takes it with a furrowed brow.
The head coach turns towards the team, “Una chica, para Juan!” Everyone bursts into laugher, except Juan, who dismisses them all with a wave and jogs a few meters away to take the call.
The rest of the practice is filled with the same dual energy of laughter and comradery and serious athleticism that has helped the team rise to the highest level of club play in Spain, the División de Honor.
The team does tackling drills. Players laugh at each other, playfully yelling, “Puta madre!” when they miss an opponent. They also send a new teammate with a bloody nose or the field, up the concrete stairs and into the club building to see the trainer. The new player doesn’t cry, and the coaches oRer her no sympathy, only an explanation that if she had gotten lower in her tackle, her nose would be in better shape.
The team does fitness circuits. They run for five minutes and rest for one minute. The players look at each other with pained expressions, unable to speak as they catch their breath. Some wince as they run or pause to spit on the grass in the middle of the drill. They also joke with the coach between sets. They ask what time it is and wager that if they can get the time right, the drill should end early. The coach laughs with them and then adds an extra run to their set.
Even though the sun has set by the end of practice, a few people sit in the stands of the stadium. There is a small shack that serves beer and sandwiches to students who linger after classes have finished to watch the Cisneros team train. Two older women walk laps around the top of the bowl, looking down at the players. The team and spectators have no interaction, but a mutual appreciation for the sport unfolding on the field.
