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News from Georgia
21 Sep 2011
Greetings from an International Acorn - click here for press release
Tales from Tbilisi
Rugby is all about camaraderie, competition, good festivity and making new friends across all colours, races, creeds and nationalities. Levan Vasadze is from Tbilisi, capital of Georgia, that is on the east coast of the Black Sea and has the same latitude as the south of France. His family lived in Sevenoaks for a number of years (and he still visits regularly) and he and his two sons were members of the club, Levan playing for the Acorns whom he will be hosting during their 2012 tour to Tbilisi.
Here is his story:
My two eldest sons' names are Shio Irakli Vasadze and Giorgi Vasadze, they were 11 and 7 respectively in 2008/2009 academic year when they went to New Beacon and played at SRFC. My father, Shio Vasadze, now 62, one of the older generation rugby players in Georgia, lived with us in Sevenoaks and took great pleasure in driving the boys to the club for their practice. Our two younger sons, Nikoloz, 6, and Ilia, 2 are being prepared already to play for the Lelos (Lions – the national team) one fine day. They all go to Kiketi School ( www.kiketischool.ge ), a private school with an extensive rugby programme, which our family has helped to build in Georgia and the board of which I have the honour of chairing. The school and our love towards our Motherland is the reason we gave up the great pleasure of living in Sevenoaks, as soon as the risk of a full Russian military invasion of Georgia subsided.
To all of you in Sevenoaks, as your fellow ex-veteran player, I console myself on having Georgia in what is perhaps the toughest pool in the Rugby World Cup. I have recently returned from France, where I visited our team in their training camp at the invitation of our head coach, Richie Dixon, gave them a motivational speech and brought the Georgian Polyphony Singers for a special concert in their honour. I had a truly fantastic evening with our Lelos. Our boys are in the warrior spirit, which is perhaps well represented in this press release, which I prepared for them to be issued in NZ on their arrival. While we realize the strength of our opponents, including Romania, we will hope to cause trouble in each match. For those of you English and Irish, I hope that you will have cheered for us on the 14th in our first match with Scotland and for those of you Scottish, that you did the same on the 18th, when we played England. Do whatever you please on the 28th when we play Romania, we will have to win it anyway, and I will travel there for it too, and please support us when we clash with Argentina on October 2nd.
I look forward to seeing all the Acorns in Tbilisi next spring for our vets matches. I hope by then that Georgia will be an ever bigger rugby nation than it already is and that you will enjoy all the great things that our country has to offer.