The Irish rugby coach standing shoulder to shoulder with a proud Palestinian team

Watching the disturbing images coming from the region, Kevin McCleery asked himself what he could do to help in some way. The answer, for him, was on the pitch.  

BREAKING BARRIERS: Kevin McCleery with the Palestine rugby 7s side at the Asian tournament in Oman this month.

You are who you are. You do what you can. Like so many of us, Kevin McCleery found himself looking on from afar, horrified at the scale of the slaughter pouring out of the Middle East on a daily basis via our phones and our TV screens.

It was August when he started googling with a view to doing … something. This was a month that would end with at least 3,210 deaths confirmed by the Gaza Health Ministry due to Israeli military action. Another 170 people lost their lives to malnutrition.

Numbers that don’t begin to unlock the horror.

“It had just been months and months of seeing upsetting footage from Palestine and having a sense of just, a drive, or an urge, to be of some sort of help. I wasn’t sure how. The thought struck me one day that if I do have one skillset it tends to lie within rugby.” 

There are different paths people can take in the face of these tragedies. We can turn the other way, we can despair at the enormity of it all and dismiss any response as inadequate, or we can try and address the balance by an inch or two in the other direction.

Rugby was McCleery’s offering, he just wasn’t sure how.

Born and bred in Drogheda, his varied sporting passions boiled down into this one code by the close of his teens. And he stitched it into his everyday life in a long-term role with Leinster as a community rugby officer that finished up earlier this year.

McCleery helped to bed the game into areas like Ballymun, Finglas and Phibsborough before turning towards a Masters in Sports Performance Analysis at SETU in Carlow, and taking on the role of head coach with his local club Boyne RFC.

He’s still a registered player, even if the job of working with their three adult teams has kept the boots clean lately, but this game has owned him since he was a lad throwing the ball around the Lansdowne pitch after an international while the men drank their pints.

There was a year spent playing in New Zealand with the Waitemata club in Auckland. Stints spent travelling in the UK and Canada were never going to pass without a game or two. So, if he was going to help in some small way, this was it.

“I did a bit of searching and I came across the Palestine Rugby Committee. In that there was an email address for the president so I first reached out to him, Rabie El Masri is his name. He came back to me to arrange a call, we did that a few days later.

“At this point in time I had no plan other than, ‘can I be of help somehow? I coach rugby in Ireland’. I saw they are trying to grow the game in regions of Palestine and he mentioned that they had been invited to play in an Asian 7s tournament in Oman in October.

“I said, ‘great, let me be of service to that’. If they needed me, I could come up with some game plan, some exercise and skills they could work on prior to it, technical, physical. Anything at all. I put together a document that he was able to share among the players.” That was the genesis of it.

The calls and emails flowed through the next few weeks, until it came to the end of September and El Masri mentioned that the team still needed a coach. As luck would have it, Boyne had the same week off. McCleery was in.

He flew out last Monday, arrived in Muscat in the early hours of Tuesday morning and took his first training session that evening. Lunch on the first day was a blizzard of handshakes and smiles, introductions and questions.

Five of the players travelled from Palestine itself: men from Nablus, Ramallah and Bethlehem, their journey starting with a bus from the West Bank to Jordan and continuing on with flights to Abu Dhabi and Oman.

Another seven have made it to this weekend’s tournament from other parts. Lebanon, Qatar, Dubai. One is Chilean. A GoFundMe page paid for the travel and accommodation, their determination to represent Palestine doing the rest.

McCleery was offered a window into their lives and collective experiences going back generations when the group gathered in the team room on Tuesday night and shared what he described as their “incredibly powerful” stories.

“If you were to go back to the late ‘40s, when I guess they were first forced to flee their land, we would have three players currently based in Lebanon whose grandparents were forced to flee. Those originally in the north of Palestine would have gone to Lebanon.

“Those in the east ended up in Jordan and those from the south would have went to Egypt. They are all so proud of their heritage, whether it was their parents that were forced to flee, or some of them their grandparents. They are proud Palestinians.” 

Drawn in a group alongside the hosts, Qatar and Jordan, McCleery had a three-point plan. First order of business was to gel the group, then to work on the key skills of catch, pass, tackle and ruck. A game plan was the third prong.

What he didn’t mention before his arrival was that he had never coached 7s before but a long phone call with a former Ireland player reinforced his thinking and the fact only four of the players speak strong English has actually had an unexpected upside.

“Selfishly, it's actually been great for my coaching because you are counting on the power of demonstration, the ability to convene a message very quickly with just a couple of words and a couple of actions, and then you are straight into it.” 

He’s loath to accept any pat on the back for this.

McCleery was in a coffee shop in Drogheda with four ex-teammates recently, chatting away about old times. He was on the blower the next day to a Kiwi coach they had all played for, still picking the man’s brains from the far side of the world.

“Sport is just incredible for that. You find good people within it and I always felt if I was ever in a position to give back in whatever shape or form then it was my duty to do that. It’s a powerful thing, sport. It’s a vehicle for change.

“It does an awful lot of good and I guess I’m just happy to play my part.”