Smaller. Shorter. Smarter: Coach Paul Delport Dissects India Rugby Plans For Asian Games

India's women's rugby sevens team is never going to out-muscle China or Japan heading to the Asian. So head coach Paul Delport stopped trying to build muscle and started teaching physics instead - and the tackle completion numbers prove it's working.

Heading into the 2026 Asian Games, Delport faced the same size gap every Indian team in this sport confronts against Asia's rugby powerhouses. His answer wasn't more weight in the squat rack. It was leverage. "One of it is obviously the conditioning. From a movement perspective, our girls are brilliant. You ask them to run, they'll do extra runs. Gym wasn't something that was part of our DNA. That's something we've brought in massively," he explained in conversation with myKhel. But the real shift came from an unlikely place: "I'm big on Greco-Roman wrestling and jiu-jitsu."

His reasoning is almost mathematical. "If you're smaller and you look at pure physics - if you're smaller and shorter, if it's a collision or a contact situation, the lower person wins. It's just now being intelligent and me teaching them how to change your body height. How must we decelerate into that collision? We look at levers. We target an elbow. We target a knee. We target a shoulder. The girls have really taken on - they've gotten much smarter in that environment."

The Numbers Behind the Shift

Delport didn't just introduce the drills and hope. He tracked them. "When I came in last year, I did the tackle completion rates - it's just something I look at when you play. In ARST 2024, it was 48%. If you look at us now in the last one, our tackle completion rate was 73%. We made a lot more dominant tackles than we did last year. We can see there's a bit of transfer through that."

That kind of physical escalation usually comes with a cost, and Delport was candid about the balancing act his staff had to manage. "Having Keanu back, having him manage the load... in terms of managing the load, we've tamed them this week - we haven't had a single soft tissue injury. If you look at yesterday, that's why we went early - we trained Monday to Thursday and it was the biggest load we've had in a week over the last seven weeks.

"The girls have managed it. It just shows that we're pushing them and we're driving them hard, but we're also able to manage them through it."

What Kazakhstan Actually Reveale

The clearest test of where the team stands came in Suzhou, where India let a 0-12 deficit against Kazakhstan turn into a 12-12 game before losing it late. Delport walked through exactly how it unraveled - a missed kickoff requirement, a blown defensive read, a high tackle and yellow card, a kickoff mismanaged, a pass sent over the dead-ball line. "We've given them 12 points. Then, two and a half minutes in, we were able to regain our control, and then we were fine."

He was equally direct about where India sits in the region's pecking order right now. "I feel these Asian teams at the moment - there's big chasms. If you look at Japan and China, they're way ahead of all of us. Then Thailand and Hong Kong are a little bit better than, say, Kazakhstan and ourselves. In the UAE, you're pushing hard to get better, but they're big chasms between us."

Kazakhstan specifically has become the measuring stick. "The last three occasions we've played them, on average, we've lost a game by two points. They're a very good rugby nation. I just feel the same way as Hong Kong - once we get that win over them, we'll be fine."

That framing only lands because of where this program was two years ago. "When I came in in 2024, the girls couldn't beat the UAE. They couldn't beat the Philippines. They couldn't beat Singapore. Now, we've beaten the UAE four times in a row. We beat the Philippines last year. We beat Singamore last year. For us, as a team, there have been huge strides made."

Grounded Targets Going Into the Asiad

Even with that progress, Delport isn't promising a podium. "I think the next thing for us is, realistically, we're not going to get to top three in the foreseeable future. But I think it's a really realistic goal for us to get to five. If the balance of the ball goes well for us, possibly four every now and then."

Asked what success looks like for him individually at these Games, Delport pointed away from the scoreboard entirely. "My personal goal for me is our girls taking control. I've been very hard on them in terms of that, and I sometimes get it wrong - I give too much direction. What Terry and I have done very well is we've simplified things in a way that I feel our girls get and can drive. For me, that's a big goal going into Asian Games - I don't want to sit on the side of the field and tell them what to do and scream and shout. I want to sit on the side of the field and say, 'Okay, cool'- what I need to do and when I need to do it."

For a team that's gone from a 48% tackle completion rate to 73%, and from losing routinely to the UAE to beating them four straight times, that's not a modest ambition dressed up as a big one. It's the clearest sign yet of exactly how this team plans to close the gap in Nagoya: not by getting bigger, but by getting smarter about the size they already have.