Chavan was a clear choice after the crew watched to teams the Magicians and Rhinos play a club game at Mumbai, and the youngster caught their eye with his uninhibited sprints along the length of the Gymkhana grounds. “We were looking for a boy who was good at rugby, and with a lot of charisma—Chavan was lovely to work with. The narrative was simple— a young boy watching rugby on TV, who could be a potential Olympic athlete if he trained hard and played well. He’s 11 or 12 now, and we’re targeting 2016 when he’ll be about 20,” Batty said, adding that he was mighty surprised by what he saw in India. “Not rugby’s presence, but the high and structured level at which they’re playing. The world associates India with cricket, but here we wanted to show the wide appeal of rugby through this Indian boy,” he said.

Helmed by Wilders directors Jim North and Paul Gowers, the 2:38 minute capsule has Chavan zigzagging through a narrow lane of a Mumbai chawl after being handed the typical tin meal ‘dabba’ by his mother. And interspersing footage from tournaments and the world’s leading players exalting the virtues of the sport, is Chavan’s range of rugger manouvres—a sprint down the flanks, a timely back-pass, and finally cutting past two defenders, a the screen-stealing touch-line try, with Mangesh’s celebrating face with Mumbai’s heritage architecture, the CST station and BMC in the backdrop.

For Chavan, who started rugby just a year ago, the video was nothing more than a chance to practise his sprinting skills. “They shot the try scene 10-12 times, and it was a little boring doing it again and again,” the boy says, before adding that his fisherman father and five siblings were simply happy to hear that he’d been part of a film-shoot. Shyly, he told them, he’d played the hero.