PAUL Grundy is ready to give rugby league a samba beat as Brazil’s Amazonas make their World Cup debut.
But in the land dominated by football, it is still a struggle to give the 13-a-side code a foothold.
The women’s side has swapped training at home and 42-degree camps for relatively freezing West Yorkshire as they prepare to start the tournament against England in front of the biggest northern hemisphere crowd for a single women’s match.
For Grundy, though, just being in Leeds on a pretty much self-funded trip will be enough after what he has gone through to get his team to this level.
He said: “The girls pretty much train at home. Some who’ve made the final squad were locked in their house for months on end because of Covid-19 but still maintained their fitness using stairwells.