150 years ago it began …
The grand old game of rugby union achieves a significant anniversary this year in New Zealand. I am not talking about All Blacks or Super teams here but instead about the origins of the game in our country and how there is still a place to celebrate it in these modern professional times.
The game goes back to a time over 150 years ago when 15 men from two towns were formed into modest clubs and bashed the hell out of each other for a couple of hours while trying to carry an oval-shaped ball across the other team’s painted white defensive line. It was simple stuff.
Even before that year, back in 1863 a club was formed in Christchurch for men to play a new game called ‘Football’. And in 1868 a club was formed in Nelson to play a similar type of game, 4 but with slight differences. The Wellington Football Club followed in 1871. (Then came Dunedin in 1871 and North Shore in Auckland in 1873.) These clubs were all playing differing ways of kicking a ball about. One version was called ‘soccer’, another was ‘The Melbourne game’ (a forerunner of ‘Australian Rules’) and a third version was ‘Rugby rules’, which had
