FlexFlexerson said:
So, the Rugby World Cup has been piquing my interest: what advice do the knowledgeable have for a person looking to start watching rugby? I've been catching some of the World Cup and my trusty Fox Soccer 2 Go subscription seems to have some games. What should I be watching? How should I be watching it? Who should I be rooting for? I've been looking around but unlike, say, guides to get into soccer there don't seem to be very informative guides for starting to watch rugby.
So...the US TV situation. Looks like a mess. Fox Soccer 2 Go doesn't have any rugby union on it - only rugby league, the Canadian football to rugby union's American football. It looks like BeIn sports has the Six Nations, Aviva Premiership and Guinness Pro12. No idea where the European Champions Cup is (Fox Soccer Plus claims to have it, but they also claim to have the Prem and Pro12...). DirecTV has some super-expensive channel with Super Rugby, the Rugby Championship and the Kiwi and South African domestic competitions, the ITM Cup and Currie Cup respectively. The best two ways to watch are via streams, which are pretty plentiful, and YouTube - rugby seems to be totally hands off on YouTube and there's games on it constantly. Good way to keep up with international games played at 3am your time.
Basically the rugby union world is divided into hemisphere and tiers. Tier 2 nations are countries like the US, Japan, Canada, Samoa, Fiji, Tonga, Georgia, etc....there's not a lot of attention on them most times, although by all means go down to your local rugby club and say hi! Japan actually has a semi-pro league sponsored by the major Japanese companies, and they do attract some decent overseas talent - a lot of Springboks top up their contracts with some games in Japan in the offseason.
But Tier 1 and the Northern and Southern Hemispheres are what you'll want to watch. One other thing to note - unlike soccer, which is very much a club-driven game, rugby is very much about the international season. To the point that it sometimes feels like club rugby is a sideshow, primarily to whet your appetite for the Tests (aka international games). In the Southern Hemisphere, clubs don't play at the highest level. Rather it's provinces (or states in Australia), which pick the best players from local clubs and fashion a professional squad out of them.
The Northern Hemisphere revolves around the Six Nations, which is probably the most watched and loved annual competition in the world. It's been played since 1883 (although France didn't join until 1911, and Italy until 2000) and even Southern Hemisphere fans make an effort to watch it. Away days in Cardiff, Edinburgh, London, Paris, Rome or Dublin are legendary. And it's a damn good thing there's so much tradition and bonhomie surrounding the tournament, because the rugby isn't always the best. It's cold and muddy a lot of the time, and Northern Hemisphere teams just aren't as good as Southern Hemisphere teams most of the time. But it's an absolute must watch.
To briefly trade in some national stereotypes, England have a lot of ex-private schoolboys who play a forward-based kicking game, Wales are all working-class boys from the Welsh valleys (Wales is the one of the few nations where rugby is the legitimate national sport) who play a free-flowing game of rugby (until they got Kiwi coach Warren Gatland and became huge, physical ass-kickers who only get creative when they have to), and Scotland are just a bit shit, really. Ireland were awful for decades but have been excellent for about 15 years due to great coaches (Gatland got the ball rolling for them), great players (such as the legendary Brian O'Driscoll), and the rise of Irish provinces Munster, Leinster and Ulster as European powers. PS: unlike soccer, rugby is an all-Ireland sport, so Ulster's full of good Protestant farmboys who would never dream of uniting Ireland. France used to play champagne rugby, which is as decadent as it sounds, but have mostly given in to their other half of physical, South-West farmboy rugby. Unless they have an extra glass of Bordeaux at halftime, and then they turn on the jets. Along with England, their massive population advantage gives them a feeling of underachievers (three World Cup finals...no wins). Unlike England, they are pretty well-liked by the rest of the rugby world, because they all speak French and we can't understand what they're saying. Italy, being comparatively new to rugby and growing (they used to play in a stadium half the size of anybody else's, but now sell out the Olympic Stadium in Rome for games), are pretty crap - they used to rely a lot on poaching talented Argentines with Italian passports, but are trying to become more homegrown. Still, you'll see some obviously not Italian names in their team.
The club comps are England's Aviva Premiership, France's Top 14, and Wales/Ireland/Scotland/Italy's Pro12. The Pro12 is the worst - because Wales, Ireland and Scotland essentially have Southern Hemisphere-style provinces, they tend to use the Pro12 as a bit of a training ground and only take it seriously at the end of the season. So you'll watch a game and a whole bunch of international players won't be playing. The Aviva is very English, very much a league dominated around forwards and hard graft. The Top 14 can be startlingly physical, full of French towns in the South-West (France's rugby heartland - all of the Top 14 are based in the South bar two Parisian clubs) that hate each other. Both have lots of international stars - because the money is much better in Europe, a lot of Southern Hemisphere players retire from international rugby with a year or two in the tank and top up their pensions in Europe. In addition, most professional players from the US or Canada or Romania or Georgia or wherever play in the European club leagues - so if you want to follow Americans playing for club teams, France's defending European champs (three years in a row!) Toulon (Samu Manoa) or London's Saracens (Chris Wyles, Thretton Palamo, Hayden Smith) are the way to go.
The European Champions Cup is a Champions League style club competition played during the season - I would say that this is a must-follow as well. The best clubs from all the European countries I've just mentioned participate.
The Southern Hemisphere is a bit different, but fortunately simpler. The big "club" (actually provincial) competition is Super Rugby. When this started as the Super 12 in 1996, just after rugby union became professional (yes! The Rugby world cup had a website before it had paid players) it was a sensation - high-quality, super-attacking rugby from NZ, South Africa and Australia that blew everybody away. Due to the rise of European club rugby (skimming off veteran stars for bigger money in Europe) and expansion (the league has 16 teams from NZ/SA/Oz now, and will soon add one from Argentina and one from Japan) the quality and crowds have dipped a bit, but it's still probably the best provincial competition in the world. This is my third must follow league.
There's six teams from South Africa (Bulls, Sharks, Lions, Stormers, Kings and Cheetahs), five from Australia (Waratahs, Reds, Brumbies, Force and Rebels), and five from NZ (Crusaders, Highlanders, Hurricanes, Blues and Chiefs). All these teams represent regions/states/cities.
The Rugby Championship is the main SH international competition and the highest-quality itnernational competition going. New Zealand, The All Blacks, are the world's best rugby team - fast, skillful (by doing the basics really well), physical, and immensely marketable. They're a bit like the Brazil of world rugby, lots of people who aren't Kiwis walking around in their shirts.
South Africa, the Springboks, are the anti-All Blacks. Enormous and hugely physical, they grind teams into dust and then let forth some immensely talented, classy backs when they've got the game won. Nowhere near as popular worldwide as NZ, mostly because the team is strongly associated with apartheid. White South Africans, particularly Afrikaners, revere rugby, the isolation of the rugby team from the community was a legitimately important point of pressure in dismantling apartheid, and the mostly Afrikaner team looks a bit out of place coming from a country that's 85% black. Basically, that's why Matt Damon and Morgan Freeman made that movie about rugby. Best jerseys in rugby though.
The third team is Australia, the Wallabies, who usually try and win through immensely skillful backs and a weak forward pack, because scrums and lineouts are shit according to them (rugby league, which has neither, is the more popular rugby in Oz). They've got some really great players, and do well to be so good given league's popularity - Oz were the redheaded stepchild of the NZ/SA/Oz axis for decades before getting really good in the 80s and winning two World Cups in the 90s.
The final team is Argentina, who only joined the Tri-Nations (causing a need to rename it) in 2012. Los Pumas have jerseys almost as good as the Boks, and play a very physical forward-based game - Argentines are legendary for their love of the scrum, the bajadita. They've never beaten NZ and have only beaten Oz and SA once each, but they're good enough to give anybody a game and are probably as good as the best NH sides - SH rugby is just awesomely good in general. The Rugby Championship is a must follow.
As for picking a team, pick whoever you want, but there's a run down of the major international teams. In terms of competitions to follow, I'd go with:
- The Six Nations (Feb-March-April)
- The Rugby Championship (June-July-August)
- The Autumn Internationals (when SH goes to Europe - Europe tends to send lower-quality teams to the SH) (November)
- The European Champions Cup (October-May)
- Super Rugby (February-June)
That'll give you some great rugby to watch almost throughout the year.
