It all began around the early 1800’s when William Webb Ellis a student of Rugby School, in Rugby, Warwickshire who was notorious to consistently break the strict traditional rules set by that esteemed learning institution decided to take the foot ball in his hands and run towards the opposing goal line.
What started as a young student’s school boy prank in England nearly two centuries ago is today a multibillion dollar sport played worldwide within the countries of the British Commonwealth as well as others around the world.
The sport was named Rugby, after the school where it all started and the rules of the game were drawn up from time to time as the game became popular especially among the schools in London, England.
Collectively progressing
The first grouping or association primarily promoting Rugby was formed on January 1st 1871 with 21 clubs and schools joining in to promulgate laws and to have some sort of control over the game as various schools and clubs were playing the game as per their own rules.
Rugby School, where it all started was conspicuously absent from this inaugural association which was appropriately named as the Rugby Football Union (RFU) and the first written laws of the game of Rugby Football were approved in June 1871.
Unity in diversity
A contentious issue in 1884 that occurred in a match between England and Scotland saw the former keep out of the formation of the International Rugby Football Board (IRFB) in 1886, where the founders were the latter, Ireland and Wales with England subsequently seeing sense and in 1890 joined the IRFB.
The four big names in Rugby joining together did provide the right impetus and much needed adrenaline to propel the sport to new heights not only within the United Kingdom and the Republic of Ireland but across all of the British Empire with the expansionism designs of the former helping immensely to propagate it.
The first International Rugby match
The first international Rugby match was played on March 27th 1871 at Raeburn Place, Edinburg, Scotland between Scotland and England and since then there have been many played between Rugby playing nations around the world.
It was this that provided the intuition for the International Rugby Football Board subsequently named as the International Rugby Board (IRB), to organize the first “Rugby World Cup” in 1987 with New Zealand hosting and Australia too taking some matches especially the two Semi-Finals.
The Rugby World Cup
Since the first “Rugby World Cup” there have been seven tournaments held every four years with New Zealand winning against France in the first in Auckland and again New Zealand getting the better of Australia in 2015 at Twickenham.
The “Rugby World Cup” initially had sixteen teams competing in thirty two matches in 1987 and in the 2015 tournament there were twenty teams competing in forty eight matches.
The next “Rugby World Cup” is to be held in Japan in 2019, again with twenty teams competing in forty eight matches with the “Cup Final” to be staged at the Yokohoma Stadium.
