willaby wallaby rugby

Last night I watched my first rugby game.  It was really more by default than choice (I thought I was going to the pub for a nice after-church chat with girlfriends ... not realizing girlfriends were actually quite interested in watching the rugby.  There you have it -- my first rugby game in Australia, and I didn't even have a cute boy to explain things to me!  Couldn't have played that hand much worse, now, could I?), but watch I did.  (Hard to do much else when that's what everyone else is doing.)

Rugby, it seems, is kind of somewhere between American football and soccer (??).  There's lots of running around and some tackling and this very funny thing called a scrum, which reminded me vaguely of trying to throw a parachute up in the air with an elementary school class when I was a kid.  There's no parachute in the rugby version, but it is reasonably colorful.

Also, there are two kinds of rugby:  union and league.  I, evidently, watched a rugby union game that was part of SupeRugby (judging by the spelling on the field ... aren't those sporting types clever with their language?).  It's all very confusing to me how it works and what championships there are and who's involved and who the teams are and who plays who ... eventually somehow Australia comes up with a team called the Wallabies, which is kind of like their dream team or all-star team or something of best Australian rugby players and they play the New Zealand All-Blacks, which I'm assured is not nearly a racist team name as it sounds, and the South African Spring Boks (a spring bok being an animal along the lines of a deer that you can find in South Africa).

There's just so many major events I haven't really worked out which is which and which is played by which sport, much less which teams.  I think the State of Origin was just held recently and is always (?) between New South Wales and Queensland, but NSW has been losing for the last several years.  There's something along the lines of a Tri-Country Tournament that includes Australia, New Zealand and South Africa.  Then the World Cup is presumably lots bigger and is potentially held once every four years, possibly including this one.

Then there's AFL (the "footie") and cricket and soccer and goodness knows what else.  Swimming I suppose.

Anyway, the game I saw was the rugby union game between the Queensland Reds (red) and the Canterbury Crusaders (silver).  The crowd at the Kirribilli Hotel was heavily in favor of the Reds because, I was told, they'd prefer NSW to be in the ... finals? ... but if they can't, they'd much prefer Queensland to New Zealand.  The minority favoring the Crusaders picked them, from what I could tell, primarily based on the rugged good looks of number 7, Richie McCaw.

Speaking of looks, I have at least twice now been given a run-down of a Girls' Guide to Australian sports; namely, what size/shape men are generally found in each main sport.  I was all set to type it out for you, but realized upon closer investigation, that I did not take nearly as good of notes as I thought I had.  Roughly, I think the rugby union boys are supposed to be a bit beefy with broad shoulders, the league ones a bit leaner ("nuggety" I think was how they were put to me) and the AFL ones ... presumably quite athletic?  Sorry, will have to get back to you on that, ladies.

The biggest problem anyone could easily spot with yesterday's rugby boys was that someone had clearly forgotten to tell them to shave.  About half a dozen of them were sporting mountain man beards that surely would have kept all the women at bay, regardless of how shapely the rest of them might have been.  They looked like they'd surpassed Seven Brides for Seven Brothers hairdo and were bordering on something closer to cave man.  The rest of their skin looked a bit shiny though, and I was given to wonder whether they actually shaved their legs (again, Australian sportsmen show far more of their legs than any self-respecting American man would dream of).  One proved particularly capable of impromptu dance as well.  I'd had no idea there was so much humor to be had on the rugby field.

Much to the delight of the pub, the Reds managed to win yesterday's game 18-13 or thereabouts.  (The scoring falls roughly in the vicinity of American football scoring.)  The only thing more crushing for the minority was that the pub somehow decided to switch off the volume just as Richie McCaw gave his, presumably, so-gutted-we-lost speech.  If, however, I am mistaken and it really was an on-screen proposal -- I can assure him that there was at least one resounding yes just across the table from me.