Origins of international rugby - 1987 Rugby World Cup

Friendly rivalry

The first regular international rugby was the annual England versus Scotland match that kicked off in 1871. The other Home Countries – Ireland and Wales – soon joined in. The first round-robin among all four teams, in 1884, was won by England. Two years later the British unions appointed themselves as the International Rugby Football Board (IRFB). These were men on a mission to keep ‘their’ game amateur and middle-class.

Professionalism had taken over association football (soccer), which had captured the British masses. This, the IRFB declared, must not be allowed to happen to rugby as any form of payment for playing the game would destroy it. Less than 10 years later, though, a northern union broke away from the (English) Rugby Union. This new body let working men be compensated for the time they took off work to play the game. A rival code, rugby league, had been born. Traditional rugby men were bitter. Players who ‘went north’ – converted to league – were barred for life from any further contact with the union game.

In the late 19th century rugby caught on across the English Channel. Its biggest French booster was Pierre de Frédy, Baron de Coubertin. He was keen to perk up the nation’s manhood in the aftermath of the disastrous Franco-Prussian War of 1870–71. Rewarding intelligence yet requiring brutality, rugby was seen as perfect training for the anticipated military rematch.

The Five Nations Tournament is born

When the Olympic champions, France, played the touring All Black Originals on New Year’s Day 1906, they were soundly beaten 38–8. (Captain Dave Gallaher apparently told his team to let the French score a couple of tries.) England then decided to play France, and the other home unions followed suit. France joined an expanded Five Nations Tournament in 1910. This was played annually but was interrupted by the world wars. Like the earlier contest among the home unions, officially it did not exist. These matches were, in theory, unrelated, friendly fixtures, and a champion was crowned only by the press.

France – for whom winning was everything – was banned from top-level rugby throughout the 1930s. There were two main reasons: revulsion at especially thuggish play in one test against Wales and the widespread French practice, dubbed ‘shamateurism’, of giving star club players highly paid jobs with few actual duties. In response, the French fostered rugby elsewhere in Europe. Their main opponent in the 1930s was Germany. Ominously for adherents of Baron de Coubertin, the Germans improved rapidly, winning a match in 1938.

New Zealand and South Africa

Beyond the Five Nations Tournament, international rugby was a network of bilateral rivalries. The game had spread with British settlers in the late 19th century. New Zealand's rapid progress was clearly demonstrated during northern hemisphere tours by a Native side from 1888 to 1889, the All Black Originals from 1905 to 1906 and the Invincibles from 1924 to 1925.

South Africa’s Afrikaners also took to rugby with a passion after the Anglo-Boer War. For most of the 20th century, world rugby’s heavyweight championship was contested roughly once a decade between New Zealand and white South Africa. Both were convinced of their superiority to the ‘hidebound’ British and ‘erratic’ French, but these claims were hard to prove on the basis of irregular one-off tours for which the home side made all the arrangements, including providing the referees.

Rugby at war 

The closest thing to a rugby world cup before 1987 was organised at the end of the First World War. There was a precedent in 1917 when a New Zealand Division team won the Somme Cup by beating English, Welsh, Irish and French teams representing divisions serving on this sector of the Western Front. (The New Zealanders’ 3–0 defeat of Wales neatly reversed the result of the controversial 1905 match in Cardiff.)

Then in early 1919, delays in getting troops home were temporarily forgotten amidst the excitement of the King’s Cup tournament in Britain. The New Zealand Division beat a Mother Country XV 9–3 at Twickenham in the final. It had already defeated these British Army representatives, the Canadian and South African expeditionary forces and the Royal Air Force in round-robin play. The New Zealanders had, however, lost 6–5 to the Australian Imperial Forces.

Among world rugby’s heavyweights, only France was missing. Given the scale of mobilisation by the end of the war, and the amount of rugby played behind the lines, these teams were probably not far off full international strength. Eighteen of the New Zealand Division’s 36-man squad were former or future All Blacks.