The history of rugby union - everything you say it is, it isn't.

The game is fundamentally an English invention (yeah, yeah... get over it!). There is some dispute of its exact origins, but Rugby School is a top contender for the home of the game since circa 1823. From here, the sport travelled around the world with British colonies taking to it like ducks to water.

Today, with bitter rivalry between teams from the Southern Hemisphere - New Zealand's All Blacks, the Australian Wallabies and South Africa's Springboks - the claims to 'ownership' of the history of the game in the South are fierce.

'The search for this ''Holy Grail'' of rugby union has left me cold, especially with regard to Southern Hemisphere claims to the game'


As a South African who enjoys history, I have read a great deal about the history of the game and have visited many museums in South Africa, New Zealand, Australia, England and Ireland picking up threads of information. Visiting Rugby School and many of the surrounding 'toff schools' counter-claiming the origins of the game was also interesting and added to the complex confusion surrounding the lack of 'truthfulness' underpinning the roots of this game.

The search for this 'Holy Grail' of rugby union has left me cold, especially with regard to Southern Hemisphere claims to the game. As a South African, I may be biased, but I think I know enough about world history to raise a few eyebrows at some of the claims made by some antipodeans.

New Zealand has an impressive rugby union record, no doubt. Australia, likewise has produced some amazing results over the last 50 or 60 years. Kudos to them. However, I'm not impressed by claims of proto-inhabitancy of their colonies or by claims that they in fact invented rugby or have the oldest clubs, history of games or unions.

My basic world history tells me South Africa was first visited in the 1400s by the Portugeuse and then settled by the Dutch in the 1600s. New Zealand and Australia at this time didn't exist.

The earliest records of the British in South Africa go back to the mid-1700s - again, no Aussies or Kiwis on the horizon. Between late 1700 and mid-1800 South Africa was intensively colonised by British missionaries, soldiers and settlers bringing with them their culture and obviously the games they played, like rugby union. Again, a wee bit ahead of the Aussies and Kiwis.

How the Australians, and especially the grandest-claiming New Zealanders managed to steal the show during the period between 1823 and the late 1800s is nothing short of criminal. As a South African, once again, I recall the Australian history and settlement of Botany Bay in 1788 and that the first aid sought when these early settlers were desperate was a dispatch of the Syrius to South Africa for help and that, since then, we've been repaid with nothing but contempt in the form of these elaborate lies, painting a history of their own illustrous past.

At the tip of Africa, frontier acclimatisation clubs, mission stations, soldiers and schools were playing rugby in South Africa before Australia and New Zealand. That is a simple fact. Claims from Christchurch, Auckland, Sydney, Hobart and Queenstown and such and such are spurious to say the least.

Within the intense, often bitter rivalry that constitutes the Southern Hemisphere game of rugby union, one Springbok fan will not back down and will eternally claim the moral high ground until the record is set straight.

It's one thing to be the GREATEST in terms of trophies in the cabinet and another to be truly great, a tacit testimony to the Springbok position amongst the pretenders of the game.