Northampton Saints
The hunt for a rugby club
By Jon in Brazil
July 8 2009
Nearly ten years ago was one of the happiest days of MK Al's life (but one of the saddest days for Mrs MK Al, I hope). I left home. In those years that followed, I've been lucky enough to live in several different countries, but struggled to find a rugby team that I could watch with the same amount of interest as the Saints.
Not, I hasten to add, to replace Saints. Just to supplement my lack of Saintly action... I still wear my Saints shirt to any game I go to!
The first country looked promising - I headed North-West to Bangor. Yes, I had a lovely time. Well, sort of. All the studying at university got in the way of socialising. I joined the university rugby club, even getting a game or two in the seconds. The best part of this though was that my first year at UWB was 1999. The year the World Cup was held in Wales. All Welsh rugby clubs were allocated tickets for all the group games; some tickets for the quarter finals, even less for the semis, and UWB were lucky enough to have 5 tickets for the final. As you can imagine, demand for these particular tickets were high, and it came down to a names-out-of-a-hat kind of draw. Lucky me got one.
Travelling from Bangor to Cardiff is always an interesting idea. Someone had the good idea to dump a load of mountains in the middle of the country, so there really isn't a direct route to get to any decent rugby. Still, with a ticket to the World Cup Final, I wasn't complaining at a trip that had me getting up at stupid o'clock. Well actually, I was complaining, but I knew it would be worth it. Cardiff was full of ticket touts, and one of the five of us even tried to see what he could get. When he was offered £400 for just his, we knew that we had good seats. He turned down the offer just to see where we were sitting!
Turns out that we were in the second row, behind the goals. Not too shabby. The highlights were having the second Aussie try scored right in front of us, and the winning Wallabies having the team photo taken in front of us. The lowlight had to be Rolf Harris performing; you guessed it, right in front of us!
Two more years in Bangor followed, with my next trip down to Cardiff being in May 2000. This game, an evening game between Wales and the French Barbarians, was the first time a game was to be played with the roof closed. Despite being on a Saturday, the game was a late kickoff, allowing them to show the European cup final between Munster and some team from the Premiership. Can't remember who though, but I was getting an awful lot of people offering to buy me drinks.
Another trip to Cardiff for the Australia vs BaaBaas match in 2001, and rugby in Wales was looking promising. However, no decent club teams in the North, and if you wanted to watch a game in Cardiff, you were looking at around a 20-hour day. Nothing helpful there...
Next country looked even more promising. However, there were a few parallels with my next "home" country. I had just spent three years in a country where people are outnumbered by sheep. I was moving to another. I lived in a country where rugby was THE sport to watch. I was moving to another. I lived in a country where they hated the English. I was moving to another. My new home, albeit only for a year, was deep in the Southern Hemisphere. I would be spending 10 months near the House Of Pain - better known as Carisbrook, Dunedin, New Zealand. Rugby prospects looked good.
Students got a discount price for terrace tickets, so a home
game cost me in the region of £5. The first game in the Super 12s I was
ridiculed by friends for wearing a Saints shirt, being told that no one down
there would recognise it. I had the last laugh - the first shirt we saw after
coming through the gates was a Tigers shirt!
Despite the fearsome reputation of Carisbrook, it seemed very close to Franklins Gardens. The atmosphere is intense, the fans are often called the 16th man, and they are hospitable to visiting fans. Players in the street are left alone - I actually ran in to Anton Oliver at a bar in Dunedin one night. No one paid him much notice, other than to wish him luck for the game that weekend. A quiet "thanks" was the most anyone got before he turned back to his beer.
An added extra to my time in Dunedin was the visit of England. The first test was at Carisbrook, and a night camping out ensured I got a ticket. A few days before the game, the ABs help an open training session, which was just a bit of a loosener for them. Still - it was something that I haven't heard England do! Great game, not for England though. This was the first game of the tour that had Kiwis proclaiming that the O2 on the jerseys was not the sponsor, but the win - loss ratio...
Carisbrook, the Highlanders, would have been a team to follow had I spent more time there, but sadly, I had to leave after finishing my post-grad. The team itself are perennial underachievers, much like Northampton, so a home from home!
A few months after returning home from The Blackness, I accepted a job in Bermuda. As far as I knew, I was going to be in rugby limbo. However, I soon discovered the existence of the Bermuda rugby classic. For one week in November, Bermuda is inundated by tourists. Don't get me wrong - Bermuda is full of tourists for most of the summer, but this one week is different - the tourists are rugby folk. Equated to a veteran's World Cup, the Rugby Classic is supposed to be light-hearted fun. However, most of the players take it just as seriously, with a lot of big names turning out for their country once again.
I managed to get to three Classics out of four while I was in Bermuda. Players included Pienaar, van der Westhuizen, and our very own Mattie Stewart. Sadly, the one I missed in 2008 included greats as Frank Bunce and Emile N'Tamack. Socialising is heavily encouraged, and in 2007 I was invited along to the Classic Eagles team barbecue. Hanging around with some vaguely attractive 20 year old students probably helped my cause, but I still ended up being able to have a drink with Derek Bevan, a regular on the refereeing panel for the Classic. Also that year I was subjected to a visit from MK Al, which led to a great day spent showing him and Mattie Stewart the west of the island.
A few months ago, I left Bermuda for a new job, and the hunt for rugby resumed again. The peculiarities of my job now mean that I get to spend a lot of time in one country, then spend the rest in another. Twice as many chances to find a rugby club to watch!
I mainly work in Brazil now. Let's look at what they offer... Warm, mostly dry weather. Should promise some running rugby. National team plays in green and gold. Good start, but missing the black. Down side - national team plays football. There is very little other sport than the round ball game, at least that is taken seriously. Some rugby teams do exist apparently, but they were all started by English expats searching for a rugby team to follow. No, I don't plan on starting my own...
When I'm not in Brazil, I'm living in Maine. Prospects here look a little brighter - for the rugby, not for the weather! One national sport uses an oval ball. Nice. Even has a league team called the Saints. Two points... The Saints colours are gold and black - as Meat Loaf once sung, two out of three ain't bad. It's looking good. Now the down side again. The American "Football" players wear more padding than a recovering Jonny Wilkinson, and have less stamina than team in the lower parts of division one playing Northampton. I mean come on... The game stops for five minutes every time someone gets tackled. Don't people know how to ruck and maul over there?
Add to that the standard of refereeing - abysmal. Every forward pass is missed - some of them are even so forward they travel 40 or 50 YARDS forward! You're also penalised for kicking to touch. In fact, if you want to kick the ball, you have to kick it down the throat of the opposing full back. Hmm... I'd like to see some of the GP teams try that next year against us! The intelligence needed to play a game like that is astounding though - I've heard of one post-game interview on artificial turf where a player was asked whether he preferred grass or astroturf. His response - "I don't know. I've never smoked astroturf..." Gah! Get the pads off, pass backwards, and let the game flow! Play a REAL game of rugby! Actually, you can keep the cheerleaders, as long as it's warm enough...
So, despite travelling around the world, finding some decent rugby, and struggling to do so in others, I have finally found a team to follow and support. They finished mid-table in their league this year, and did very well in one of the larger cup competitions. I can hear all the games on the radio, and I even managed to get to go to a couple last season, despite tickets for some games being hard to get hold of. The team? Northampton Saints of course. I can tell you that there's no substitute.
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Out of interest, there was a piece on Total Rugby a while back about Brasilian rugby - there is a thriving club (SPAC) in Sao Paulo (so there must be others!) and the national team competes with the likes of Uruguay and Paraguay, apparently.
I always thought that American football was really all about the 'matchday experience' rather than the sport. It's a really good day out, but I would hate to see anything like it at the Gardens. Horses for courses really.
I too was living in non-English Wales during RWC99, moving later to a land where sheep outnumber people (only 'rugby' in Kyrgyzstan is played on horseback with a decapitated sheep as a ball)...
And now you live in Rio - to all intents and purposes a tropical Moscow. Plus we both got to FG despite the distances this year.
Yes, I liked this one a lot. But not as much as I like Cachaça and the marvellous city, you lucky carioca ******...!
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