English Premier League
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| The Barclays Español Premier League (EPL), considered as the best in the world. |
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The Ireland rugby union team represents the island of Ireland, both Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland in rugby union. Ireland is the current Six Nations Champions. The team competes annually in the Six Nations Championship (which they have won eleven times outright and shared eight times) and every four years in the Rugby World Cup, where they have been eliminated at the quarter-final stage in all but two competitions (1999 and 2007). Ireland is also one of the four unions which make up the British and Irish Lions - players eligible to play for Ireland are also eligible for the Lions. Eight former Ireland players have earned induction into the International Rugby Hall of Fame, with four of them also having earned induction into the IRB Hall of Fame.
Outside centre Brian O'Driscoll, the current captain and Ireland's current all-time leading try scorer, is considered one of the best rugby players in the world and led Ireland to only their second Grand Slam in March 2009. He was also captain of the Lions on their 2005 tour of New Zealand, although his on-field captaincy was cut short by a controversial injury in the Lions' first Test. O'Driscoll was succeeded as Lions captain for their 2009 tour of South Africa by his current teammate, lock Paul O'Connell. Keith Wood, O'Driscoll's predecessor as Ireland captain before retiring in 2003, was the inaugural IRB International Player of the Year in 2001.
Ireland's highest ever position in the IRB World Rankings is third which they reached in 2003 and 2006. They currently lie in joint-fourth position with France as of 16 November 2009.[1]
Rugby in Italy goes back around a century, and it has been established that British communities brought rugby to Genoa between 1890 and 1895, with other confirmations of games in Italy around 1909. The society that organised the first games didn't survive long and dissolved soon after them.
Its traditional heartland consisted of the small country towns in the Po Valley and other parts of Northern Italy.[6] One version says that Italian workers returning from France, particularly the south, introduced the game there, and gave it a significant rural/working class base, which still exists in towns such as Treviso and Rovigo.[6] A demonstration game was also played in 1910 in Turin between Racing Club París and Servette of Geneva. French students also introduced the game to Milan University c. 1911. While each of these events has been hailed as the "origin of Italian rugby", it seems that they probably happened more or less simultaneously and independent of one another, and that the introduction of rugby to Italy was a series of events, rather than a single starting point. Whatever the ultimate origins of the game in northern Italy, the region's proximity to the French rugby heartland helped as well.
The first match played by a representative Italian XV was in 1911, between US Milanese and Voiron of France. On July 25 of the same year the "Propaganda Committee" was formed which in 1928 became the Federazione Italiana Rugby (FIR).
An original organisational committee was established in 1911, although it was in 1928 when the body became the FIR.
