The Waratah Hotel

Rugby Union is a winter sport in Australia with a history dating back to 1864. Although traditionally most popular in Australia's rugby football strongholds of New South Wales, Queensland and the ACT, it is played throughout the nation. The principal competition in Australian rugby is Super Rugby, which is a multi-regional competition across the southern hemisphere. With the competition expanding from 14 teams to 15 for 2011 and to 18 teams in 2016, Australia entered five teams—the Reds of Queensland, the Waratahs of New South Wales, the Brumbies of the Australian Capital Territory, the Force of Western Australia and the Australian conference's newest team, the Melbourne Rebels of Victoria. The National Rugby Championship was launched as the next level below Super Rugby in August 2014. As of the most recently completed 2017 season, the NRC consists of nine teams – two from Queensland, three from New South Wales, one each from the Australian Capital Territory, Victoria and Western Australia, plus the Fijian Drua, effectively a developmental side for that country's national team. The Buildcorp NRC runs for 11 weeks from August to November. It includes preliminary rounds, with each team playing each other once , one bye week per team and a finals series . Below the NRC are traditional capital city competitions, such as the Shute Shield of Sydney, Queensland Premier Rugby of Brisbane and Pindan Premier Grade of Perth which formed the highest level of domestic competition for much of the sport's history in Australia. In December 2017, the national governing body of Rugby Australia announced that it would launch a new top-level women's 15s competition, to be known as Super W, in 2018. The new league will feature five state/territorial representative teams—the ACT, New South Wales, Queensland, Victoria and Western Australia.The men's national team are the Wallabies, who have won the Rugby World Cup twice, in 1991 and in 1999. The Wallabies play in Australia's traditional sporting colours of green and gold. They are considered one of the top rugby nations, owing to success at the World Cup and consistently high ranking, being ranked fifth in the world as of 21 August 2017.
Continue reading...
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.