The Zimbabwe national rugby union team is the rugby union team representing Zimbabwe. They are considered to be a third tier rugby union nation. The team has participated in rugby activities since the late 19th century with international matches being played as early as 1910.
The national team has a long association with touring British Isles teams, who would regularly play matches against them in their tours of South Africa. The earliest tour being in 1910 when Zimbabwe was known as Southern Rhodesia. The side has also played New Zealand on several occasions, the first being in the late 1920s.
The Zimbabwe national rugby team have competed at two World Cups, the first in 1987 and the second in 1991. With the Apartheid-era exclusion of South Africa, Zimbabwe were the first African nation to compete in the World Cup, although they are yet to win a finals fixture. The team are also known as the Sables.
Read more about Zimbabwe National Rugby Union Team: Record, World Cup Record, Current Squad
Famous quotes containing the words national, union and/or team:
“All experience teaches that, whenever there is a great national establishment, employing large numbers of officials, the public must be reconciled to support many incompetent men; for such is the favoritism and nepotism always prevailing in the purlieus of these establishments, that some incompetent persons are always admitted, to the exclusion of many of the worthy.”
—Herman Melville (18191891)
“The rage for road building is beneficent for America, where vast distance is so main a consideration in our domestic politics and trade, inasmuch as the great political promise of the invention is to hold the Union staunch, whose days already seem numbered by the mere inconvenience of transporting representatives, judges and officers across such tedious distances of land and water.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (18031882)
“Is my team ploughing,
That I was used to drive
And hear the harness jingle
When I was man alive?”
—A.E. (Alfred Edward)