This is very interesting ackshually. I had no idea Romania were once so good. I saw England play them in the first international I ever watched (maybe 93 or 94) and they were already rubbish by then. But it was not ever thus...Rugby's forgotten fairytaleRomania are also-rans in this World Cup, but they were once one of the best teams on the planet.Andy Bull (
The Guardian)
September 25, 2007 1:56 PM
The 30th game of the World Cup will be one of the least hyped and little viewed. In Toulouse tonight Romania play Portugal, with both sides seeking a first, and probably final, win to mark their participation. There will be little coverage in the English papers tomorrow, and perhaps just a line or two on the evening news.
Rugby union lives in a near-perpetual state of concern about whether or not it really is an international sport - say in comparison to football or athletics. The extent of its globalisation must be measured by more than just how well the smaller sides perform against the home and Tri-nations. Globalisation depends also on our awareness, appreciation and understanding of the cultures that have embraced the game. It depends also on not allowing the smaller teams to just slip through the cracks for another four years.
The mutual enjoyment of sport bridges the divides created by languages and cultures. The familiarity the game creates between the otherwise unfamiliar is one of the most important and enjoyable things about the World Cup. Portugal will never beat New Zealand, but if they demonstrate, and we appreciate, their own passion for the game, then the game becomes more universal.
For much of the 20th century, Romania were the sixth team in Europe rather than Italy. If the game there is especially unknown to British fans, it is because, like Portugal, it has grown under French influence.
English fans may think back to 2001 and the 134-0 defeat of the Romanians that, for us, was simply another marker of the team's inexorable process towards becoming world champions. For Romania, that was the nadir of a terrible era in their rugby history, a low-water mark indicative of the disintegrating popularity, funding and structure of the game there.
Contrary to what we may blithely think, that history is a long and glorious one. Rugby has been played in Romania since the very early years of the last century, when students who had moved to Paris to study returned to Bucharest, bringing with them a set of balls and a copy of the rules for the game they had played in between their studies.
France, for so long excluded from the IRB, nurtured the sport there in an effort to boost their own sphere of influence and create a rival power-base to that of the home nations. By 1914 the Romanian rugby championship was being contested, and it has run almost uninterrupted ever since. In 1919 the national team played their first match, against France in Paris.
Skip forward to 1960, and Romanian rugby was beginning to flourish. They beat France 11-5 in Bucharest, and over the next four years won one rematch 3-0, and drew two more. In 1964 Grivita Rosie become European club champions by beating Mont-de-Marsanin, reigning champions of France, 10-0.
The following year Dinamo Bucharest won the same title, and at the same time Nicolae Ceausescu became first secretary of the Romanian Workers Party. He would become head of state two years later. Romania, communist since the Soviet occupation of 1947, had increasingly been establishing its autonomy from Soviet rule at the same time as its rugby team had been enjoying such success.
The two were to become inextricably linked. Under Ceausescu sport became a vital source of propaganda. For the population, almost completely cut off from the rest of the world due to its increasing isolationism, sport was one means of global interaction, of demonstrating Romanian culture, and as Ceausescu would have it, strength and prosperity, to the outside world.
Gymnastics benefited, football benefited, and so did rugby. Ceausescu poured resources into his national teams. It is almost forgotten now, but in the 1970s and 1980s Romania were one of the best teams in the world.
In 1974 they beat France 15-10, and in 1980 they beat them 15-0 and then held Ireland to a 13-13 draw in Dublin. In 1984 they beat Scotland 28-22. On and on it goes: in 1988, Wales were defeated 15-9 in Cardiff, and in 1990 France went down again, this time 12-6. Throughout that period, Romania beat Italy in 12 of the 20 games they contested.
In the mid-80s, Romania really were one of the best teams in the world, and on the verge of joining the Five Nations. And then the revolution happened. Six of the national team lost their lives in the fight to overthrow Ceausescu. Some of them died because their day jobs were with the army or the police; others, such as the legendary flanker Florica Murariu, were simply victims of the turmoil and confusion of the time. Murariu was shot dead at a roadblock, believed to have been mistaken for a terrorist by a pair of trigger-happy soldiers.
The revolution triggered a rapid decline in Romanian rugby. Shorn of state support, mourning some its leading players and increasingly irrelevant to the new society forming itself, rugby union went backwards. A win against Fiji in the 1991 World Cup marked perhaps the final occasion when the world really took notice of their team.
Professionalism exacerbated the problem, as there was an exodus of players to France. Currently there are 326 Romanians playing at various levels of the French league system. The domestic game, virtually spectatorless and penniless, was crumbling. Included in the first ever Heineken Cup, Farul Constantal lost to Toulouse, and no Romanian team has participated since, though Romania A do play in the Challenge Cup.
"With the revolution children discovered new opportunities," said the team spokesman Radu Constantin. "Nightlife and discos, TV and computer games. Sport, and rugby especially, became less popular as an activity".
When I ask him whether Muriaru is a hero in Romania, he says no: "because football is the king. The man in the street in Bucharest could not tell you who captains our rugby team. Floricau was another man who died in the revolution, he just happened to be a rugby player".
At the time of the loss to England in 2001, the national team had no sponsors and the federation was unable to pay the players. Of late there has been something of a stirring, prompted by that humiliating defeat. Only 15 years previously Romania had lost at Twickenham by just 22-15. The national administration was changed, with some financial help from France, and new sponsors were found.
"For the national team," Constantin continued, "things are improving. We now have nine national teams, across all age groups and sexes, whereas before we only had two. We have an academy too, the only one in eastern Europe. But for the clubs, things are not so good".
This year, Arad, who provided three players for the national team and finished second in the Romanian Championship in 2006, went bust and were shut down. Currently, the game is not a viable business. So while the likes of Argentina and Italy have been welcomed into the top rank of rugby union, Romania have all but disappeared from it. It seems unbelievable given their long and passionate history of playing the game, and the astonishing results they produced in the 1970s and 1980s.
Behind that short paragraph in tomorrow's papers, that 30-second sound-bite on the radio, lies one of rugby union's more remarkable and rare stories. A minor team that took on and beat the established sides, then collapsed and almost vanished from view. If rugby union is serious about becoming a global sport, it will acknowledge Romania's achievements, and help do everything it can to ensure they don't just become a distant and obscure chapter in the game's history.
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