Fiji caused a major upset at the World Cup being played in France when they defeated Australia 22-15 in their group match.
It was not just Fiji’s first win against Australia in the World Cup, but their first of any sort at all since they beat them by two points at the SCG way back in 1954. Given that, the surprising thing was Australia never looked close to winning this one.
You can see the highlights.
I will not try to explain the rules of rugby, except that scoring a touchdown (also known as a ‘try’) gets you five points. If it is followed by a conversion, you get a further two points. A penalty goal or a drop goal gets you three points.
But the tournament has an interesting scoring system. It gives four points for a win, two points for a tie, and zero points for a loss. But to encourage teams to try to get points by scoring tries (which are more exciting) instead of penalty goals, a team gets a bonus point if it scores four or more tries in a game. But even more interesting is that a losing team can get a bonus point if the margin of their defeat is seven points or less. So in the case of the Wales-Fiji game that Wales won 32-26, Fiji got two points even though they lost: one point for scoring four tries and another for losing by just six points.
There are three teams from the central Polynesian archipelago region among the twenty playing in the tournament and they represent by far the nations with the smallest populations. Fiji has about 900,000, Samoa has about 200,000, and Tonga has just 100,000. That they can manage to field teams that can compete at the top level with countries that have far greater populations says something about the quality of their rugby programs. I noticed that some of the other teams also had players with Polynesian names on their squads, that further shows the strength of the Polynesian rugby traditions.
Worth 15 minutes of your time: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b07mxv60
It also says something about the size of the lads they’re turning out.
Sonifrojblake @2
Indeed.
A former co-worker was in the Swedish UN unit in former Yugoslavia, where they operated together with a unit from Fiji.
The Fijians usually drank kava, but when they got drunk on alcohol and someone went berserk, it would take four MPs to subdue him. They were BIG.
Almost entirely offtopic, but athlete-size related: I heard a thing from a friend recently about Australia’s approach to Olympic swimming success. The core idea was this: you’d expect them to go looking in swimming clubs for the best, fastest swimmers, and look to pick the best and train them up. They didn’t do this. What they did was go looking for basketball players. The central point was that in order to be Olympic standard, you HAVE to be tall. So they’d concluded that you can train a tall athlete to be a great swimmer but you can’t train a great swimmer to be taller.
“Fiji has about 900,000, Samoa has about 200,000, and Tonga has just 100,000.”
Those numbers are misleading. Almost half of Fijians are of Indian origin, and are too small to play rugby. There is also a Polynesian minority (mostly Tongan) in the easternmost islands (Lau Group).
The number of Tongans is even more misleading. About 100’000 live in the islands, but there are lots of expats elsewhere. Something like 60’000 in the USA (especially Mormons), 40’000 in New Zealand, and 30’000 in Australia. So the total is near quarter a million. (Those numbers are from about 2005, when I did a round-the-world tour.)
I don’t know how many Samoan expats there are, but probably quite many.
@ #4: The Froude number applies also to the physics of swimming.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Froude_number
tl;dr: Hull speed is proportional to the square root of waterline length (i.e. the swimmers tallness).
If you read Australian media, this of course had nothing at all to do with how well the Fijians played, and everything to do with their own team simply imploding and making all Australians look bad and rip their hair out.
really, rugby is entirely full of sheer spite in both Aus and NZ. If the All Blacks lose more than a game in a row, I swear the fans here are ready to go to war over it, and all coaches MUST be immediate fired. It’s bizarre, and scary.
If racists were consistent, they would take this as a sign the future belongs to people with polynesian heritage, like The Rock.
I now wait for David Duke to step back and accept playing second fiddle to the new masters…