The 1874 Cup brought rugby to FedEx Field on Saturday, and the result was a spectacle that thrilled multiple continents and cultures. Siena College junior John Lynch attended his first professional rugby match and said it was “awesome.” Samuel Whitelock is the captain of the greatest rugby team in history and said his experience was “amazing.”
The legendary All Blacks from New Zealand routed the USA Eagles, 104-14, but the announced crowd of 39,720 didn’t appear to care about the result. No matter the score, this was a rare opportunity for all involved in the exhibition.
“I just want to see if they play in real life like they play on TV,” Rupert Bronkhorst said. Bronkhorst and Lynch play on the rugby team at Siena. They and 18 of their teammates left Upstate New York at 7 a.m. Saturday for a six-hour drive to FedEx Field, where they saw the world’s most famous rugby team, a squad they have admired from afar but seldom seen in person.
Lynch, who grew up outside New York City, took up rugby two years ago when he met Greg Matthew, Siena’s rugby coordinator, at the school’s admitted students day. “Want to play rugby?” Matthew asked Lynch, and Lynch was on the team.
Michael McDonald, who sat next to Lynch, also started playing rugby in college. He played hockey growing up, but hockey at Siena cost $1,300 per semester to play. Rugby was free. McDonald chose rugby.
“Those are the guys we want to get introduced to this top level of rugby,” said Nate Augspurger, who scored for the United States on Saturday. “I know the first time I saw it, it was on a VHS [tape]. But now it’s more accessible. It’s growing.”
Lynch and McDonald now have teammates like Bronkhorst, who grew up in South Africa and was recruited to play at Siena in preparation for the team’s transition to Division I next fall. Bronkhorst had seen rugby matches before, but not like Saturday’s.
“It’s crazy,” Bronkhorst said. “It’s the most amazing feeling of my life.”
For most of the afternoon, a partisan New Zealand crowd reveled in the dominance of the All Blacks, who scored their first try in the match’s first 40 seconds and led, 59-7, at halftime in one of their rare appearances on U.S. soil.
“It feels like home,” said 19-year-old Katy Condon, who was born in Auckland but lives in Dallas. “When they played the national anthem, I hadn’t heard that in a while.”
Condon, who watched with her brother and wore a New Zealand flag around her back, is a lifelong All Blacks fan but hasn’t been home since just before the pandemic. She hadn’t seen a pro rugby match in two years and hadn’t seen her home country’s team in longer than that. She was, like most of the black-clad fans in the crowd, enthralled once again by the Haka (a cultural display used by the All Blacks as a pregame ritual).
Jen and Jay Clinton and Ashlynn and Tim Guptill, who live in Delaware and cheer for the All Blacks, said Saturday’s match was their first mass gathering since before the pandemic. They met before the game with New Zealanders who had flocked from around the United States — California and Colorado, South Carolina and Georgia — to see the All Blacks.
On the field, the Eagles did not have much to celebrate, but they did gain a valuable experience against a world-class team. Augspurger put the hosts on the scoreboard just before halftime, providing one bright spot. Afterward, he compared his team’s experience to that of an up-and-coming boxer.
“A boxer is starting to fight professionally and trying to be a world champion,” he explained. “Well, world champions know how to go 12 rounds, and the guy who’s on his way up to being a world champion has to find out the fitness, the body capacity it takes. There’s a speed to that; I think there’s a technique to that. But we’re building our capacity.”
The 1874 Cup — named after the year of the first rugby match played in the United States — was designed to grow the sport in America with the hope of bringing rugby’s men’s and women’s World Cups to the country within the next decade.
Although U.S. Coach Gary Gold said he was “devastated” by the result, U.S. organizers hope even a lopsided match could help develop the national rugby program.
“[The exhibition] shows that we’ve got people that back us, people that care,” U.S. captain Bryce Campbell said. “We need to do our best to make them proud, keep filling stadiums like this. The game’s just going to progress here in the U.S.”
