Bicentenary Rugby Festival - Clongowes Wood College

Posted: 20th October 2014

It’s that time of year again, when the young men of Clongowes don the purple and white to represent the school on the rugby field. While this has been happening since the boys returned to school last August there is nothing to quicken the pulse quite so much as the sight of 15 young men striding out on to the pitch ready to give their all for the school in the a representative match.

While the IRFU was founded in 1874 it was some fourteen years more before ‘some Clongowes students asked the Higher Line Prefect to have rugby posts erected’ and not until 1923 that Clongowes entered the lists in the Leinster Schools Senior Challenge Cup with our inaugural success coming just three years later. Since then the college’s teams have gone from strength to strength in the schools’ game and so it is entirely appropriate that a festival of rugby be one of the features of our packed Bicentenary Programme.

Next Friday and Saturday will see the playing fields of Clongowes play host to twenty schoolboy teams from home and abroad (see below) in be an action-packed tournament that will pay tribute to the magnificent game we all enjoy. The festival will be an opportunity to see the latest crop of developing rugby players in action and, as several of our more recent alumni have known much success at provincial and international level (not to mention the Lions), you never know who might turn up…

The 15 a-side matches will take place from 10am to 4pm each day on nine pitches and will be run under IRFU/IRB laws with accredited referees. The ‘23rd man’ (this means you!) has always been an integral part of the schools’ rugby and so we encourage you to come along and support the boys as they get the purple machine rolling along the roads to the RDS and Donnybrook next March.

All together now… ‘Womba! Womba! Womba!

Declan O’Keeffe

Invitation

 

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