RNRU Royal Navy Rugby Union

So let’s agree that the highlight of the RNRU season is the annual Army v Navy Match held at Twickenham. A squad of some forty players is used during the season with only 23 making the match day squad. But how to get there?  It is at the community level that the players get noticed and their details are fed up via the Training Support Groups (TSG) to the Director of Rugby and the representative team coaches to have a closer look at.

The 1st tier of the route to representative rugby is the Navy Cup, where ships, commando units and establishments battle it out.  The second tier is a conglomeration of these teams either based on location (RN North, RN East and RN West) or specialisation (Fleet Air Arm and Royal Marines).  The Inverdale Challenge Trophy is the silverware up for grabs and this year the 2017 match will be contested by the Royal Marines and Fleet Air Arm on Wed 25 Jan 17 at Burnaby Road, the home of Navy Rugby.

The fixtures are arranged as a round-robin competition and administered by the community rugby team (Navy Rugby Development Officer Ady Cherrington and Director of Community Rugby, 'Beastie' Williams).  A great deal of credit must go to these two as well as to the managers and coaches of each of the teams who willingly give up their precious personal time to bring the players together to compete.

Now to the Inverdale Trophy itself: named after Royal Navy Surgeon Captain (Dentist) John Inverdale RN, a rugby man through and through with unbreakable ties to Devonport Services and United Services Portsmouth.  With ‘family’ a strong motif throughout RN rugby, it was poignant and appropriate that last year the trophy was presented by Jendy Weekes, daughter of Captain Inverdale, and his son, John, was also able to find time in his busy schedule to see the game.

Throughout the competition, teams were able to field strong sides and maybe just maybe there was a chance that the perennial finalists of the FAA and the RMs wouldn’t have it all their own way.  Where the FAA and the RMs are able for the most part to guarantee only small changes to their sides, this cannot be said of the regional sides who draw most of their strength from ships and establishments where the turnover of players is more like a revolving door to a shopping centre.  Coupled with the operational tempo of ships and submarines, the TSGs performed minor miracles in ensuring that competitive teams could be fielded at each of the matches.

The highlight of the competition this year was, for the first time in the history of the Inverdale Challenge, one of the matches being played overseas.   Teams from RN North and RN East travelled from Helensburgh and Portsmouth to the Dutch town of Leeuwarden in the Netherlands to mark the centenary of a rugby match between the Scottish and English sailors from the Royal Naval Division who fought in the First World War and were then interned nearby.  A superb, well supported match saw North beat East 22-8.

While the regions achieved parity with each other; emphasised by the RN East v RN West game finely poised at 22-21 when the lights literally went out, the Marines and the Airmen showed they were a class above and a target for the regions to aim for.  So yet again, this year's final will be contested between the ‘Royals’ and the ‘Wafus’.   In the 2016 final it was the RMs who were victorious and in the heat stage before the Christmas break, it was the attacking flair of the Royal Marines that won the day with a somewhat flattering score line of 47-20.  But having met so many times in the past it would be absurd to discount the Airmen who will 'pull out all the chocks' to ensure that they get their hands on the Inverdale Challenge Trophy this time around.

The match will kick off at 1900 Wed 25 January 2017 at USSG, Burnaby Road, Portsmouth.  Entrance is free. All are welcome.

Words by J Campbell-Baldwin
Images RNRU © Mark Andrews and Keith Woodland