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Level 2 – Pre-intermediate
The Rugby World Cup
Rugby is a sport which started in England in 1823. During a football match at Rugby boys' school, one of the players, a schoolboy called William Webb Ellis, suddenly picked up the ball and ran with it. The new game was called rugby, after the school. Today people play rugby in over 100 countries around the world.
The Rugby World Cup, which takes place every four years, is a fairly new event – the first World Cup took place in Australia and New Zealand in 1987. The All Blacks from New Zealand won.
The most exciting World Cup final was in South Africa in 1995, when the South African Springboks beat the All Blacks. The event took place just a year after the first democratic elections in South Africa. President Nelson Mandela presented the Webb Ellis Trophy to the first mixed black and white South African rugby team.
The Rugby World Cup is now the third largest sporting event in the world, after the football World Cup and the Olympic Games. Rugby is one of the most spectacular spectator sports. It is sometimes called a 'game for hooligans played by gentlemen'. Rugby has only recently become a professional sport and there is now a lot of money in the game. Let's hope that this new professional status doesn't turn rugby into a game for hooligans, and played and run by hooligans!
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Answer the questions below to check how well you understand the text.
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C2 Mastery
