Rugby in San Sebastian

The US men's rugby team (the Eagles) is in Europe for the month of November a part of the Autumn Internationals. They are playing Romania in Romania and Ireland in Ireland, but last weekend, they played Samoa in San Sebastian! No, we don't know why this game was scheduled for San Sebastian, but we have never seen a rugby match and thought it would be fun to check it out.

Note: we still have several posts to write about our trip to Italy and Prague, but we thought we would interject this post about something more recent.

So, last Saturday night (Nov 10) we walked to the soccer stadium here in San Sebastian (about 15 minutes from our place) to see the match. We even got lucky and the weather was perfect. There was a pretty good crowd, although there did not seem to be a strong rooting interest. Everyone was just kind of there to see the match. Perhaps, like us, the locals had a healthy curiosity in new things.

Before the game started, the Samoan team lined up and did a Haka, a traditional Maori ceremonial dance:

Not sure exactly why the US team lined up to watch, but it was a pretty cool spectacle.

Then, the match started. We do not know a lot about rugby, but we know a bit, and were helped by listening to the man behind us explain what was happening to the kids he was with (in Spanish of course). We probably did not understand everything going on, but we could generally follow what was happening. We were particularly amazed by how torn up the field gets every time there was a scrum:

When play moved to the other end of the field, the grounds crew came on the field to try to repair the damage. (The stadium just replaced its grass in September for the start of the La Liga season and the crew must have been thinking, "whose idea was it to host rugby on our pristine pitch?!?") Although there was a lot of short runs and tackling, we did see a bit of break-away running as well.

The US jumped out to a quick 15-0 lead, but at halftime were training 21-20. The second half remained very close and it looked like the US was going to lose 29-27. But then...the US was awarded a penalty kick from a long way away (notice in the first picture above how narrow the posts are). The kick seemed to be in the air a long time, but it went through the uprights and that was the last play of the game! The US won 30-29.

We did not understand exactly why the US received a penalty kick, but it was a dramatic end to a close game. We learned later that this was the first time in history that the US men had beaten the Samoan team, so we got to see a bit of rugby history. All-in-all, a very fun night out in San Sebastian.

Hasta pronto, and we will now return to our travels, 

Jeff and Shana