Rugby

 Forget the baseball playoffs and the World Series.  All through the months of September and October, the only sport in Suzhou was rugby.  The Rugby World Cup, like the Olympics or the Soccer World Cup, is held every 4 years.   This was a tournament year and this year the host was New Zealand.  TV prime time in New Zealand works out to be mid-after noon in China.  So for the past 6 weeks or so, all the expat rugby fans have been gathering on week-ends to watch the matches. 

As playoffs turned to quarter-finals and then to semi-finals, the crowds grew in number and in partisanship.  The Irish, the Australians, the British (rooting for Wales)...all took their turns in the thrill of victory and then the agony of defeat.  The finals came down to France and New Zealand.  New Zealand was heavily favored on both technical and emotional merits.

I followed the last few rounds with a group of French fans.   I'd learned to sing La Marseillaise when in Strasbourg, and that was enough to gain me honorary admission to the clique.  (Truth told, I also had to buy a few rounds of beer.  My singing is not that good.)  These photos show the group gathered at Zapata's, where the games were projected on a big screen on the porch.

In the end, the French played the better game...but lost by a score of 8 to 7 in a heartbreaker.  It would have been less disappointing for them to have lost 80 to 7.   Close but no cigar.  C'est la guerre.

The U.S.A. fielded a team for the tournament, by the way.  They didn't make it out of the round-robin play.. winning just one game while losing three.  The win was against Russia, which is not exactly a rugby powerhouse.  Australia, which is a powerhouse, beat the U.S.A with a score of 67 to 5.