ManusXavi
New member
Hi guys this is an article I have written about rugby Culture in my Area of New Zealand.
The picture I am showing is Coach Tony Brown holding a beer after winning the Ranfurly Shield in a rugby game. Beer that has also been used to help bring back a culture of passion into Otago rugbys imported players.
Rugby as a sport where success in a large part comes from desire and passion. A player can use determination to achieve a better result in a variety of areas such as, extra effort to make that dive tackle or physicality in a ruck. Determination can also add extra effort mentally to achieve better decision making, energy efficiency and situation awareness. Football is less capable than rugby of using determination in a physical way as he/she increases the risk of fouling. New Zealanders enjoy the rucks in rugby with the way determination to be physical can achieve results.
Rugby has become professional so players are not fussed about having to play for somewhere they do not come from if it means they can get money. Players also play for another area for tertiary study reasons. Most rugby and Sports teams for that matter don’t have a passion any longer that comes from the team he/she plays for being his/her own. Passion for an area is hard to achieve. Each person in the team may have their individual desires. These levels however can vary. It can be a powerful tool if team passion can be achieved for the area. Rugby is a game that can achieve this in certain places. Otago and Dunedin also have a certain product that imported players enjoy. That product is beer. The coach Tony Brown (in this picture) uses beer as part of building the imported Otago players passion for the area and the team.
In this picture the Speight’s beer is not only a Sponsor or even just any beer. It is Otago’s own beer. Speight’s is a product that the province brews that it can be proud of. It is a product that represents itself as something that only deserves to be drank after hard work. Speights have slogans of ‘Good on ya mate’ and ‘they build them tough down here’ to add to its advertisements that show hard work happening before the reward of beer. The Otago rugged land that Southern Men used to work hard physically on before machinery came along is a representation of the physicality and effort of rugby. The fans of the Southern Man expect men playing for Otago to work hard on the Rugby Field and Tony Brown has worked hard in bringing that in the modern game. This comment came from Tony brown after the Ranfurly Shield success. "That's always been Otago rugby - a good bunch of Otago Country and Otago players mixed with a few students who buy into the Otago culture and that's where we perform best," Brown said.
So in an age where Imports are now very common in Sport and players may play for multiple teams, Otago is proud to have a Sport that can represent itself
