Brush up on your German

The rugby blog hits Europe...

In this case we have possibly the first national RFU to adopt a blog as its main news medium - the Deutschen Rugby Frauen (DRF) - who launched their blog in April, and for some of the same reasons we started this (ie. its much easier to maintain than the "standard" website).

Its worth highlighting for a number of reasons, not least of which is that women's rugby is a lot more widespread than you might think. Indeed according to the RFU at their exhibition last year women's rugby is played in at least 81 countries across the globe.

It has to be said that in most of these countries the main format is 7-a-side rugby - indeed if you read around a bit you find that Germany came close to abandoning the 15-a-side game quite recently, and only changed their minds following protests. 15-a-side rugby is quite expensive to maintain for smaller nations, and also tend to result in teams like Germany getting a bit of a pummelling, whereas 7s does not generally result in 100-0 scorelines and also allows a country to play several other nations over a weekend.

I came across this blog because Sundays have been a bit dull what with the rain and the general restless feeling that I should be doing something... So I've been busy working on a comprehensive "history" of women's international rugby (mainly because the international game was 25 years old last month, but everyone missed it because no such resource exists, so I thought I'd do one). Well, as comprehensive as its possible to be when most RFUs can't be bothered to record their women's national team's exploits (even the RFUW do not do a complete list of England games). Anyway, the above blog found out about it and highlighted it. Which was nice of them as its means that my coverage of German international rugby is now more complete than that for England...

(If your German isn't up to it this Google translation isn't bad...)