No mercy - a tale of girls school rugby, kiwi-style

A remarkable little story from Land of the Long White Cloud - and maybe a small clue as to why the New Zealanders are so good at the game.

Southland Girls High School, from Invercargill recently took on local rivals James Hargest/Menzies College, and ran out winners by 144 points to 0! Obviously there are one sided games like this all the time, but this story stands out for a number of reasons...

1. This was Southlands Girls 1st XV, which kind of implies that they have a 2nd, and maybe even 3rd XV, as well. This is pretty impressive for a school roughly the same size as Hitchin Girls'!

2. They clearly have no concept of mercy in Kiwi rugby - no truck with concepts such as calling a game off when one team is 50 points ahead. On the contrary, in New Zealand it would seem that, once an opponent is on the floor, the main consideration is to go for the jugular and keep them there.

3. Southlands scored 22 tries - 17 of which were converted by full-back Nina Shields (left) - in a game that lasted only 45 minutes. Taking into account the time to take the kicks, for Nina to get back into position for the next restart and so on, this would seem to mean that they scored a try every minute or so that the ball was in play! Its not that far short of the world record in a properly contested match over 80 minutes (which is somewhere around 229-0) - indeed in terms of points scored per minute it would seem to exceed it!

4. And finally the newspaper report is a straight report on the game with none of the man-bites-dog journalism that most mentions of the game in this country tend to get.

In short, its difficult to imagine that anything like this would ever happen here!