Convicts win Bingham Cup for fourth time
The Sydney Convicts A team defeated the Brisbane Hustlers 31-0 at Woollahra Oval in Rose Bay, the Eastern Suburbs home ground, on Sunday.
The Convicts jumped out to a big lead in front of an estimated crowd of 6,000 people, including ARU Chief Executive Bill Pulver, and were leading 26-0 at the break. Then they took it home to win 31-0.
Some further details and video footage can be seen here
The tournament was set up by the International Gay Rugby Association and Board, which is fun-abbreviated as IGRAB.
In May 2001 they held an informal invitational tournament in Washington DC, but later established an official tournament as a gay rugby union world cup. They planned to have the first one in 2002 and hold it every two years.
One of the players in the 2001 Washington DC tournament was Mark Bingham who had played for the University of California (Berkeley) team and for the San Francisco Fog after graduation. He also co-founded the Gotham Knights Rugby Football Club.
He died on September 11, 2001 when United Airlines Flight 93 crashed, the victim of terrorist highjackers. He was the last passenger to board the aircraft and was on his way to attend a friend’s wedding.
Bingham is accepted as one of the passengers who stormed the cockpit to stop the hijackers—one can imagine an all-action man and rugby player like Mark trying to clean that lot out, unarmed. In the end the plane crashed in a field instead of in populated Washington DC where it was headed.
IGRAB resolved unanimously to name the two-yearly tournament and the trophy in his honour.
The Sydney Convicts, who play 5th Division Subbies rugby, had won the tournament in 2006, 2008 and 2012 but their skipper Steve Thorne said that those wins didn’t compare to winning at home.
We have been traveling every two years for a decade to other countries to play and so to win on our home turf in front a massive crowd is really beyond anything we could have dreamed would come true.
The level of rugby being played has also gone up significantly, which also shows the massive interest and commitment to play good, hard and tough rugby in the gay community.
