PROJECT: Glory

I do not want to approach this topic with the ethos that the winning is everything because it really is not. Of course it plays an important part and seeing as the top level of rugby these days is essentially a business, winning equals money therefore winning is everything. However, I am going to look at glory from a supporters perspective, and to support this I believe the best means of explaining  this is through a video I created.

The footage is taken by myself at the big screen located outside the Cardiff Civic Centre on the final day of the 2012 Six Nations Tournament, an annual northern hemisphere tournament which my team, Wales, won with a clean sweep this year. The footage shows the dying minutes of the game, you can see on the screen a crowd of seventy-four thousand fans cheering their country on, but that day the was an estimated quarter of a million Welsh supporters in Cardiff, and the majority were stood behind me watching the screen too.

The celebrations in reaction to the Welsh teams glory that day, through this video, is a magnificent way to illustrate why rugby gives me such a huge feeling of place and belonging.

The use of movies is a common method in which to document rugby, any aspect of the game can be found in video form on websites such as YouTube or the rugby specific site ‘RugbyDump’.

The glory experienced by the players that do, who worked so hard to achieve success was shared by loyal fans of Welsh rugby, fans that hold a sense of place in the game, with Cardiff being the spiritual home of this place. In Wales, rugby is the national sport, it is more like a religion than something to casually have an interest in, and only through having such strong feelings as this, as I do, can one experience such euphoria as the video shows.

Cardiff on match day, the home of Welsh rugby.

Wales has a long tradition in the game of rugby, being a Welshman this could help define why my sense of place is in the game itself. Images of the world renowned Millenium Stadium and crowd shots from match day like the ones above can show that many appreciate that sense of place.