100* Not Out

RW charts a century of Samoa's flagship national team, including its dramatic rebirth in the late 1980s

- CAMPBELL BURNES

CLOSE YOUR eyes and transport yourself back to 1991 when Manu Samoa shook up the world. An unheralded team in its first Rugby World Cup was in cattle class on the flight to the UK, while the All Blacks, who didn't cover themselves in glory on or off the field, were in business class.

Most fans in New Zealand knew how good this Samoa team was on paper, having seen many of the players perform in the NPC. Charismatic captain Peter Fatialofa led from the front. Brian Lima was a tearaway teenage wing.

Stories emerged of the team, with the union strapped for cash, taking a wheelbarrow around the Samoan islands of Savai'i and Upolu to raise funds. Keneti Sio told Frank Bunce to take his heart if his heart was not full for this team.

Samoa shocked Wales 16-13 before bowing out to Scotland in the quarter-finals. The team had made its reputation, and scores of journalists sought to find out what was in the South Seas' water that made these players so dynamic and delightful.

That World Cup run ranks as the high-water mark of a century of international rugby in Samoa. That is both a source of pride and sadness: pride that after 67 years almost in the international wilderness, this small nation was emerging to fly the flag, and sadness that, due to rugby politics, Samoa has never kicked on to be a world force, despite having some of the world's greatest rugby players carrying Samoan blood.

HUMBLE BEGINNINGS

Helped by Innes Logan's 1999 work Manu Samoa: A Rugby Phenomenon, we can piece together the past. In 1924, the establishment of the Apia Rugby Committee led to the first rep match between Apia and Pago Pago (from nearby American Samoa). Samoa's first Test, against Fiji in Apia, was played on 18 August 1924.

The match was played at 7am on a Monday, so Fiji could catch a steamer to Tonga and Samoa could go to work! Fiji won 6-0 but Samoa turned the tables, 9-3, a few days later.