History
The union was founded in 1881, celebrating its 125th year in 2006. Since the inception of the NPC in 1976, Otago have won the competition twice, in 1991 and 1998. Furthermore, since playoffs were introduced, Otago have made the final on six occasions and the semifinals on 11.
Although Otago have not held the Ranfurly Shield since 1957, their overall performance is impressive, having won 36 of 74 shield matches, with only Auckland and Canterbury boasting a better record.
In 2011, Otago (along with the Highlanders) moved from Carisbrook, the union's traditional home, to the recently completed Forsyth Barr Stadium. A fully enclosed venue, Otago held their first home match at the new ground on the 27th of August. In front of a crowd of 14,067, the largest home gate of the season, Otago lost to Canterbury by 16 - 29.
Read more about this topic: Otago Rugby Football Union
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“Properly speaking, history is nothing but the crimes and misfortunes of the human race.”
—Pierre Bayle (1647–1706)
“If usually the “present age” is no very long time, still, at our pleasure, or in the service of some such unity of meaning as the history of civilization, or the study of geology, may suggest, we may conceive the present as extending over many centuries, or over a hundred thousand years.”
—Josiah Royce (1855–1916)
“History ... is, indeed, little more than the register of the crimes, follies, and misfortunes of mankind.
But what experience and history teach is this—that peoples and governments have never learned anything from history, or acted on principles deduced from it.”
—Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831)