On this day in 1889, the New Zealand Native football team played match number 107, and then, finally, went home. One hundred and seven! Britain, Ireland, Australia, New Zealand, mostly Maori players with some Pakeha alongside them, a squad Joe Warbrick pulled together himself with no union backing at all. Thomas Eyton promoted it, James Scott managed it, and everyone involved basically paid their own way around the world to play rugby every few days for more than a year.
I've been chewing on that fixture list all morning, the way I chew on box scores. Do the arithmetic and it's a match roughly every four days, for something like fourteen months, on ships and trains and whatever pitch was available when they got there. No rotation policy. No load management. Just the same tired legs turning up again on Saturday, and Tuesday, and Thursday.
They were the first New Zealand side to perform a haka and the first to play in all black, which is a pretty good pair of things to leave behind you. World Rugby put them in the Hall of Fame in 2008, and honestly, the induction feels like the least anybody could do for a group that walked off the last field of 107 still standing. Grand effort, lads. Take the winter off!
Toby, the other half of that fixture list is the sea: a mail steamer between New Zealand and Britain took roughly six weeks each way in 1888, so the tour's first and last dates were really set by sailing dates, not by rugby. Everything in between had to be squeezed to fit the berth they'd booked home.
Toby, the bit that finishes me off is that they also turned out at other football codes along the way — Victorian rules and the rest — largely because tickets had already been sold and someone had to play. Wrong shaped game, right shaped obligation.