We Won!

In-bounds play


In addition to Saturday being Diwali, it was also the day of the island's biggest Rugby rival game. The village of Nadi vs. the village of (I can't remember). Rugby may very well be the national sport here in Fiji -- but don't quote me on that, I'm just going by how the locals talk about Rugby, and how big this game was to them.

Nadi is just across the bay from Namale, and a large portion of the staff lives in that village.

So Traci and I decided to go into town and watch the game, despite the fact that neither of us knew anything about the sport -- rules, scoring, strategy, etc...

While we were there we learned a little bit about the game and scoring, but nothing in too great a detail. We did, however, know that we were losing for most of the game... They had scored a touchdown (or the rugby equivalent) and 2 field goals, while we had only scored 3 field goals.

That is until the last minute of the game. We scored a touchdown, and the place went wild (we were the home team.) 30 seconds after we scored, people were running onto the field and celebrating, etc... I didn't know what was going on until someone said that the game was over and we had won. You see, there was no score board or any other device telling how much time was left, and since we don't know how long a game lasts, we had no idea when it ended. By the way, our team was the blue/burgandy team.

We also learned (maybe this is just with the local game), there are no injury timeouts. In the picture below on the right hand side they are tending to a player who had been on the ground for at least a minute before I took the picture. Hidden by the post is the action that was still going on, and went right on past the player and the guy helping him.


No Injury Time-outs