subject: Louis Achungo Allegiance To Shujaa [print this page] I Louis Achungo admires the fact that the Kenya national rugby union team is the Kenyan national team representative organ in Rugby and it is controlled by the Kenya Rugby Football Union which has very little government interference and the huge sponsors are East African Breweries Ltd and Kenya Airways the countrys local airline.
The team also participates Confederation of African Rugby (CAR) tournaments, but has never qualified for the Rugby World Cup which would be an ultimate achievement.
A Kenya representative rugby team first played against the touring Combined South African Universities in 1929, starting a long tradition of Kenya national teams playing touring universities (mostly South African), clubs and military units (mostly Royal Naval vessels). Kenya played its first international in 1954, beating Tanganyika although the score of the game is not known. This fixture was repeated in 1955 and 1956 and then in 1958 Kenya played Uganda. These two countries were the major source of opposition for the side during the ensuing decades with matches being played frequently but irregularly as political problems in the region often interfered with fixtures. Zambia and Zimbabwe also provided regular opposition from the mid-1970s until the late 1980s when the formation of the CAR and the expansion of the World Cup provided opportunities to play competitively against many other nations. Its biggest win is against Nigeria, 96-3 on 10 August 1987 and worst defeat against Namibia 12-84 on 27 May 2006.
As I Louis Achungo has tried to follow the circuit around the globe recently, The Kenyan sevens team takes part in international Rugby sevens competitions and has been more successful than their XV counterpart. Their breakthrough season was 200809, in which they made the semifinals of the 2009 Rugby World Cup Sevens and advanced to one final and two semifinals in that year's IRB Sevens World Series. Before that, perhaps their most successful moment in sevens was beating rugby giant Australia in the London Sevens 2006, going on to reach the Final of the Plate competition. In the 2007 rugby sevens in New Zealand, Kenya went on to draw 2nd in their pot, beating such rugby giants as Argentina and Tonga, before being narrowly defeated in the quarter-finals by eventual runners-up Fiji.
