Brisbane City (rugby team)

History

Brisbane's earliest recorded intercity football match under Rugby Union rules took place on 19 August 1878 when Brisbane FC played Ipswich FC. The teams played again three weeks later under Victorian Rules. This was five years before the foundation of the Northern Rugby Union (the NRU, which was later to become the QRU). In the early years of rugby in Queensland, teams from country areas such as Toowoomba, Rockhampton and Charters Towers were Brisbane's main on-field rivals.

Representative team

Brisbane representative sides have been selected from the premier clubs in the city's competition for more than a hundred years to play teams from other areas of Queensland as well as international and provincial touring sides. A Brisbane Metropolitan side played the visiting British Isles team in 1904, and later Brisbane representative teams played the All Blacks in 1951 and Fiji in 1954.

The first City-Country rugby match between Brisbane and Queensland Country (selected from the rest of Queensland) was held at the inaugural Country Week carnival hosted by the QRU in 1902. Country Week carnivals became sporadic with the rise of rugby league after 1909, and the start of the First World War brought rugby union to a halt in Queensland in 1914. The QRU was revived in 1928–29, but rugby languished in country regions of the state for many years.

City-Country matches were resumed in 1965. From 1968 until 1982, annual Country Carnival competitions were held from which the Country team was selected to play Brisbane and other representative sides. The Country Carnival was discontinued in favour of State Championships in 1983, and the format of competition has varied over time, but City-Country matches between representative teams from Brisbane and Queensland Country have remained regular fixtures since.

Ballymore Tornadoes (ARC team)

In 2006, after setting up a consultative process culminating in a working session of some 70 delegates from around the country, the Australian Rugby Union announced that a new, eight-team national competition would commence in 2007 to compete for the Australian Rugby Championship (ARC).

The Ballymore Tornadoes was the Brisbane-based team in the ARC, and the team played its home matches at Ballymore Stadium. The team's colors were maroon, blue and silver. The Ballymore Tornadoes side was one of two Queensland teams supported by the QRU in the competition, alongside the East Coast Aces.

Queensland's two teams in the ARC were aligned with existing clubs and regions. The Tornadoes were aligned with six Queensland Premier Rugby clubs north of the Brisbane River – Brothers, GPS, Norths/QUT, Sunshine Coast, University and Wests. Chris Roche, a former Wallaby who played 17 Tests as well as 49 matches for the Reds during the 1980s, was the head coach of the Tornadoes. Paul Healy was the assistant coach.

The Australian Rugby Championship was terminated at the end of 2007 after only one season of competition, with the Australian Rugby Union citing higher costs than budgeted and further projected financial losses. The Tornadoes team was disbanded with the end of the ARC competition.

National Rugby Championship

In December 2013, the ARU announced that the national competition was to be relaunched, with the National Rugby Championship (NRC) commencing in 2014. Expressions of interest were open to any interested parties, with the accepted bids finalised in early 2014. There was initial interest from Brisbane clubs in forming NRC teams themselves, but to eliminate the risks to sub-unions and clubs the Queensland Rugby Union decided to organise and manage two teams centrally for the first year of the competition. On 24 March 2014, it was announced that the Brisbane City and Queensland Country teams would play in the NRC competition.

Brisbane City secured McInnes Wilson Lawyers as principal sponsor for the 2014 NRC season.

Stadium

The home ground for the Brisbane City team is Ballymore. The stadium was built in 1966 and is the traditional home of Queensland Rugby. The Queensland Reds played their home matches in the Super Rugby competition at Ballymore until the end of the 2005 season, before they moved to the larger Suncorp Stadium for 2006. Ballymore has a capacity of around 24,000. Test matches have also been played at Ballymore, including Bledisloe Cup matches, and a semi-final of the 1987 Rugby World Cup.

Brisbane City also played a home game at Suncorp Stadium in 2014, as the curtain raiser to the Bledisloe Cup match.

Current squad

The squad for the 2016 National Rugby Championship season:

(c) Denotes team captain, Bold denotes player is internationally capped, ¹ denotes allocated national player additional to the contracted squad, ^WTS denotes Wider Training Squad.

Honours

Season standings

National Rugby Championship

Head coaches

Captains