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RUGBY FOOTBALL CLUB
Oxford Rugby Football Club has seen many ups and downs in its 107 year history and the club founder , Alfred St George Hamersly , would be rightly pleased to see that it continues to flourish today .
Alfred played for England in the first ever international rugby match between England and Scotland at Inverleith in 1871 and then for the following three years . He then emigrated to New Zealand where he was responsible for founding the Canterbury Rugby Union after realising that distances were then too great to form a New Zealand Rugby Union before moving on to Canada where he was responsible for the formation of the British Columbia Rugby Union . So he had a background in organising Rugby Union and , having retired to Oxfordshire in 1904 , the time was ripe to set up a club in the city .
The club was formed as Oxfordshire Nomads , given that name because it had no home field but played its games on various grounds where it could . The club colours of one inch green , white and black hoops still hold good today . The club survived two World Wars and became Oxford RFC in 1947 when a meeting of local clubs decided that a new club level should be introduced to improve standards so that the Oxfordshire County team could be accepted into the County Championship .
At this time the club were involved with a number of sports under the heading of Oxford Sports Club and a ground was bought just off the Southern Bypass in Oxford when ‘ Bunny ’ Cole , the then President paid for the deposit from his own pocket . The ground became an obvious choice for the newly named club that went on to buy outright the land and buildings in 1970 , and the club continues to own these premises today .
The club won the Oxfordshire Cup eleven times and played in the final on another six occasions . Since then competition from other local clubs took its toll on the playing side and in 2007 the club offered the facilities in a ground sharing project with another local club . This brought thoughts of an amalgamation that many expected but did not take place when the sharing club returned to its council owned pitches on the other side of the city in 2014 .
Oxford club players had been swallowed up in this time but under the
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