Culture
European settlers took the sport to South America in in the 1880s it was thanks to British engineers building railroads across the pampas in Argentina, Brazil, and Uruguay. Locals watched the engineers playing this peculiar sport and decided to have a go themselves. The sport never took a very large foothold in Brazil due to its sheer size and competition from soccer, although proved much more popular in Uruguay, and had the most success in Argentina. Most of the many country clubs in the country offer the sport as an option, and there are many cultural heroes that have graduated through the Argentinian system.
Play Style
Similarly to South Africa, the Argentinian diet involves a lot of meat products, which helps to build physical, powerful, and stereotypical rugby players. This physicality plays a big part in the Argentinian game, their forward pack has a legendary status around rugby fans everywhere for there scrum technique known as the "bajaba". The key conventions of the technique involve: setting extremely low, the second row lock around the side of the props in doing so they apply immense pressure to the hooker creating an arrow of power, finally the Argentinian scrum revolves around a unanimous second shove driving as a unit and dominating opponents scrum. The Argentinian team also have an enhanced kicking game thanks to the popularity of soccer in the country. In the 2014 rugby championship first five eighth Nicolas Sanchez scored 53 points from the boot a testimony to the accuracy of the Argentinian kicking game. On the other hand there are some negatives of focusing all the attention on the scrum. This new look Argentinian team have done a lot of work in order to build some potency on attack. It has to be said that there inclusion in the rugby championship has worked wonders on improving the attacking game, because of the exposure to some of the best attacking systems in the world from New Zealand, South Africa, and Australia.
Fast Facts:
Players: 127,214
RWC Results: Third 2007, Quarters 2011, 1999 Third in Pool 1987
IRB World Ranking: 10th With 75.97 points
Best Result 2014: Vs. Australia 21-17
Coach: Daniel Hourcade Captain: Agustin Creevy
Martin Dobey