Quade Cooper for Brisbane City tackles Steve Mafi of Greater Sydney Rams 2014

Brisbane City is an Australian

rugby union Rugby union, commonly known simply as rugby, is a close-contact team sport that originated at Rugby School in the first half of the 19th century. One of the two codes of rugby football, it is based on running with the ball in hand. In it ...

football team based in

Brisbane Brisbane ( ) is the capital and most populous city of the Australian state of Queensland, and the third-most populous city in Australia and Oceania, with a population of approximately 2.6 million. Brisbane lies at the centre of the South ...

that competes in the

National Rugby Championship The National Rugby Championship, known as NRC, was an Australian rugby union competition. It was contested by eight teams, seven from Australia and one from Fiji. The tournament ran from 2014 until 2019 before being disbanded in 2020 following t ...

(NRC). The team is one of two Queensland sides in the competition, the other being . Brisbane City is organised and managed by the

Queensland Rugby Union The Queensland Rugby Union, or QRU, is the governing body for the sport of rugby union within the state of Queensland in Australia. It is a member and founding union of Rugby Australia. The QRU was founded in Brisbane in 1883 as the ''Northern ...

(QRU), with the coaching and training programs utilised by the

Queensland Reds The Queensland Reds is the rugby union team for the Australian state of Queensland that competes in the Southern Hemisphere's Super Rugby competition. Prior to 1996, they were a representative team selected from the rugby union club competitions ...

being extended to players joining the team from the Reds and

Queensland Premier Rugby Queensland Premier Rugby is a semi professional club rugby union competition in Queensland, Australia. Nine clubs play in the competition, eight of which are from Brisbane with one club from the Gold Coast. The premiership has been conteste ...

teams. The Brisbane City team in the NRC takes its identity from the metropolitan rugby team that has represented Brisbane for more than a century. The representative team's colours and a similar logo were inherited for the NRC. The Brisbane City uniform is yellow and blue, with a crest of the City Hall logo within Queensland Rugby's traditional 'Q' on the jersey's chest. The NRC was launched in 2014, reinstating the national competition after the

Australian Rugby Championship The Australian Rugby Championship, often abbreviated to the ARC and also known as the Mazda Australian Rugby Championship for sponsorship purposes, is a now-defunct domestic professional men's rugby union football competition in Australia, which ...

(ARC) was discontinued following the first season in 2007. The Brisbane City NRC team utilises existing QRU staffing roles and infrastructure, with the team's home ground and training base located at QRU's headquarters at Ballymore.

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 The British Isles are a group of islands in the North Atlantic Ocean off the north-western coast of continental Europe, consisting of the islands of Great Britain, Ireland, the Isle of Man, the Inner and Outer Hebrides, the Northern Isl ...

team in 1904, and later Brisbane representative teams played the

All Blacks The New Zealand national rugby union team, commonly known as the All Blacks ( mi, Ōpango), represents New Zealand in men's international rugby union, which is considered the country's national sport. The team won the Rugby World Cup in 1987, ...

in 1951 and

Fiji Fiji ( , ,; fj, Viti, ; Fiji Hindi: फ़िजी, ''Fijī''), officially the Republic of Fiji, is an island country in Melanesia, part of Oceania in the South Pacific Ocean. It lies about north-northeast of New Zealand. Fiji consis ...

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 Rugby league football, commonly known as just rugby league and sometimes football, footy, rugby or league, is a full-contact sport played by two teams of thirteen players on a rectangular field measuring 68 metres (75 yards) wide and 112 ...

after 1909, and the start of the

First World War World War I (28 July 1914 11 November 1918), often abbreviated as WWI, was List of wars and anthropogenic disasters by death toll, one of the deadliest global conflicts in history. Belligerents included much of Europe, the Russian Empire, ...

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 Rugby Australia Ltd, previously named the Australian Rugby Union Limited and Australian Rugby Football Union Limited, is an Australian company operating the premier rugby union competition in Australia and teams. It has its origins in 1949. It ...

announced that a new, eight-team national competition would commence in 2007 to compete for the

(ARC). The Ballymore Tornadoes was the Brisbane-based team in the ARC, and the team played its home matches at

Ballymore Stadium Ballymore is a rugby union stadium situated in Herston, a suburb of Brisbane, Australia. It is the headquarters of Queensland Rugby Union and was the home ground of the Brisbane City team in the National Rugby Championship, until the league's ...

. The team's colours were

maroon Maroon ( US/ UK , Australia ) is a brownish crimson color that takes its name from the French word ''marron'', or chestnut. "Marron" is also one of the French translations for "brown". According to multiple dictionaries, there are vari ...

blue Blue is one of the three primary colours in the RYB colour model (traditional colour theory), as well as in the RGB (additive) colour model. It lies between violet and cyan on the spectrum of visible light. The eye perceives blue when ...

and

silver Silver is a chemical element with the symbol Ag (from the Latin ', derived from the Proto-Indo-European ''h₂erǵ'': "shiny" or "white") and atomic number 47. A soft, white, lustrous transition metal, it exhibits the highest electrical ...

. The Ballymore Tornadoes side was one of two Queensland teams supported by the QRU in the competition, alongside the

East Coast Aces Queensland Country is an Australian rugby union football team that competes in the National Rugby Championship (NRC). The team is one of two Queensland sides in the competition, the other being . Queensland Country is organised and managed by t ...

. Queensland's two teams in the ARC were aligned with existing clubs and regions. The Tornadoes were aligned with six

clubs north of the

Brisbane River The Brisbane River is the longest river in South East Queensland, Australia, and flows through the city of Brisbane, before emptying into Moreton Bay on the Coral Sea. John Oxley, the first European to explore the river, named it after the ...

–

Brothers A brother is a man or boy who shares one or more parents with another; a male sibling. The female counterpart is a sister. Although the term typically refers to a familial relationship, it is sometimes used endearingly to refer to non-familia ...

GPS The Global Positioning System (GPS), originally Navstar GPS, is a satellite-based radionavigation system owned by the United States government and operated by the United States Space Force. It is one of the global navigation satellite sy ...

Norths/QUT North Brisbane Rugby Club or Norths is an Australian rugby union club. The club plays in the Queensland Premier Rugby competition, and fields teams for males and females in several other grades and age-group competitions. North Brisbane has ...

Sunshine Coast Sunshine Coast may refer to: * Sunshine Coast, Queensland, Australia **Sunshine Coast Region, a local government area of Queensland named after the region **Sunshine Coast Stadium * Sunshine Coast (British Columbia), geographic subregion of the Br ...

University A university () is an institution of higher (or tertiary) education and research which awards academic degrees in several academic disciplines. Universities typically offer both undergraduate and postgraduate programs. In the United Stat ...

and Wests. Chris Roche, a former

Wallaby A wallaby () is a small or middle-sized macropod native to Australia and New Guinea, with introduced populations in New Zealand, Hawaii, the United Kingdom and other countries. They belong to the same taxonomic family as kangaroos and som ...

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

Lachlan Maranta for Brisbane City v Sydney Rays 2018

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

played their home matches in the

Super Rugby Super Rugby is a men's professional rugby union club competition involving teams from Australia, Fiji, New Zealand, and the Pacific Islands. It previously included teams from Argentina, Japan, and South Africa. Building on various Southern Hem ...

competition at Ballymore until the end of the 2005 season, before they moved to the larger

Suncorp Stadium Lang Park, also known as Brisbane Football Stadium, by the sponsored name Suncorp Stadium, and nicknamed: 'The Cauldron', is a multi-purpose stadium in Brisbane, Queensland, Australia, located in the suburb of Milton. The current facility co ...

for 2006. Ballymore has a capacity of around 24,000. Test matches have also been played at Ballymore, including

Bledisloe Cup The Bledisloe Cup is an annual rugby union competition originally staged between the national teams of Australia's Wallabies and New Zealand's All Blacks that has been contested since the 1930s. The frequency that the competition is held has va ...

matches, and a semi-final of the

1987 Rugby World Cup The 1987 Rugby World Cup was the first Rugby World Cup. It was co-hosted by New Zealand and Australia – New Zealand hosted 21 matches (17 pool stage matches, two quarter-finals, the third-place play-off and the final) while Australia hosted 11 ...

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

match.

Current squad

Records

Honours

**Champions (2):

2014 File:2014 Events Collage.png, From top left, clockwise: Stocking up supplies and personal protective equipment (PPE) for the Western African Ebola virus epidemic; Citizens examining the ruins after the Chibok schoolgirls kidnapping; Bundles of wa ...

2015 File:2015 Events Collage new.png, From top left, clockwise: Civil service in remembrance of November 2015 Paris attacks; Germanwings Flight 9525 was purposely crashed into the French Alps; the rubble of residences in Kathmandu following the April ...

* Horan-Little Shield **Season winners:

Season standings

National Rugby Championship : Australian Rugby Championship (Tornadoes) :

Head coaches

Jim McKay James Kenneth McManus (September 24, 1921 – June 7, 2008), better known professionally as Jim McKay, was an American television sports journalist. McKay was best known for hosting ABC's '' Wide World of Sports'' (1961–1998). His introd ...

(2019–present) * Mick Heenan (2017–2018) *

Rod Seib Rodney Seib (born 1975) is an Australian professional rugby union coach and a former player for Queensland Reds and Glasgow Warriors. He also played for Australia in rugby sevens. Family and early life Rod Seib attended Brisbane State High Scho ...

(2016) *

Nick Stiles Nick Stiles (born 17 October 1973) is an Australian professional rugby union coach and a former player for the Queensland Reds. He also played in twelve Tests for Australia as a loosehead prop. Family and early life Stiles was born in Melbourn ...

(2014–2015)

Captains

Fraser McReight Fraser McReight (born 19 February 1999) is an Australian rugby union player of Irish descent who plays for the Queensland Reds in Super Rugby and Australian rugby union team, the Wallabies. His playing position is flanker. International caree ...

(2019–present) * Adam Korczyk (2018) *

Andrew Ready Andrew Ready (born 11 July 1993) is a rugby union player for the Western Force team in the Super Rugby competition, playing as a hooker. Early life Ready was born in Brisbane, and attended St Joseph's College, Gregory Terrace. He was selected ...

(2017) * Sam Talakai (2016) * Liam Gill (2015) * David McDuling (2014)

Squads

: : : :

Gallery

File:Brisbane City versus North Harbour Rays NRC Round 8 (5).jpg,

Quade Cooper Quade Santini Cooper (born 5 April 1988) is a professional rugby union player and occasional boxer. Although born in New Zealand, he has represented Australia in rugby at international level. He currently plays for Hanazono Liners in Japan, a ...

takes a conversion for Brisbane City File:Brisbane City versus North Harbour Rays NRC Round 8 (6).jpg, Brisbane City scrum down against North Harbour Rays File:Brisbane City versus North Harbour Rays NRC Round 8 (47).jpg, Brisbane City win a lineout against North Harbour Rays

References

Sources

* *

External links

Brisbane City
official web page
NRC
on redsrugby.com
Brisbane City
on twitter.com National Rugby Championship Rugby union teams in Queensland Sporting clubs in Brisbane Rugby clubs established in 2014 2014 establishments in Australia Rugby union clubs disestablished in 2020 2020 disestablishments in Australia