Word: cupfuls
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...ferociously partisan fans who pack into Paris's Stade de France Saturday night, the only measure of victory will be whether England or South Africa walks away with the coveted Webb Ellis trophy. But the big winner of the 2007 Rugby World Cup has been the game itself. Never before has rugby drawn so wide a global audience as it has done over the past six weeks of the tournament, and never has it been seen to be played by people of such diverse cultural and socio-economic backgrounds. Forget the stereotypes: Rugby's getting popular...
...Although it's unlikely ever to challenge soccer as the "world game," the interest and excitement the tournament has generated has marked the emergence of rugby's world cup as a major big-money sporting event. It drew an estimated 2.7 million spectators into stadiums, and a TV audience - accumulated over the entire tournament, including Saturday's final - of nearly 4 billion, an increase of nearly 25% over the 2003 event held in Australia. Although that forecasted total is dwarfed by the soccer World Cup, which drew a total TV audience of 30 million people, rugby's tally certainly rivals...
...Rugby has long enjoyed a sizable audience in Britain, Ireland, France, South Africa, Australia, and New Zealand and is developing a growing fan base in Argentina and Italy; the numbers of fans tuning in from such World Cup competitors as Tonga, Fiji, Georgia and the U.S. is tiny by comparison, however, so the 4 billion total means a lot more people from a growing number of nations around the world had to be interested enough to tune...
...club Wasps, Raphael Ibanez, as well as hirsute lock-forward Sébastien Chabal of Sale. And scores of players from Britain and Ireland play in the French league, where they'll soon welcome among them South African full-back Percy Montgomery, set to join Perpignan. Following the Cup, French fly-half Frédéric Michalak will make the reverse trip to take a job with South Africa's Natal Sharks; while the rapid rise of Argentina as a real contender has been due in large part the experience gained by 90% of its squad while playing...
...growing World Cup audience the only indicator of rugby's spread: The big, TV-generated resources flowing into pro leagues and the regional international competitions continues fueling interest and participation as never before. In France, there has been an upsurge in youth and amateur squads way beyond French rugby's native, largely rural stronghold in the southwest, where its presence had long been a sign of English influence - France's new generation of top-level players is being drawn from youth squads in cities farther north. And, although less has been made of it than during France's victorious...