Throwback Weekend; A look at how the ''All Blacks'' went down in Stamford

When Stamford Bridge hosted the All Blacks

That the Rugby World Cup final is taking place this weekend and New Zealand’s All Blacks are one of the teams is big sporting news and of little surprise to followers of the oval ball game.

What is less well-known is the part Stamford Bridge plays in the history of rugby union’s most successful international side. For although it is Twickenham, eight miles south-west of Chelsea Football Club, that will be staging Saturday’s showpiece event between New Zealand and Australia shortly after our Premier League match with Liverpool, it was our stadium that hosted the All Blacks’ first game in London during the tour when they were given their enduring nickname. It was also their first tour beyond Australia.   

The date of the Stamford Bridge match was 4 October 1905, a mere one month after Chelsea FC played our first competitive match in a Stamford Bridge stadium freshly reconstructed by our founder Henry Augustus Mears.

The new football club was started to make use of the best sporting arena in London and one of the most modern in Europe, so it must have been a natural choice to stage a notable rugby event. Mears’s dream was always for his project to become a major national stadium. 

New Zealand’s opposition that autumn day was a Middlesex side and they won 34-0. They did a lot of winning on that 1905 tour.

Five matches in the West Country and the Midlands preceded the one at Stamford Bridge, and by the end of their tour New Zealand had won 34 games including four Tests against the national sides of England, Scotland, Ireland and France. They lost only once, by three points to nil against Wales, and that was a disputed result due to a disallowed try.

The New Zealand team colours had evolved from dark blue to black shirts and socks with white shorts, but it was in 1905 that the shorts became black too, as can be seen from photos above and below which were taken at the Stamford Bridge match. An English newspaper coined the term ‘All Blacks’, it rapidly caught on and the rest is history.

For Stamford Bridge, it was the end of the rugby union story. Many sports have been staged at our home over the past 110 years, with athletics taking place before Chelsea were formed, and there have been several major rugby league internationals held since, but in September 1906 the Middlesex County Rugby Football Association, which had agreed a deal for an England v South Africa rugby union international to be played at the Bridge, backed out of the arrangement and took the match to Crystal Palace instead – an older and smaller-capacity stadium, but crucially one with more seating for spectators. That sold-out game there followed on from an England v New Zealand sell-out, convincing the RFU to build their own stadium at Twickenham in 1907.