Harlequin F.C.
| Full name | Harlequin Football Club |
|---|---|
| Nickname(s) | Quins |
| Founded | 1866 |
| Location | London, England |
| Ground(s) | Twickenham Stoop (Capacity: 14,800) |
| Chairman | David Morgan |
| Director of Rugby | John Kingston |
| Coach(es) | Mark Mapletoft |
| Captain(s) | Danny Care |
| League(s) | English Premiership |
| 2015–16 | 7th |
| Official website | |
| www |
|
The Harlequin Football Club (Harlequins or Quins for short) are an English rugby union team who play in the top level of English rugby, the English Premiership. Their ground in London is the Twickenham Stoop. They were one of the founder members of the RFU.
Quins were crowned winners of the European Challenge Cup in 2011, the English Premiership for the first time, in 2012 and won the LV= Cup in 2013.
The current club captain is Danny Care and the Director of Rugby is John Kingston.
For sponsorship reasons they were formerly known as NEC Harlequins, but principal sponsorship is currently held by DHL, Adidas and IG.
The Hampstead Football Club was founded in 1866 and the first recorded game took place in 1867. The club was renamed Harlequin Rugby Football Club in 1870, supposedly because the membership was no longer purely local but the HFC monogram had to be retained. The word 'Harlequin' was found in a dictionary and all present agreed to the new name. This caused a split in the membership and the half that did not form the Harlequins went off and formed the club now known as the Wasps.
During its first 40 years the club played at a total of 15 venues. Since 1909, they have only played at three.
In 1906, the club was invited by the Rugby Football Union to use the new national stadium in Twickenham. In those early days, only one or two internationals were played there during the season, and before long Twickenham became the headquarters of the Harlequin Football Club.
In 1961, Harlequins undertook a tour of East Africa in conjunction with Pretoria Harlequins from South Africa, as guests of the Kenya Harlequin F.C. and the Rugby Football Union of East Africa; the club won five and drew one. The tour is notable for two facts, it was the first time that three sister clubs of the Harlequin family all played each other in a coordinated series of matches and at 19 days it was the longest overseas tour undertaken by a British club up to that time. Despite this, the tour pales to insignificance when it is realised the Pretoria club spent four weeks in East Africa playing eight matches and another in Rhodesia on the way home.
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