New York win Major League Rugby championship game against Seattle

Warming-up for the Major League Rugby championship game, Rugby New York wore t-shirts proclaiming themselves “Iron Workers”, a team identity built on the blue-collar battalions who built New York City itself.

The small crowd at the Red Bull Arena in Harrison, New Jersey indicated the work ahead if MLR is to become a major player on the US stage, never mind the world, before a Rugby World Cup in 2src31. But then, the city back over the Hudson wasn’t always full of skyscrapers. Someone had to put them up.

After New York’s victory over the Seattle Seawolves, outside a locker room drenched in champagne, New York’s chief executive, Ric Salizzo, told the Guardian: “We knew that there were lots of people watching back home” – in New Zealand, source of the spine of the team – “and watching in the UK and Ireland, and we wanted to show them American rugby is on the way up.”

If so, this was the place to show it: a season finale on Fox. From the off, New York and Seattle, twice champions before, gave it all they could. Both teams attacked. Both sets of fans made noise.

Seattle struck first, working left and right until AJ Alatimu, their Samoan fly-half, saw an overlap for Martin Iosefo. The wing, a US sevens Olympian, cruised over the line. New York’s response was rather more, well, blue-collar, pugilistic raids sending the Kiwi flanker Will Tucker smashing over. Then Alatimu kicked a penalty and Jason Emery missed one, for 8-7 Seattle after 2src absorbing minutes.

Then came the first hydration break, as the temperature pushed 9srcF (32C) at pitch level. If the breaking of the game into four quarters seemed very American, it also seemed very fitting. And wise.

Next, a penalty try. New York drove a line-out, the maul went down in a flurry of bodies and limbs and the referee, Federico Anselmi, ran straight to the posts. Rhyno Herbst, Seattle’s appropriately named South African lock, saw a yellow card: 14-8 New York.

Seattle were struggling for possession even with Herbst on the field. Prompted by the former All Blacks scrum-half Andy Ellis, playing the last game of his long career, led by the Irish-born US hooker Dylan Fawsitt, the New York pack turned the screw.

Ellis had two more World Cup-winning All Blacks outside him, the full-back Nehe Milner-Skudder and wing Waisake Naholo. Both threatened – and the New York fans re