Super Cup (rugby union)

Toshiba Super Cup
	Logo introduced for the 2005 tournament
Sport	Rugby union
First season	2003
Ceased	2005

The Super Cup or Super Powers Cup was an international rugby union competition contested from 2003 to 2005. It featured teams representing Canada, Japan, Russia, the United States and Romania.

Tournaments

2003

Date	Winner	Score	Loser
May	United States	69–27	Japan
May	Russia	43–34	Japan
July	Russia	30–21	USA Selects

The Super Powers Cup was first launched in 2003. It was planned that China, Japan, Russia and the United States would play each other once. However, because of the SARS outbreak the Chinese team were forced to withdraw.

Russia won the inaugural 2003 competition, defeating the United States 30–21 in Krasnoyarsk, Russia.^[1]

2004

Date	Winner	Score	Loser
May 27	Canada	23–20	United States
May 27	Japan	29–12	Russia
May 30	Japan	34–21	Canada
May 30	United States	41–11	Russia

For the 2004 competition Canada joined the competition. In May of that year Japan won the second edition of the Super Powers Cup in Tokyo, where the entire tournament had been staged, beating Russia 29–12 and Canada 34–21 in the process. The United States defeated Russia in the third-place playoff.

2005

Date	Winner	Score	Loser
May 25	Canada	30–26	United States
May 25	Japan	23–16	Romania
May 29	Canada	15–10	Japan
May 29	United States	28–22	Romania

In 2005 the tournament was renamed the Super Cup and the participants were again changed, with Romania taking the place of Russia. Romania had been given 'second tier' status by the International Rugby Board (IRB), meaning greater funding and integration into the international calendar, while Russia were at the time considered a third tier nation.

Canada and Japan met in the final, with the Canadians winning 15–10. The United States beat a Romanian team missing many of their France-based professionals 23–16 in the third place play-off.

Dissolution

The competition was discontinued in 2005 after the IRB undertook a new Strategic Investment programme, with funding instead going to several new tournaments including the Pacific Nations Cup, featuring Japan (since 2006), Canada and United States (since 2013), as well as the IRB Nations Cup and IRB Tbilisi Cup, involving European, African and South American teams.

In February 2009, representatives from the IRB, Rugby Canada, the Japan Rugby Football Union, the Rugby Union of Russia and USA Rugby met to discuss the possibility of reviving the tournament under the Super Powers Cup name, beginning in November 2010, but nothing materialized.^[2]^[3]