City and Country: Swansea, Wales.

PRO Rugby Titles: 4.

Coach: Toby Booth.

Captain: Justin Tipuric.

Stadium: Swansea.com Stadium.

 

The Ospreys are Wales’ most successful rugby club in the professional era and the home club of none other than 2021 British and Irish Lions captain Alun Wyn Jones and a number of other Welsh rugby greats. Ospreys also had their birth in that watershed summer of 2003 in Welsh rugby as the game went regional for the professional era. Originally this brought together the two famous rugby clubs of Neath and Swansea to form Neath-Swansea Ospreys, and later just the Ospreys. South Africans Stefan Terblanche, Brian Mujati, Ricky Januarie and JJ Engelbrecht have all featured for the Ospreys over the years. South African prop Tom Botha currently features in their Vodacom United Rugby Championship squad.

 

If you want to sound like a local: The Welsh are proud of their language, even though to the rest of us it can seem as if Welsh place names are where vowels go to die. But if you want to climb into a Welsh person’s heart, pronounce the name of their town properly. In the case of Swansea, the correct Welsh pronunciation is Swans-ee, and not Swan-sea.

 

What you didn’t know: An Osprey is a large fish-eating hawk. The club’s mask logo mimics this. Shakespeare even wrote about it. The Osprey, that is. Not the mask logo.