Australian rugby coach calls to reassure fan whose drunken rant went viral

Every sports fan has been there.

Every sports fan has been in the same spot Australian rugby fan Jack Quigley was on Saturday night. 

Australia’s national team, the Wallabies, had just dropped a heartbreaking game to a second-rate Scotland squad, the latest in a series of disappointments for the rugby-crazed nation. Quigley, despondent, sat down and wrote an impassioned 800-word plea to the Aussies on Facebook that quickly went viral. 

“Cards on the table, I wrote that really late on Saturday night after drowning my sorrows for several hours after the game,” Quigley, a 29-year amateur rugby player and coach, told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. “I wasn’t sure if it was a culmination of 15 years of hurt or 16 beers on Saturday afternoon, but it was probably somewhere in between the two.

“For me, the most shocking thing was how well my spelling and grammar held up given the circumstances.”

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In his post, Quiqley offered to drive two hours each way just to talk to the team for 15 minutes. Head coach Michael Cheika decided to save him the drive and called him up on the phone. 

“I think it’s important you talk to the fans and he is obviously one who cares,” Cheika told reporters. “How he was feeling after the game wasn’t too far away from what some of us were feeling as well.”

Quigley said he and Cheika spoke for about a half hour and their call left him more optimistic about the future of the team. 

“It’s pretty reassuring when the coach of the Wallabies phones a fan to have a good heart-to-heart rugby chat and tells you how much they do care,” Quigley told The Courier-Mail.