Cornish Pirates

For years the club played simply as Penzance & Newlyn, the product of a 1945 merger between Penzance RFC, dating to 1876, and the smaller Newlyn club, and it took until 2005 for that identity to be set aside in favour of Cornish Pirates.

The rebrand came with an experiment: between 2005 and 2010 the club left the Mennaye Field for Truro and Camborne, before moving back.

In 2006–07 the Pirates beat Exeter Chiefs 19–16 at Twickenham to take the EDF Energy National Trophy, and three years later they won the first British and Irish Cup ever contested, defeating Munster A 23–14. Between those two came a harder pattern: promotion play-off defeats in 2010–11 to Worcester Warriors and in 2011–12 to London Welsh, finals that stayed just out of reach twice running.

One player has since taken the club's name further than any trophy did. Sam Simmonds, capped by England and selected for the British & Irish Lions, came up through Cornish Pirates before his career moved on.

This year brought a different kind of news: US investors J. Kenneth Moritz and John H. Tippins put money into the club, a rare instance of American capital reaching this far into the English game. What it has not yet bought is what those play-off defeats denied Cornish Pirates a decade earlier — a return to English rugby's top tier, still the one line missing from the club's history.