Harlequin (disambiguation)

Harlequin is a comic servant character.

Harlequin may also refer to:

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Harlequin F.C.

The Harlequin Football Club (Harlequins or Quins for short) are an English rugby union team who play in the top level of English rugby, the English Premiership. Their ground in London is the Twickenham Stoop. They were one of the founder members of the RFU.

Quins were crowned winners of the European Challenge Cup in 2011, the English Premiership for the first time, in 2012 and won the LV= Cup in 2013.

The current club captain is Danny Care and the Director of Rugby, until the end of the 2015 / 16 season, is Conor O'Shea.

For sponsorship reasons they were formerly known as NEC Harlequins, but principal sponsorship is currently held by DHL, Adidas and IG.

History

Formation and early years

The Hampstead Football Club was founded in 1866 and the first recorded game took place in 1867. The club was renamed Harlequin Rugby Football Club in 1870, supposedly because the membership was no longer purely local but the HFC monogram had to be retained. The word 'Harlequin' was found in a dictionary and all present agreed to the new name. This caused a split in the membership and the half that did not form the Harlequins went off and formed the club now known as the Wasps.