The student club has won the trophy nine times and is the most successful club at the national club seven-a-side tournament which was first held in Dunedin in 1951, when it was won by Zingari-Richmond.
The University club first won the trophy in 1975 and over the next 21 years won it seven more times.
In 60 years of competition it has been held by 22 clubs, five in the North Island and 17 in the South Island.
Between the years 1954 and 1978 the cup crossed Cook Strait 10 times. It has been held by South Island clubs for the past 34 years.
It was won five times by Taumarunui and three times by Green Island. Five Dunedin clubs and three Otago country clubs have held the trophy.
It is the job of the defending club to organise the defence of the trophy the next year. This has led to lapses and years when the event was not held.
It was defended only three times in the 1990s and there was a danger that the importance of the tournament would be lost.
There was a 10-year gap from 1996 to its revival a decade later in 2006.
The chairman of the Otago University Club John Burke is chairman of the organising committee for this year's tournament that will be held on the outer University Oval grounds on February 26.
"When we held the cup in the 1990s it used to summer-over in the corner of my lounge," he said.
He had the cup valued by Dunedin jeweller and city councillor John Bezett while he was looking after it and discovered that the solid lump of silver was worth $8000.
He then took it to Carisbrook and told the Otago Rugby Football Union's chief executive John Hornbrook that "I am delivering it into your hands for safekeeping."
The Cup sat in the foyer at Carisbrook for several years, along with sundry other trophies before the ORFU's rugby operations manager Des Smith revived the competition in 2006, when it was won by Green Island.
The origin of the Middlesex Cup Tournament, which is conducted at Twickenham each year, was in May 1925, when the Middlesex County Rugby Football Union decided to hold a seven-a-side competition between Middlesex clubs.
In 1949, the Middlesex County Union offered cups in the county's name for a sevens competition in the "Dominions or Colonies". The Middlesex County "Wavell Wakefield" Cups were accepted by New Zealand, Australia and Rhodesia.
The Cup was brought to New Zealand by the manager of the 1950 Lions L B (Ginger) Osborne and was competed for in Dunedin for the first time in 1951.
