What is a Loose-head?

what is a loose-head?

The mysteries of rugby union explained

John Griffiths

Contents

1    Why This Book?

2    How Did Rugby Union Evolve?

Did the Greeks (or Romans) have a word for it?

When did games begin?

Who was William Webb Ellis?

How did international matches start?

Where does the International Board fit in?

When was the first Rugby World Cup?

How did the game become professional?

3    What Is Rugby Union?

On the ball

Is rugby like American football?

Is Rugby League a different game?

How many players are on each side?

How are points scored?

How long does a match last?

4    Which Teams Play the Game?

International Rugby Union

The Lions

Short tours

Who are the up-and-coming Nations?

European and Super competitions

Other club rugby

What about the Barbarians?

Coarse Rugby

Who are the Golden Oldies?

5    Who Plays Where?

The pitch

What are the markings on the pitch for?

Touch and throw-ins

What if the ball lands on a line?

Backs and forwards

The backs – what do all the fractions mean?

The forwards and their roles

What are substitutes and replacements?

So how are teams numbered?

6    Who Keeps Control of the Players?

Referees

Sanctions

Rugby’s unique law

Cards, sin-bins and citings

The advantage law

Offside

Safety first

Ball touching the referee

What does the referee need to carry?

Touch judges

What’s a TMO?

Is there an association that represents the interests of leading players?

7    What About Tactics?

What exactly are tactics?

What is open play?

How is the tight game played?

How do teams defend?

Is there a master plan?

8    Everyone Knows Jonny Wilkinson, But Who Was Alex Obolensky?

Jonny Wilkinson

Prince Alex Obolensky

Who are the other famous names in Rugby Union?

What about this Clive Woodward bloke?

9    Twickenham and Other Famous Grounds

Twickhenham – the game’s Mecca

Cardiff

Murrayfield

Lansdowne Road

Stade de France

Stadio Olimpico, Rome

Ellis Park, Johannesburg

Eden Park, Auckland

10    What Media Coverage Does Rugby Get?

Which critics and newspapers should I read?

What are the important books about the game?

Broadcasting

Other media

Do I need to know any famous statistics?

11    So, Am I Ready to Go and Watch a Match Now?

Getting ready for the game

During the game

Are all spectators potential streakers?

12    What Is Rugby Union’s Appeal?

Glossary

1.

Why This Book?

In the autumn of 2006 international rugby teams from New Zealand, South Africa and Argentina visited Britain and played matches against England, the then reigning world champions. The visitors all succeeded in their quests to topple the country where the game began and, by doing so, they added to the record string of defeats suffered by England’s national team in 2006.

Yet for all the disappointments of continued losses, support for rugby in Britain, Ireland and Europe was at record levels. The authorities staging England’s home matches rapidly sold out of tickets – indeed they could have filled the stadium at least twice over for the New Zealand and South Africa matches.

Despite the national side’s temporary loss of form, interest in the game at club level was rapidly increasing. In December 2006, an all-embracing survey conducted by Premier Rugby of 12,000 club rugby supporters in England was published. It showed that 93 per cent of respondents rated rugby at the highest club level as ‘good’ entertainment. Nearly all (96 per cent) enjoyed its competitiveness.

Two-thirds reckoned the sport offered good value for money and nearly three-quarters rated rugby as good family entertainment. These figures were borne out by another interesting result of the survey: that 34 per cent of spectators at club matches in 2005–6 were parents of children under 16, up from 22 per cent the season before. Later in 2006, more than 48,000 turned out at Lansdowne Road in Dublin to watch Ireland’s oldest provincial rivals, Leinster and Ulster, meet in a league match.

Then, in February and March 2007, the mean attendance at the fifteen matches in Britain, Ireland, France and Italy’s popular International Championship was higher than for any football World Cup tournament’s final stages. Measured by attendances alone, the old Championship, it could be said, is the most popular sporting event of any kind in the world.

Further confirmation of rugby’s growing attraction elsewhere in Britain, Ireland and Europe came the same season when tickets for the sport’s Rugby World Cup, to be staged in France in September and October 2007, went on sale to the general public. This was the third phase of the ticketing sales for the tournament and the organising committee’s website was so inundated with enquiries that it crashed within two hours of opening. By the end of the first day of sales, a third of the 550,000 tickets had been snaffled up and the available allocations for seven of the pool matches sold out.

Apart from the game’s rising stock as family entertainment offering value for money, another attraction of rugby is its camaraderie. Friendships formed through playing or regularly watching the game often last a lifetime. The eighty minutes’ entertainment on the pitch is followed by after-match rituals that are the envy of other sports.

Yes, sometimes blind eyes are turned to the antics of young and not-so-young followers. But generally rugby is a game that engenders friendly rivalry and innocent banter among players and supporters – there has never been the need to keep rival spectators apart even at the highest level of competition. Rugby is a physical game, yet part of its attraction is that the strongest and most skilful of its players manage to excel without resorting to violence.

To the newcomer, however, it is a complex game and the idea of this book is to unlock some of its mysteries. It attempts to explain rugby’s vocabulary and traditions, and to give the uninitiated an idea of how to appreciate the game. It is NOT a ‘How-to-Play’ book.

The book can be read straight through or dipped into as an ‘enquire within’. Each chapter deals with topics on which newcomers to rugby might require some explanation, and an extensive glossary is provided for reference. The first time that a word of rugby jargon appears in the text it is printed in bold so the reader can look it up in the glossary. Finally, apologies to any of the growing number of women players and enthusiasts who might take offence at the male pronouns used in the book. Rugby is predominately a male pastime so the convention is to refer to players and officials as ‘he’.

Six Rugby Quotes

Rugby is a game for gentlemen of all classes, but never for a poor sportsman in any class.

– Bishop Walter Carey, Oxford rugby blue of the 1890s

I must say that when a referee is in doubt, I think he is justified in deciding against the side which makes most noise. They are probably in the wrong.

– Dr H H Almond, headmaster of Loretto School in Musselburgh near Edinburgh, on his decision to allow a hotly disputed try to Scotland in the first-ever international match, played in Edinburgh in March 1871

Twickenham is the last fortress of the Forsytes.

– Ivor Brown

A bomb under the West Stand on an international day at Twickenham would end fascism in England for a generation.

– Philip Toynbee

We may not be the best team in the world, but at least we turn up.

– John Pullin, England captain, on his team’s defeat by Ireland in Dublin in 1973 (Scotland and Wales had declined to play there the year before because of the political troubles)

In Rugby, you kick the ball; in Association, you kick the man if you cannot kick the ball; and in Gaelic, you kick the ball if you cannot kick the man.

– Irish journalist Jacques MacCarthy describing the three forms of football played in Ireland in the 1890s . . . more than a hundred years before rugby football was first played on Gaelic football’s hallowed turf at Croke Park

2.

How Did Rugby Union Evolve?

Did the Greeks (or Romans) have a word for it?

Historians confirm that the Greeks (around 400 BC) and later the Romans refer to a team ball game played on a rectangular field with a halfway line and goal lines. Translations suggest that the game was one involving physical contact, that the ball was transferred from player to player through a pass and that there was no kicking. The features of the game appear to have remained virtually unchanged for 800 years.

The Latin word for this recreation was harpastum. It first appeared in Britain approximately 2,000 years ago, practised by the Roman legions during their occupation.

When did games begin?

In England, the Romans gave way to the Angles and Saxons, and later the Normans, all of whom appear to have enjoyed variations of ball games. By the nineteenth century, many towns and villages in England were enjoying a game called ‘football’ that had evolved from harpastum but which now involved unlimited numbers. Festival days, such as Shrove Tuesday, were regarded as the traditional time for playing games.

The game evolved differently from town to town, there being no code of playing behaviour or written set of rules. A report of a three-day match at Sheffield in 1793 asserts: ‘There were many slightly wounded’, but reassuringly adds, ‘none killed’.

The aim was for a mob representing one town to force a ball through a target or goal situated in its opponent’s town. Play was wild and fierce according to historians and attracted hordes of spectators. These games typically took place at holiday time, Shrove Tuesday games being recorded in the early 1700s in Derby and in Kingston-on-Thames in 1815. At Chester a game was played in commemoration of the day in AD 217 when a mighty flying wedge was organised to banish the Roman legion from the town.

Who was William Webb Ellis?

Modern rugby footballers measure their dates from 1823, when 16-year-old William Webb Ellis caused such a stir by reputedly gathering a ball and running with it at Rugby School in Warwickshire. Ellis’s action was regarded as ‘not football’, but his deed was to give the game of rugby football its distinction as a handling code.

Ellis was probably not the first man to run with a ball at football; it has since been established that his action was the norm in parts of Cornwall and East Anglia in the early nineteenth century. More likely, it was the fact that he performed his feat at a school that was about to undergo a reformation that bestowed lasting fame upon the youngster as the ‘inventor’ of rugby football.

The immediate consequence of his running with the ball is unknown, and the next protagonist to feature in the development of the game was Dr Thomas Arnold, an innovative educator who became headmaster at Rugby School five years after Ellis’s shocking indiscretion.

The English public schools had been founded in the Middle Ages with the aim of preparing pupils for the great universities of Oxford and Cambridge. At first the schools, which were not expressly established for the rich, flourished by providing a free education to pupils with academic potential. But by 1800 the most prominent public schools had fallen into relative decline. They became complacent and the legend grew up that in the pursuit of leisure, public-school pupils indulged in bullying, drinking, poaching, gambling – and even shooting their masters.

Dr Arnold successfully arrested this decline by broadening the curriculum and developing a commitment to character training. Beatings were actively discouraged and a sound classical grounding was imparted with a strong flavour of Christianity. In particular, his encouragement of team games brought about a revolution of the public-school system. His pupils and colleagues had a high regard for him and his ideals, and Rugby School was held up as a model public school.

Through Rugby School’s pupils and masters, the Arnold methods and traditions spread to other schools. Disciples of Arnold’s methods believed in the emphasis on sporting activity as a suitable occupation for pupils’ leisure, and the encouragement of team games was seen as a positive antidote to immorality.

Later, it became evident that the virtues of loyalty, co-operation and esprit de corps were developed through organised school sport and football – the Rugby School variety in particular – was to flourish at the public schools. This spread naturally to the great universities and later more widely as the young men of Rugby and other influential schools took up their careers and travelled the country.

It might be spurious to suggest that William Webb Ellis invented rugby football, but it is true to say that without the combination of Ellis, Dr Arnold and the school that was destined to set the fashion in sport for many other