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I keep seeing these YouTube videos where American blokes provide their reactions to great rugby tries.
They always end up saying “I’ll probably like it better when someone tells me the rules”.
I thought I would help out a bit. I am happy to help any of you guys understand the game more.
You have fifteen men on the field, and they can only be replaced by seven reserves. Once a guy comes off, he can’t go back on – except for the sin bin or the blood bin – So everyone plays until replaced, and in some cases, they may play the full 80 minutes. No special teams, you select your kickers from within.
Usually the fast backs are also your kickers.
The sin bin is where you get a yellow card for some offence that the ref saw, but nobody else did. You just run off mouthing about your innocence and freeze your butt off on a cold chair for 10 minutes and nobody talks to you. You are not replaced and your team plays one short.
You get a red card and you they play one short for the rest of the game and you probably don’t get to play next week.
The forwards are the eight beefy guys in the scrum and lineout, the backs are the fancy dancers with combs in their back pockets in case they get their hair out of place.
Rugby is a game for all shapes and sizes. You can have an 80kg half back tackling a 140kg forward. You have 5-foot-6″ halfbacks all the way through to 7-foot locks and everything in between. The only real body requirement is that if you want to play in the front row of the scrum, you are not allowed to have a neck.
Rugby is a game of contests. Every restart is a contest, whether it be the kick-off, a ruck, a maul, a scrum, a lineout, a free kick, a field kick in general play, or a quick throw in.
It’s all about unpicking the defence and creating holes where none exist, then charging though them, with other blokes in support. You can’t have anyone running interference as that is obstruction – you have to do it all on your own. But it looks great on your highlight reel, especially if some other bloke did all the hard work and passed it to you right at the end.
You can’t pass the ball forward but you can kick it forward, as long as the catcher starts from behind the kicker. You can only kick the ball out on the full if you are in your own quarter, otherwise you have to bounce it out. Then you have a line out to restart where one bloke throws it down the line of two forward packs and with luck and lots of practice your jumpers are better attuned to your thrower than the other guys are, so you win it.
Therefore it is a controlled dog-fight.
To score, you have to actually touch the ball down, which is called a try, as opposed to a touchdown in American football where you don’t actually have to touch it down.
Yeah, that makes sense.
Once you score the try you get to kick a conversion just like in American football, except that you have to kick it directly back from where it was touched down. Since fancy dancing wingers like to score in the corner, many kicks are taken from the sideline, but the kickers don’t mind. You get 5 points for a try, 2 for a conversion – 3 for a penalty goal or a field goal.
The game doesn’t stop because some bloke gets tackled – that is just an invitation for a ruck or a maul, meaning a fight for possession in a controlled warfare kind of way, that only referees and certain All Blacks and blokes like David Pocock understand.
The name of the game is continuity and pressure. When you have the ball (also known as the ‘pill’) you apply pressure on the defence and when you don’t have it you apply pressure to get back what is rightfully yours. When you see the fancy backs kicking away possession, don’t worry, they really are applying pressure, even if they didn’t want to admit that they were just relieving themselves of the pressure of being hammered into the dirt.
Infringements result in a penalty kick, free kick or a scrum. Only referees know which one to pick.
Only beefy forwards understand the dark arts of what actually happens in scrums. If the forwards are good and cagey enough and the referee is patient enough, you can have this great old scrum contest between the forwards that can go on forever, while the backs watch on and catch a cold.
The referees don’t explain themselves as much as they do in American football, though you can sometimes understand their hand signals, so the scrums, rucks and mauls look like a bit of a lottery – which they usually are.
Backs like to kick the ball downfield a lot so you might wonder why they would give away possession, but no one likes being pinned down in their own quarter. You give it to the other side and then see if you can hammer the crap out of them to make them give it back. Simple
The forwards are the piano movers and the backs are the piano players. Forwards create the momentum and the fancy dancing backs work off it. Easy! See?
There are no ‘rules’ in rugby – instead we have ‘laws’. There are supposedly only 27 of them, but the book might as well be a copy of War and Peace.
There are that many adaptations and interpretations, but each year the referees come out and tell us that they will be emphasising this interpretation or that adaptation. The secret to success in rugby, however, from the players point of view is that we don’t really care. We just get on with smashing into each other or trying to run around each other, dive into the rucks and mauls with gusto, catch your breath with each scrum or lineout and just run around and have fun.
At the end of the day, unless you are a dedicated professional, the aim of rugby is to spend 80 fun-filled minutes working up a heavy thirst for the camaraderie that takes place afterwards, where everyone lies about their prowess and has a bloody great night.
Does that help?
Join The Roar rugby editor Christy Doran, former Wallaby Matt Toomua and a cast of regular and special guests as they look at the biggest issues in the game on The Roar Rugby Podcast. If you’re looking for great odds on the next game check out Aussie bookmaker PlayUp. Chances are you’re about to lose. Set a deposit limit.