@ Stevie. I think at the moment 7s lacks the contest interest to get too many enthralled beyond party dresses and lager indulging. That’s why I suggested/hope that the IRB is looking to the 7s laws. There is still something lacking in 7s to the wider rugby public.

I also think if handled well, 7s can be used to attract people to ‘rugby’ who, for whatever reason, aren’t involved in playing/watching XVs. I understand the point your making in a cricket setting, but I think in rugby that 7s can compliment the full sized game, rather than create a divide of existing resources.

The Melrose 7s of 1883 began as 15 minutes apparently (2 x 7m, with one minute break). From what I can tell from Aust & NZ reports of 7s games though allocated playing time was set by the local tournament organisers, and many varied.

Thanks Mella. Hopefully the IRB will continue to look at the laws of 7s. Might as well play touch if it just about running & speed.

Rugby isn’t and never was purely “football”. Rugby is a game combined of wrestling, handball & football.

Different players, different positions, different roles bring different attributes, specialties, and ultimately in combination produce a game to play and watch that has variety of interests.

While the % of the three component parts in that formula have varied over time, I’m not sure what sort of a game reduced solely to wrestling-handball would offer the heart.

I don’t think tail docking is still lawful in many placed, and I wouldn’t do it to rugby by severing the goal posts.

Well said Brett – this particularly goes to the heart of the problem:
Is it really fair that you can deliberately infringe to stop a likely try, knowing that further punishment isn’t likely? It’s a cynical, deliberate infringement; the very definition of a professional foul.

And everyone condones the behaviour, writing it off as “professionalism”. Fulltime is called and the matter is forgotten. But why?

Don’t we have access to game video? Why isn’t each game (I’m talking about the elite pro levels) audited for more than just violent acts?

Why isn’t each game video audited to identify and call to account those who deliberately flout the laws of the game? Why aren’t players fined or even suspended for repeated and deliberate breaking of laws?

The referee blows the final whistle, all head to the sheds, “Richie McRoar” might have got yellow carded but still probably got away with more to help his team to a much needed win, gets all the back-slaps, and is free to line up again next week and do it all again.

As Oscar Goldman used to tell us, “We have the technology” – we have the capability, let’s use it, and make the game better.

The initial plans for that Lions tour were for the Tests to be played vs “Australasia” (NZRU + NSWRU + QRU) in Sydney, Brisbane & NZ. The NSWRU opted to just keep it as Australia, and as they were financing the tour, refused the Lions permission to visit and play in NZ at all.

I’m not sure how international rugby in our region would have played out had the 1899 Australasian team set the benchmark for what constituted a “Test match”. Would Australasia have toured the UK in 1905 instead of the NZ All Blacks? Would we have had something akin to the Home Nations every year (NZ, NSW + QLD) and in-bound tours/Tests, combining only as Australasia for tours to the UK (akin to the Lions).

Rabbitohs/Blues/Kangaroos/NZ RL coach Arthur Hennessy seems to have spent as much of his time, expertise and enthusiasm thru the 1910s-1940s coaching GPS rugby teams as he did the professional RL ranks (he was of course a Waratahs rep for a decade before RL started). As for the Joeys news re a RL coach involvement, isn’t the present Joeys First XV coach Jeremy Ticehurst – I’m not sure of his league/union background as a junior/schoolboy footballer, but isn’t he the former Manly/Parra RL player.

@ sheek. Thanks for that. I should’ve added a mention of Brown. The list/story could have had more. I cut a few pars out re Henry ‘Harry’ Tancred – Sydney born early 1900s, moved to NZ with family, played RU, then after WW1 came to Sydney as capt of NZ Kiwis RL team, stayed after, NSWRU re-admitted him to RU (somehow on basis he proved played RL as an amateur), and played for Waratahs in 1923 in games that were in the mid-1980s granted Wallabies status by the ARU. Story just got too long/complicated! Scotland in 1925 had a backline that boasted Ian Smith (Melb born & raised in NZ), NZ All Black skipper George Aitken, and future captain of the famous 1927/28 Waratahs Johnny Wallace.

@sixo_clock – cheers! In short, they’d seen your aspirational theory of one happy family already tested in soccer – those who played for the love of the game & the amateur ideal were very quickly cast aside as the win-at-all-costs professionals overran them and took control.

No ManInBlack – given you’re aware of that article I wrote (and therefore the claims others made that triggered it) I’ve no idea how you concluded yesterday that it was me that was acclaiming Tom Wills as the code’s sole founder. All I’ve challenged is the established myths re the DNA of the code’s first rules in the beginning decade of its birth – I’ve never asserted the code hasn’t gone on like AC-DC and John Farnham to be regarded as Australia’s own despite their British blood.

gimme da banjo!

@ kingplaymaker those state histories limit themselves to period up to WW1, and there isn’t much to say of rugby in Darwin/NT til the 1970s, beginning with the arrival of southerners due to the re-build after Cyclone Tracy.

Thanks AC. That’s the piece about rugby football being played at Bishopsbourne in Tasmania a decade before Aust rules began in Melbourne http://jottingsonrugby.com/2010/09/25/the-legacy-of-old-brooke/

The first rugby game in Hobart was played at the Christ College Ground (now called Parliament Street Reserve) in Sandy Bay, Hobart on 8 July 1933 by teams under the University of Tasmania. A club competition & local RU body (later claimed as the TRU) was organised days/weeks just after that. There was a Launceston RU existing at the same time, though it seems to have been one club playing internal matches each Saturday. So apart from the above late 1840s rugby games, rugby history in Tasmania starts 1933, though I’m not certain it has been played every year (WW2 aside) in the first decades.

Sure The Cattery. Jack Simon never denied his anti-English football activism and what he was doing via his WAFL position and what the YAL was founded to do/influence, so I don’t see why it should remain in the dark now.

There’s plenty of fictionalised war stories told around AFL campfires about how Aust rules was denied its rightful claim on NSW/QLD/NZ that we can publicly dissect if you want.

@ p.Tah – I think the query that raises is why are there so few (any?) other examples in Adelaide or Melbourne that mirror Rodan? They wouldn’t be the first/only Poly family residing in Adelaide or Melbourne.

WA before WW2 was still a very long way (travel times) from Sydney for annual exchange of visits needed to generate income. It wasn’t til after WW2 that people began to think of RL as a sport for weekend players – only attempts to start RL before that were based on competing with Aust rules for gate-money i.e. Adelaide 1914, and Melbourne 1924-26. After WW2 from 1947 onwards RL was established in Perth, and Sydney teams/coaches used air travel to make visits.

RL didn’t expand in Aust early on for the same reason RL never made much gain anywhere else – it was founded to return the profits to the players, not divert to grand plans that might never produce a result, and certainly would produce a result for the curernt RL players – so most of the income generated by the sport went back to the pro (or arguably then semi-pro) footballers and clubs.

By the late 1920s RL’s playing rule changes (which focused on the elite & gate-drawing spectator level), gave RU the advantage in attracting the social/Saturday footballer (less training/fitness, less risk of injury etc), and opening up opportunities for RU outside NSW/QLD.

RL authorities in Aust never saw RU as a rival til after WW2 – they were quite content to let RU run the amateur side of rugby, and if RU ever turned pro to mirror RL, well, the “divide” would be over and there’d be no reason to stay apart in two bodies/codes.

Most of RL’s administrators and key men of influence from 1908 til WW2 were all former RU players/fans/admin/families – they didn’t want to kill of RU, they just wanted footballers rewarded fairly given the money the sport was making.

SA didn’t have the early rugby history that WA did, but mirrors WA after WW1 – the WARU started 1928, the SARU 1932. I get the impression that SA has not had the playing numbers of WA, but along with Victoria the three states have worked with each other to arrange interstate contests since the 1930s.

@sixo_clock – that’s a good observation – they went from the early 1880s all the way thru to 2006 before really joining the rest of the Aust rugby community (in a competitive playing sense) – at any point along that timeline they could have given up & not been seen again in WA – would the ARU have added Melbourne and not the Force in 2006 if there was no existing underlying rugby community/history in WA to build upon?

I can’t say too much here about the “Young Australia League” (or as it was first called, Young Australia Football League) without being reckoned as flaming a code war! If you try “Young Australia League” in Google it will turn up enough info to get an idea of what they were about & scale of the movement. I think they still exist today but on a much reduced level. The YAL began as a movement to push Aust rules football in Perth/Fremantle schools, but grew into a sort of an Aussie scouts movement, with a heavy Aust rules football angle to it – playing the game was a sign of patriotism & all that. In Sydney the junior Aust rules comp pre WW1 was organised &/or had a fair bit to do with the YAL. The idea of patriotic national youth corps seems a fairly common modus throughout the world in late 1800s and into the 20th century. The Boy Scouts would be the most known today.

Cheers Michael. The waratah badge & sky blue jersey were adopted by the NSWRU for the colonial/state team in 1892, and the team were called “Blues” or “Light Blues” (while the maroon deep red clad Queenslanders were “Maroons” & “Reds”).

When RL started in 1908 their state teams kept (unsuprisingly) the now identifiable/symbolic state colours – teams/fans/newspapers in both codes used the same “Blues” tags etc (a bit akin to how British RU & RL both have “Lions”, or how early NZRL teams were called “the professional All Blacks”).

The “Blues” & “Maroons” that RU first used in the late 1890s stuck/survived in RL (and then Origin branding did its modern thing to lift the use even more), while “Reds” gained a lot of popularity with the QRU team in the 1970s, and the “Waratahs” was applied to the NSW team that toured the UK in 1927/28.

But as with “Wallabies” & “Kangaroos” that once meant only Aust teams/players to tour overseas/UK, it wasn’t really til the late 1980s that newspapers/fans/branding saw state RU teams as “Waratahs” & “Reds”, and then Super Rugby of course took it even further.

@p.Tah – thanks for that. Only saw the printed version.

Geoff Didier was part of the 1990 Wallabies tourists to NZ in 1990, but didn’t play in any of the three Tests vs All Blacks.

@ Ian Whitchurch. Oh dear. The scrum, the lineout, the kicking for goal are rugby football, and indeed amongst the original founding and principal features of 200 years of rugby football.

Running with the ball, passing the ball, these are later additions that are mere flourishes, adjuncts. outcomes and consequences from playing rugby football – they don’t result unless you have domniated and won in the scrum, in the rucks, in the mauls &/or in the lineout.

You are imagining (wrongly) that rugby is handball.

Even RL is not won by ball passing, but by the tackle wrestle game. Passing the ball may seem how games are won, but it is merely to have taken advantage of having dominated the ruck battle.

Was worth the late nighter just to see Tommy Bowe’s chip and chase try. Fortune favours the brave….well, sometimes!

A very good post Clyde. No reason at all that the sentiments & reasoning so well articulated here should not be just as much as part of the professional game as they were in the amatuer era.