Watching a rugby match when you don’t get any of the rules isn’t fun: two dozen heavily built players fighting for a weird-shaped ball under the eyes of a referee who whistles every twenty seconds….who needs to see that? When you join your friends at the pub and a rugby match is on TV, an evening which was supposed to be a casual and entertaining catch-up following an overwhelming week at work quickly becomes a nightmare for the rugby-uninitiated you.
The 2019 Rugby World Cup (RWC) will take place in Japan from September 20th to November 2nd and situations like the awkward-uninitiated-pub experience will become ordinary for one and a half months.
Even if it seems like you have to be a rugby expert to fully enjoy watching a rugby match, the knowledge required to squeeze some fun out of this oval-ball-sport is actually closer to a simple series of blog posts (starting with this one) rather than hours of dedicated and thorough watching every weekend of the season.
And if you’re paying close attention to the commentators’ words during a match, you’ll notice that even they get confused about the decisions of the referee. It’s essential to keep this in mind: it’s absolutely normal and fine to not understand some moments during a rugby match.
Sound good?
The point of this article is to introduce you to the basics of rugby in order to see the coming World Cup as an opportunity to learn more about rugby, to enjoy watching a rugby match and to not try to avoid pubs between September 20th and November 2nd.
Briefly
Rugby originated in the relatively small town of Rugby in the heart of England at the beginning of the 19th century. It was invented by Williams Webb Ellies, a clergyman who gave his name to the World Cup trophy. It only became a professional sport in 1995 (meaning that players can now make a living out of it — more than 1.1 million pounds a year for some of them) and this year’s World Cup will only be the 9th (the first one was organised in 1987).
In rugby, two teams of 15 players play against each other on a grass rugby field (similar in size to a football field) for 2 periods of 40 minutes each. On each side of the field stand a pair of massive posts which allow the teams to score points if they kick the ball in between. The goal for a team is to score more points than the opposing team by the end of the 80-minute fixture.
Unlike football (understand soccer), the game is based on the possibility for players to carry the oval ball in their hands. When a player gets the ball, he can either pass it to a teammate, run with it until he is tackled (that is, an opponent wraps his arms around him and brings him to the ground) or even kick it.
In real life, it looks like this:
And if more players are involved in this tackling phase, people call it a ruck.
That’s basically it.
How To Score Points
To score points, a team has several options which all involve somehow moving the ball into the opponent’s camp.
The easiest and most common way to score points in rugby is to take advantage of the fouls made by the opponent. The team gets an opportunity to kick a penalty if the foul is major — the offender could have easily and deliberately avoided it. From the point on the field the foul was made, one of the players of the team attempts to kick the ball between the opponent’s posts. If the kick is successful — that is to say, if it’s not wide — the team gets 3 points.
Quite often, the foul is made way too far from the opponent’s posts and the kicker doesn’t have the power required to kick the ball far enough. The team usually decides to kick the ball out of the limits of the field to obtain a lineout instead.
“What’s a lineout?!” I hear you cry.
Don’t worry, we’ll get to that later…
If a team manages to carry the ball and squashes it onto the ground of the opponent’s camp, the team scores a try and gets 5 points — that’s what every rugby team is after because a) a try is worth a lot of points b) it’s badass.
In real life, it looks like this:
After the try is scored, the team also gets the opportunity to score 2 extra points by kicking a conversion (identical to a penalty kick) from a point of the field that is in line with the point the try was scored (the kicker chooses a convenient point on this line). That’s why it is better to score a try between the opponent’s posts: the conversion will be way easier and the extra 2 points guaranteed.
The last and more unusual way to score points is to kick the ball between the opponent’s posts from anywhere on the field, at any moment of the game. This is my personal favourite and it’s called a drop goal and is worth 3 points. It is usually much more complicated to score a drop goal since the opponent players run to the kicker when he’s about to kick the ball.
To sum up, if the blue team scores 2 penalties, 2 tries (1 with conversion) and 1 drop goal, it scores (3 + 3 + 5 + 5 + 2 + 3) = 21 points. If the red team scores 4 penalties and 1 try (without conversion), it scores (3 + 3 + 3 + 3 + 5) = 17 points. The blue team would win the match against the red team by 4 points.
When two similar-level rugby teams play against each other, they usually score between 10 and 30 points each. For example, during the last two World Cups (2011 and 2015), the teams scored an average of 20 points between the quarter-finals and the final.
That’s it for now! I will be posting parts 2 and 3 of this series in the coming weeks before the first game of the World Cup. In the meantime, feel free to share this article with your mates that do not get why you are so excited by this RWC or follow me on Twitter @drop__goal for updates before and during the event 🏈 🏆 🍻
