Rugby
Introduction:
The history of rugby union follows from various football games played long before the 19th century, but it was not until the middle of that century that rules were formulated and codified.
The code of football later known as rugby union can be traced to three events: the first set of written rules in 1845; the Blackheath Club's decision to leave the Football Association in 1863 and the formation of the Rugby Football Union in 1871. The code was originally known simply as "rugby football." It was not until a schism in 1895, over the payment of players, which resulted in the formation of the separate code of rugby league, that the name "rugby union" was used to differentiate the original rugby code which remained an amateur sport under the auspices of the International Rugby Football Board (IRFB).[1] It was not until 1995 the IRFB, declared rugby union an "open" game and thus removed all restrictions on payments or benefits to those connected with the game. It did this because of a committee conclusion that to do so was the only way to end the hypocrisy of shamateurism and to keep control of rugby union.
The Rugby World Cup is the premier international rugby union competition. The event is organised by the sport's governing body, the International Rugby Board(IRB), and is contested by the men's national teams. The inaugural tournament was held in 1987, hosted by both Australia and New Zealand, and it is contested every four years. The tournament is one of the largest international sporting competitions in the world.
The winners are awarded the William Webb Ellis Cup. William Webb Ellis was the Rugby School pupil who – according to popular myth – invented the game by picking up the ball during a game akin to one of the many codes of medieval football. South Africa are the current World Champions, having won the 2007 Rugby World Cup final in France on 20 October 2007 with victory over England, the 2003 World Champions. The next Rugby World Cup will take place in 2011 in New Zealand. The hosts for 2015 and 2019 have been announced as England and Japan respectively.
The sport of Rugby is often referred to as the "father" of American football. Rugby started at least 70 years before American football and football evolved with many of the same principles, strategies and tactics. However, there are several obvious differences.
GENERAL DESCRIPTION OF THE GAME
Rugby is played at a fast pace, with few stoppages and continuous possession changes. All players on the field, regardless of position, must be able to run, pass, kick and catch the ball. Likewise, All players must also be able to tackle and defend, making each position both offensive and defensive in nature. There is no blocking of the opponents like in football, and there are only five substitutions per game allowed for each team. A rugby match consists of two 40-minute halves. Finally, rugby is considered to be a gender equity sport as approximately 25% of all players in the United States are female.
Methodology
The formation of the first Rugby Union
On 4 December 1870, Edwin Ash of Richmond and Benjamin Burns of Blackheath published a letter in The Times suggesting that "those who play the rugby-type game should meet to form a code of practice as various clubs play to rules which differ from others, which makes the game difficult to play." On 26 January 1871 a meeting attended by representatives from 21 clubs was held in London at the Pall Mall Restaurant.
The 21 clubs present at the meeting were: Blackheath, represented by Burns and Frederick Stokes the latter becoming the first captain of England[5],Richmond, Ravenscourt Park, West Kent, , Guy’s Hospital, Flamingoes, Clapham Rovers, Harlequin F.C., King's College Hospital, St Paul's, Queen’s House, Lausanne, Addison, Mohicans, and Belsize Park. The one notable omission was the Wasps. According to one version, a Wasps' representative was sent to attend the meeting, but owing to a misunderstanding, was sent to the wrong venue at the wrong time on the wrong day; another version is that he went to a venue of the same name where, after consuming a number of drinks, he realised his mistake but was too drunk to make his way to the correct venue.
As a result of this meeting the Rugby Football Union (RFU) was founded. Algernon Rutter was elected as the first president of the RFU and Edwin Ash was elected as treasurer. Three lawyers who were Rugby School alumni (Rutter, Holmes and L.J. Maton) drew up the first laws of the game which were approved in June 1871.
England" to a 20-a-side game to be played under the Rugby rules. The game was played at Raeburn Place, Edinburgh, the home ground of Edinburgh Academicals, on 27 March 1871. The English team wore all white with a red rose on their shirts and the Scots brown shirts with a thistle and white cricket flannels.[6] Three international matches played according to Association Football rules had already taken place at the Oval, London, in 1870 and 1871.
The team representing England was captained by Frederick Stokes of Blackheath, that representing Scotland was led by Francis Moncrieff; the umpire was Hely Hutchinson Almond, headmaster of Loretto College.
The game, played over two halves, each of 50 minutes, was won by Scotland, who scored a goal with a successful conversion kick after grounding the ball over the goal line (permitting them to 'try' to kick a goal). Both sides achieved a further 'try' each, but failed to convert them to goals as the kicks were missed (see also 'Method of Scoring and Points' below).[7] In a return match at the Kennington Oval, London, in 1872, England were the winners.
The formation of the International Rugby Football Board
In 1884 England had a disagreement with Scotland over a try that England had scored but that the referee disallowed citing a foul by Scotland. England argued that the referee should have played advantage and that, as they made the Law, if they said it was a try then it was. The International Rugby Football Board (IRFB) was formed by Scotland, Ireland and Wales in 1886 but England refused to join since they believed they should have greater representation on the board because they had a greater number of clubs. They also refused to accept that the IRFB should be the recognised law maker of the game. The IRFB agreed that the member countries would not play England until the RFU agreed to join and accept that the IRFB would oversee the games between the home unions. England finally agreed to join in 1890. In 1930 it was agreed between the members that all future matches would be played under the laws of the IRFB. In 1997, the IRFB moved its headquarters from London to Dublin and a year later it changed its name to the International Rugby Board (IRB).
Evolution of the Laws of the Game
Changes to the laws of the game have been made at various times and this process still continues today.
Number of Players
The number of players was reduced from 20 to 15 a side in 1877.[8]
Method of Scoring and Points
Historically, no points at all were awarded for a try, the reward being to "try" to score a goal (to kick the ball over the cross bar and between the posts). Modern points scoring was introduced in the late 1880s,[9]and was uniformly accepted by the Home Nations for the 1890/91 season.[9]
The balance in value between tries and conversions has changed greatly over the years. Until 1891, a try scored one point, a conversion two. For the next two years tries scored two points and conversion three, until in 1893 the modern pattern of tries scoring more was begun with three points awarded for a try, two for a kick. The number of points from a try increased to four in 1971[9] and five in 1992.[10]
Penalties have been worth three points since 1891 (they previously had been worth two points). The value of the drop goal was four points between 1891 and 1948, three points at all other times.[9]
The goal from mark was made invalid in 1977, having been worth three points, except between 1891 and 1905 when it was worth four.[10]
The defence was originally allowed to attempt to charge down a conversion kick from the moment the ball was placed on the ground, generally making it impossible for the kicker to place the ball himself and make any kind of a run-up. As a result, teams had a designated placer, typically the scrum-half, who would time the placement to coincide with the kicker's run-up. In 1958, the law governing conversions changed to today's version, which allows the kicker to place the ball and prohibits the defence from advancing toward the kicker until he begins his run-up.[11]
[edit]The Ball
Richard Lindon (seen in 1880) is believed to have invented the first footballs with rubber bladders.
Until the late 1860s rugby was played with a leather ball with an inner-bladder made of a pig's bladder. The shape of the bladder imparted a vaguely oval shape to the ball but they were far more spherical in shape than they are today. A quote from Tom Brown's Schooldays written by Thomas Hughes (who attended Rugby School from 1834 to 1842) shows that the ball was not a complete sphere:
| “ | the new ball you may see lie there, quite by itself, in the middle, pointing towards the school goal | ” |
|
In 1851 a football of the kind used at Rugby School was exhibited at the first World's Fair, the Great Exhibition in London, this ball can still be seen at the Webb Ellis Rugby Football Museum and it has a definite ovoid shape.[12] In 1862 Richard Lindon introduced rubber bladders and because of the pliability of the rubber, balls could be manufactured with a more pronounced shape and, because an oval ball was easier to handle, a gradual flattening of the ball continued over the years as the emphasis of the game moved towards handling and away from dribbling. In 1892 the RFU included compulsory dimensions for the ball in the Laws of the Game for the first time. In the 1980s leather-encased balls, which were prone to water-logging, were replaced with balls encased in synthetic waterproof materials.[13]
[edit]The beginning of rugby sevens
Rugby sevens was initially conceived by Ned Haig and David Sanderson, who were butchers from Melrose, Scotland as a fund-raising event for his local club, Melrose RFC, in 1883. The first ever sevens match was played at the Greenyards, the Melrose ground, where it was well received. Two years later, Tynedale was the first non-Scottish club to win one of the Borders Sevens titles at Gala in 1885.[14]
Despite sevens' popularity in the Scottish Borders, it did not catch on elsewhere until after WWI, in the 1920s and 30s.[15] The first sevens tournament outside Scotland was the Percy Park Sevens at North Shields in north east England in 1921.[14] Because it was not far from the Scottish Borders, it attracted interest from the code's birthplace, and the final was contested between Selkirk (who won) and Melrose RFC (who were runners up).[14] In 1926, England's major tournament, the Middlesex Sevens was set up by Dr J.A. Russell-Cargill, a London based Scot.[14]
The schism between union and league
A cartoon lampooning the divide in rugby. The caricatures are of Rev. Frank Marshall, an arch-opponent of broken-time payments and James Miller, a long-time opponent of Marshall. The caption underneath reads:
Marshall: "Oh, fie, go away naughty boy, I don't play with boys who can’t afford to take a holiday for football any day they like!"
Miller: "Yes, that’s just you to a T; you’d make it so that no lad whose father wasn’t a millionaire could play at all in a really good team. For my part I see no reason why the men who make the money shouldn’t have a share in the spending of it."
It is believed that Yorkshire inaugurated amateurism rules in 1879; their representatives along with Lancashire's, are credited with formalising the RFU's first amateur rules in 1886. Despite popular belief, these Northern bodies were strong advocates of amateurism, leading numerous crusades against veiled professionalism. However, conflict arose over the controversy regarding broken time, the issue of whether players should receive compensation for taking time off work to play. The northern clubs were heavily working class, and thus, a large pool of players had to miss matches due to working commitments, or forego pay to play rugby. In 1892, charges of professionalism were laid against rugby football clubs in Bradford and Leeds, both in Yorkshire, after they compensated players for missing work, but these were not the first allegation towards these northern bodies, nor was it unheard of for southern clubs to be faced with similar circumstances. The RFU became concerned that these broken time payments were a pathway to professionalism.
This was despite the fact that the Rugby Football Union (RFU) was allowing other players to be paid, such as the 1888 England team that toured Australia, and the account of Harry Hamill of his payments to represent New South Wales (NSW) against England in 1904.
In 1893 Yorkshire clubs complained that southern clubs were over-represented on the RFU committee and that committee meetings were held in London at times that made it difficult for northern members to attend. By implication they were arguing that this affected the RFU's decisions on the issue of "broken time" payments (as compensation for the loss of income) to the detriment of northern clubs, who made up the majority of English rugby clubs. The professional Football League had been formed in 1888, comprising 12 association football (soccer) clubs from northern England, and this may have inspired the northern rugby officials to form their own professional league.
On 29 August 1895, at a meeting at the George Hotel, Huddersfield, 20 clubs from Yorkshire, Lancashire and Cheshire decided to resign from the RFU and form the Northern Rugby Football Union, which from 1922 was known as the Rugby Football League.<note>The clubs were In 1908, eight clubs in Sydney, Australia, broke away from union and formed the New South Wales Rugby League. The dispute about payment was one which at the time was also affecting soccer and cricket. Each game had to work out a compromise; rugby's stance was the most radical. Amateurism was strictly enforced, and anyone accepting payment or playing rugby league was banned. It would be a century before union legalised payments to players and would allow players who had played a game of league, even at an amateur level, to play in a union game.
[edit]Competition and influence on other football codes
Rugby league and assocation football were not the only early competitor to rugby union. In the late nineteenth century, a number of "national" football codes emerged around the world, including Gaelic football (Ireland), Australian Rules Football (mainly Victoria and Southern Australia), and the gridiron codes:American and Canadian football.
Some of these codes took direct influence from rugby union, or rugby football, but all of these involved kicking and carrying the ball towards posts, meaning that they were in direct competition with rugby union.
The founder of Australian football, Wills went to Rugby School, and Michael Cusack one of the founders of the Gaelic Athletic Association had been known as a rugby player in Ireland.
Not all such codes were successful - Swedish football was created from a mixture of rugby and soccer rules, but was overtaken by soccer.
Summer Olympics
Main article: Rugby union at the Summer Olympics
Pierre de Coubertin, the revivor of the modern Olympics, introduced rugby union to the Summer Olympics at the 1900 games in Paris. Coubertin had previous associations with the game, refereeing the first French domestic championship as well as France’s first international. France, the German Empire and Great Britain all entered teams in the 1900 games (Great Britain was represented by Moseley RFC[16], Germany by the SC 1880 Frankfurt[17]). France won gold defeating both opponents. The rugby event drew the largest crowd at that particular games. Rugby was next played at the 1908 games in London. A Wallaby team, on tour in the United Kingdom, took part in the event, winning the gold, defeating Great Britain who were represented by a team from Cornwall.[16] The United States won the next event, at the 1920 Summer Olympics, defeating the French. The Americans repeated their achievement at the 1924 Summer Olympics in Paris, again defeating France in a tournament marred by controversies surrounding the rivalry between the two teams. Though rugby had attracted bigger crowds than the track and field events in 1924, it was dropped from next Games and has not been included since.
In October 2009, the International Olympic Committee voted to return a form of rugby to the Olympics, with rugby sevens to be contested in Rio de Janeiro in 2016.[18]
World War I
The Five Nations Championship was suspended in 1915 and was not resumed until 1920, though in Britain in 1919, a tournament was arranged between Forces teams; it was won by the New Zealand Army. One hundred and thirty-three international players were killed during the conflict. The Queensland Rugby Union was disbanded after the war and was not reformed until 1929. NSW took responsibility for rugby union in Australia until the formation of the ARU in 1949.
Centenary of rugby
As 1923 approached, there were discussions of a combined England and Wales XV playing a Scottish-Irish team in celebration of when William Webb Ellis picked up the football and ran with it in 1823. The planned game was controversial in that there was a disagreement over whether it should be held at Rugby School, or be played at Twickenham, where an obviously larger crowd could witness the match. In the end, the match was taken to Rugby School.[19]
Formation of FIRA
For many years, there had been suspicion that the governing body of French rugby union, the French Rugby Federation (FFR) was allowing the abuse of the rules on amateurism, and in 1931 the French Rugby Union was suspended from playing against the other IRFB nations. As a result, Fédération Internationale de Rugby Amateur (FIRA) was founded in 1932.[20]
In 1934 the Association was formed at the instigation of the French. It was designed to organise rugby union outside the authority of the International Rugby Football Board (as it was known at the time). The founder members were Italy, Romania, Netherlands, Catalonia, Portugal, Czechoslovakia, and Sweden.[20][21]
Until its eventual merger with the IRB, FIRA was the most multinational rugby organisation in the world, partly because the IRB had concentrated on the Five Nations, Tri Nations, and from 1987 the Rugby World Cup, completions. FIRA has generally been a positive force in spreading sport beyond the Anglosphere.[20]
Conclusion:
The origin of rugby football is often credited to a young man named William Webb Ellis who “took the ball in his arms [i.e. caught the ball] and ran” while playing a form of football at Rugby school in 1823.
However historians have questioned the authenticity of this story, beginning with an official investigation by the Old Rugbeian Society in 1895. Nonetheless, the trophy for the Rugby World Cup bears the name of “Webb Ellis” in his honour, and a plaque at the school commemorates the “achievement.”
The introduction of rugby into New Zealand was by Charles John Monro, son of Sir David Monro, then speaker of the New Zealand House of Representatives. The younger Monro had been sent to Christ’s College, East Finchley, in north London, England. That school had adopted rugby rules and Monro became an enthusiastic convert. He brought the game back to his native Nelson, and arranged the first rugby match, between Nelson College and Nelson Football Club, on May 14, 1870. However a form of rugby was being played at Christ’s College, Canterbury in 1853.[5]. In North America, rugby developed into American football and into Canadian football.
Bibliography:
http://www.rugbyunionrules.com/the-history-of-rugby-union/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_rugby_union
http://www.ombac.org/ombac_rugby/rulesofrugby.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rugby_World_Cup
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