Page 8 - All Shapes & Zebras From Treorchy

And so we begin. The temptation was to go for ‘Away Trips’, but as this social aspect of amateur rugby will undoubtedly be covered as we ride rough-shod through the alphabet, we’ll begin with ‘All Shapes and Sizes’ instead.
Now it’s a well-worn cliché that rugby is a game for all players, regardless of size and stature and this is reflected gloriously in the amateur game. Stumble across one of the thousands of games underway on a Saturday afternoon in the British Isles and you’ll see all sorts of body types on show. Freakishly tall or shockingly short, dangerously fat and inexplicably thin – you’ll find them all on a Saturday, along with every other body type in between.
Traditionally, with the sport of rugby union, logic dictates that it’s bigger players in the forwards and the slighter players in the backs, yet you’ll always find amateur sides in which this convention is flipped on its head and the laws are reversed.
At professional level too, we are of course now used to witnessing 25 stone behemoths turning up on the wings or lurking menacingly somewhere along the back lines. When Jonah Lomu burst onto the scene in the ‘90s it was an almost freakish novelty. Nowadays, the blurring of the lines between forwards and backs is commonplace; some would say it’s a tiresome and detrimental feature of the modern game that’s sold its soul for size, rather than for skill and nuance.
A 6ft 6, 20 stone winger who’s built like a toned, Greek Adonis barely registers as unusual in the professional game these days, but in amateur rugby, these anomalies of size are all the more striking and celebrated - and work the other way too!
6 ALL SHAPES & ZEBRAS FROM TREORCHY