Page 66 - zebra_proof

If an alien life form happened to land on earth and happened upon a game of rugby mid flow, they would surely wonder what - on earth - was going on. To unfamiliar eyes, scrums, rucks and mauls must seem like glorified, all-out warfare. I perhaps should have included lineouts in this section too, but at least with the ball being thrown in from the side-lines, that facet of the game has a semblance of order to it.
The fact that each of the aforementioned elements of rugby are marshalled by a strict set of nuanced laws makes it all the more baffling to some. With the professional game being so closely monitored today with 360° camera angles and minutely dissected by pundits, the propensity for violence is curbed somewhat, although as it bubbles away under the surface it does raise its head once in a while, especially during the aforementioned scrums, rucks and mauls.
Yet in the absence of technology, and the fact that the referee has to keep a close eye on thirty players (and coaches and subs for that matter), it leaves opportunities for the dark arts to occur. Playing since the millennium, players are under no illusions that the game they play is almost unrecognisable and pretty docile compared to some of the things that occurred on amateur rugby pitches between the 1960s - 1990s. The clubhouse is often full of blurry-eyed nostalgia about some of the violent acts that were meted out in the past!
66 ALL SHAPES & ZEBRAS FROM TREORCHY