Page 59 - Gilbert & Me_Neat

Sunday Supplementary

I realised that some of you out there mightn’t know anything about the sport I mentioned –
Rugby - and since that’s what brought me to Belize, I thought I’d better give you some
information about it and what exactly I’m doing with it.

Rugby is known as the Noble Sport – a hooligans game played by gentlemen (whereas Football
is a gentlemen’s game played by hooligans – at least that what we rugbiers claim!).

At first glance, the sport looks bonkers: two teams of burly players running about a football-sized
field, colliding into each other while carrying an odd shaped ball, which is sometime kicked,
sometimes thrown and sometimes rolled into the middle of a gang of players who can only fight
for it with their feet while tightly holding onto their opposition in a turtle-like formation. Yes,
that is Rugby. A game where only the players can more forward, while a referee makes sure the
ball is moving backwards at all times. I love it.

Rugby started in the early nineteenth century in a place called Rugby, in England (hence the
sport’s name), when a young lad got bored playing what was then a very disorganised version of
association football – this became known simply as ‘Football’ eventually. There were no rules to
speak of, and the number of players was most often undetermined, with the only rule being there
had to be the same number on each team. The only objective was to get the ball over a goal line
in your oppositions’ half of the field.

Anyways, young Webb Ellis got bored and decided to pick up the ball and run with it to the
opposing end of the field. He touched down the ball and was awarded a goal. Nobody could
argue that did wasn’t playing the game according to the rules, because there weren’t any. But
somebody got thinking, and fairly soon, kids (and adults who wanted to remain kids) up and
down the country had a choice of ‘football’ games they wanted to play, and one allowed them to
use their hands. That’s how Rugby started.

Associated Football started to get serious about rules, at roughly the same time that Rugby
started to get serious as a sport with rules of its own. Rugby officials changed the shape of the
ball, to make it easier to carry and run with, and they increased the number of players from
football’s established eleven to fifteen, but they scrapped the position of ‘Goalie’. Then they
made the biggest change of all – the ball could not be thrown forward. It could still be kicked,
but not thrown. That one simple change, had the biggest impact on the game, because now,
instead of one or two players being able to ‘run’ the game, each member of the team had to play
their part if the ball was going to be touched down successfully over the opposing team’s goal
line.