Rugby is a popular sport in the United Kingdom, descending from soccer and resembling American football. Learn how to play rugby, including rules and skills, in this video rugby lesson.
MARK BREWERTON: Hi. My name is Mark Brewerton. I am a playing coach for the Austin Rugby Football Club, and today we are going to go through some of the origins, scoring, and tactics involved in playing rugby. The game originated in the early 1900s in England when a fellow called William Webb Ellis was playing a game of soccer and decided to pick up the ball and run with it, thus creating a whole new culture of sporting events throughout the world, which The Commonwealth has pretty much spread through around the world. Today, we are going to go through some of the aspects of the game, playing it, scoring, pretty much all tactics and things involved in the game. Our first step is basically explaining scoring. When you score a try, which means you have placed the ball on the ground, over the try line, that is worth five points, which is then followed by a conversion where the ball has to go between the uprights of a posts over here to my left. Once the ball dissects that, that is worth two points. Other ways of scoring are through a penalty goal. From anywhere on the field, you can be awarded a penalty. You can decide to take a shot at goal. Again, the ball has to dissect the uprights. And the third form of scoring is a drop goal, where a person on the run, from anywhere on the field again, can take a drop goal, where the ball is dropped on to the foot and kicked through the post again. The origins of the scorings are varied. It started out, originally, the try was worth three points, but in today's rugby environment it is worth five, because the idea of the game is to promote scoring and scoring tries creates more points. Also involved in the game, we have two set pieces. One is a line-out, which when the ball is kicked in to touch, we set up two even lines next to each other and we lift the player up in to the air and the ball is thrown in and caught by the player put up in the air. That is one form of restarting the game when the ball goes out of bounds. The second form is called a scrum. Scrum is basically eight forwards from each side coming down the front row and coming together. The ball is placed on the middle of the tunnel and then hooked back and then the ball is in play. Unlike American football, you cannot pass the ball forward in rugby. It always has to be passed laterally or backwards. And the person behind that generally runs on to the ball from a standing start from behind. The field, again, kicking, which we talked about, which leads to the
Lineout, a lot of the time it is used for field position. Field position is relatively crucial in rugby because you do not get a lot of time-outs. The game does not stop. It is 80 minutes long with two 40-minute halves with a 5-minute break in the middle. It is not offense and defense which changes; it is 1 to 15 playing both until the coach decides he can get subbed in. Once you subbed out or in, you cannot be coming back on to the field of play. Most of the time, you use the same 15 players throughout the game so aerobic fitness is quite important that you do a lot of running, a lot of heading, and a lot of tackling. So you could be holding the ball, carrying the ball one moment, and then defending the next.
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