The Rules of Rugby

Last night there was a really important rugby match being played in Limerick, so Laura (the other Tufts student at UL) and I went to the Stables, a pub on campus, to see what the fuss was all about.

We got there right at 7:30 and the place was dead quiet. We got really decent seats near the huge projection screen that had been set up and settled in. By the time the match started, the entire pub was full of people all turned towards the big screen.

An extraordinarily patient Irish student quickly called us out on having no idea what was going on. He spent the entire match answering our questions, most of which were along the lines of "What the heck just happened?" and "What was that all about?". It took me about five years to figure out how American football worked, and I have a feeling it will probably take me as long to fully understand rugby.

A summary of everything I learned during the two hour match: the ball can only be kicked or carried forward, it must be thrown backwards; tackling around the neck is a foul; the ball must be kicked out of a scrum (not touched by hands); kicking a goal gets your three points; the kicker for the Munster team (my adopted home team) is actually American; and American football players wear too much padding (according to our Irish hosts).

I knew that rugby was a rough game, but these guys made football players look like little boys tossing a ball back and forth. Some players wore a padded helmut that seemed to protect their hair more than their head, but most wore nothing except their uniform. And if you thought football stalled a lot because of tackles, then rugby is not for you: the entire game consists of kicking the ball back and forth a bit, someone catches it, everyone tackles him, the ball is gingerly extracted from the pile of bodies, that person runs about two feet, gets tackled himself, and the process starts all over again. Since it was only around 30 degrees F last night, the scrums literally steamed from the heat coming off of the players.

The atmosphere is the pub was probably the best part of the night. It was really intense, and everyone was super-focused on what was going on. There was a lot of cheering and conversation, but when one team set up to kick a goal, the entire place would go completely silent, as would the stadium. It was like watching a set point at Wimbledon quiet.

All in all, it was a really fun evening, and I'm definitely going to try to watch more. At some point several of us are going to try to get tickets to a local match, which should be really fun as well. The next sports that have to be watched at some point are Gaelic football and hurling, though I've been told that there's no way for anyone who hasn't grown up with them to ever fully understand what's going on...