What on earth are they doing? I’m blowed if I know, but they call it Rugby Union.

It’s so cold your fingers are stinging, you’d say it was pouring with rain except it’s coming in horizontally so you can barely see, you’re covered in mud, exhausted from an hour of intense physical and mental effort and you still have 20 minutes to go, and after all the rough impacts from the last hour, even your bruises have bruises. No, it’s not the entry course for the army special forces, it’s a game of rugby union and you love it, or you will once you’re back in the club-house with a beer/rum in hand.

Rugby Union [Not the same as Rugby League] is an odd game; one part wrestling, one part ball skills, and one part chess, and all done as a team at a hundred miles an hour. For me, it’s my favourite sport, both to watch and to play, I love the balance of physicality, complexity, and intellectual pursuit – ok they don’t need to wax lyrical about the weaknesses of Descarte’s mind-body duality, but they do need to play smart as well as hard. But to a novitiate rugby can be very confusing.

It looks like a mess; bodies are flying everywhere, the ball seems to be lying on the ground half the time while people shove each other, and then the referee blows his whistle, makes some incomprehensible statement while waving his hands around, and then the players on one team run backwards and the other team kicks or taps the ball. Sometimes half the players from each team, players one to eight who are called the “forwards”, get together in this weird crab formation and push against each other instead.

What the heck is going on!?

Well, as a self-proclaimed prophet of rugby – note I didn’t say expert, I want to share with you an outline of the game, something perhaps a little more enlightening and entertaining than reading through World Rugby’s Laws of the Game. See there’s a thing right there, in rugby they’re not called rules, they’re Laws (note the capital L). There is a good reason for this: rugby is a frenetic, physical game, passions get high and in the heat of the moment players need to respond appropriately. They must have instilled in them that throwing a punch, for example, is never going to be accepted. They have to know that the referee’s word is final and absolute. So they’re not just following the rules, they’re obeying the Laws of the game.

So to kick off some explanation of the game, let’s look at the obvious first question: how do you win.

Well pretty much like any game, you need to score more points than your opponent. You can do this in a number of ways. The first, and probably easiest to understand, is the Try. A player carries the ball over the opposition’s Try Line and presses it on the ground with their hand/s.

Simple right? Well sometimes yes. Sometimes though there are half a dozen bodies around the ball-carrier all trying to tackle him and/or hold the ball up off the ground and/or knock it from his grasp, because simply getting past the try line is insufficient, the ball must be grounded properly.

If the ball is knocked or dropped loose before it’s grounded then it’s “knocked on”: no try.

If an opposition player manages to get under the ball so it does not touch the ground then it’s “held up”: no try.

If the ball carrier was tackled and then crawled across the try line then it’s a “double movement”: no try.

Still, the basic concept is pretty simple. Get the ball down across the line, your team's awarded five points.

When a team scores a try they have the opportunity to “convert” the try – basically add two points. They do this by kicking the ball over the cross bar of the goal posts. These are a large H shaped set of poles, the two uprights about 6 metres (20 feet) apart and the cross bar about 3 metres off the ground. Originally, way back when Rugby first started, converting was required to get any points; an unconverted try was worth nothing, then by kicking the goal the try was “converted” into points. Now it’s a simple 5 for a try and 2 for a conversion.

Sometimes when players infringe the laws the referee will call a “long arm” penalty, where he sticks his arm up in the air in the direction of the team that is awarded (i.e. benefits from) the penalty. They can then opt to kick for points from wherever the penalty was awarded – the location of the infringement. That could be anywhere on the field. As the field is 100 metres long (110 yards) most attempts at kicking a penalty goal are taken when the penalty occurs within the opposition half. The penalty goal requires they kick it through the same H goal as is used for conversions, however rather than 2 points, a penalty goal is worth 3. If the penalty is not within kicking distance the team can choose some other options, but those are for another discussion.

There is also the Field Goal. A field goal is where, in general play, a player completes a drop-kick over the same H bar goals. For it to be classed a drop kick, the ball must bounce on the ground then be kicked in one action, otherwise if you don’t kick it, it’s just “knocked on” and if it doesn’t bounce, then it’s just a punt and doesn’t get any points. These are also worth 3 points but are rarely used. The opposition’s defence is usually rushing up so the player taking the kick has to stand a long way back – standing deep as it’s called – and the kicks are typically low accuracy. Probably the most famous drop kick in Rugby Union history was by an English player named Jonny Wilkinson.

In the 2003 Rugby World Cup Final between Australia and England, at full time, after 80 minutes of incredibly intense rugby, the scores were dead level at 14 all. Play went into 20 minutes of extra time. After Australia’s coming within metres of scoring a try, and both teams scoring a penalty goal each, the scores were at 17 all with two minutes to play. England managed to move the ball into Australia’s half and with just 28 seconds on the clock, Wilkinson kicked a field goal from about 30 metres out, winning the game for England 20 points to 17. It was an absolutely amazing piece of rugby by Wilkinson: I’d hate him for it if he wasn’t such a humble, likable, hard-working bloke.

So that’s the intro part one to rugby. Now you know most of the ways points can be scored in a Rugby Union match. We didn’t talk about penalty tries, the only other method of scoring, but that is a whole ‘nother discussion for another day. Bring your lawyer’s hat for that one. For those who are interested in the fantastic game of rugby, next up I’ll talk about the positions and players. Until then, I’m signing off with an old Welsh blessing:

May the ball bounce up to meet you,

May opposition Forwards be ever falling back,

May their Backs fall flatly on their face,

Their tackles drop you softly on the field,

And until we meet again, may the Ref hold out to you the advantage hand.