Rugby Skills, Tactics and Rules

A comprehensive, action-packed guide to playing rugby.

Rugby is the fastest-growing contact sport in North America. This hard-hitting game, long popular at college campuses, is now being played at high schools and community parks.

The new edition of the best-selling Rugby Skills, Tactics and Rules presents the latest information on all aspects of the game, along with an updated list of useful addresses. The book also features exciting images from the 2007 World Cup, including expert captions that describe the very latest skills and tactics used at the highest level.

Features include:

• All the tactics and skills of the game at every level -- for beginners, experienced players and coaches
• Over 150 color photographs with captions explaining player positions and strategies
• Basic and specialized skills
• Coaching, including training, team patterns and motivation
• The rules and laws of the game, including playing field dimensions
• Fascinating trivia and amusing stories from around the world.

Rugby Skills, Tactics and Rules is packed with superb, full-color action photographs of the sport's greatest players in action. Complete with glossary, a rules section, updated addresses and websites, this book has everything a player, coach or fan needs to enjoy the game.

The book is loaded full of colour photographs of rugby players in action, mostly from New Zealand domestic matches and international matches. One thing I would have liked is more diagrams supporting the text (even in exchange for some of the photos). There are hardly diagrams at all.

The text is well-written and easy to understand.


A nice start for novices   September 7, 2002
 6 out of 8 found this review helpful

The book is very handy and actually has nice photographs, but it is targeted to a novice or a "fresh start" rugby enthusiast. Keeping this point in mind, it is a remarkable work, both in style and guise, because skills, tactics and rules are clearly explained.

The text is simple but quite serious, hence being rugby an "informal" sport, a better explanation should be devised for some particular events during the match. The lineout is a typical example: in fact the rule, which permit an aided 6-foot plus gentleman to hover in the air waiting for the oval, must have been thought up by a three-quarter who flew Harriers (the famous vertical landing fighter airplane!). This strange engagement is characterized by a devastatingly human exertion, that is the pathological damage this may cause the unsuspecting jumper's groin when his shorts is pulled sharply upwards by two herculean "thrusters"! So far for the tactics!!

Another amusing rule too seriously explained is when the front rows collapse during a set scrum. The refree (the usual scapegoat for italian fans!!!) gives a penalty against the prop that goes down first. He may be the less potent of the two, the more tired or simply could quite easily have slipped, but no!, the sanction is quick,steadfast and irrevocable: he did on purpose, shame on him! Since the international refrees are not robust specimen of human race, with large diameter trunks and necks, they wrongfully suppose that above huge necks there is little capacity for gray matter. So the modern prop will use this misconception to his advantage when there is a scrum nearby the Opposition try line. Thus, by all means, usually illegal, he will check the opposite prop's thrust while collapsing, therefore automatically gaining a penalty kick from the best position ever. That's what we call a teamwork!!

That said, I will recommend this volume to anyone interested in this wonderful game, but getting in touch with its rules for the first time.