Laws of the Game

Laws of the Game

Changes to the laws of the game have been made at various times and this process still continues today.

Number of Players

The number of players was reduced from 20 to 15 a side in 1877.

Method of Scoring and Points

Historically, no points at all were awarded for a try, the reward being to "try" to score a goal (to kick the ball over the cross bar and between the posts). Modern points scoring was introduced in the late 1880s,and was uniformly accepted by the Home Nations for the 1890/91 season.

The balance in value between tries and conversions has changed greatly over the years. Until 1891, a try scored one point, a conversion two. For the next two years tries scored two points and conversion three, until in 1893 the modern pattern of tries scoring more was begun with three points awarded for a try, two for a kick. The number of points from a try increased to four in 1971 and five in 1992.

Penalties have been worth three points since 1891 (they previously had been worth two points). The value of the drop goal was four points between 1891 and 1948, three points at all other times.^\

The goal from mark was made invalid in 1977, having been worth three points, except between 1891 and 1905 when it was worth four.

The defence was originally allowed to attempt to charge down a conversion kick from the moment the ball was placed on the ground, generally making it impossible for the kicker to place the ball himself and make any kind of a run-up. As a result, teams had a designated placer, typically the scrum-half, who would time the placement to coincide with the kicker's run-up. In 1958, the law governing conversions changed to today's version, which allows the kicker to place the ball and prohibits the defence from advancing toward the kicker until he begins his run-up.

The Ball

Until the late 1860s rugby was played with a leather ball with an inner-bladder made of a pig's bladder. The shape of the bladder imparted a vaguely oval shape to the ball but they were far more spherical in shape than they are today. A quote from Tom Brown's Schooldays written by Thomas Hughes (who attended Rugby School from 1834 to 1842) shows that the ball was not a complete sphere:

“	the new ball you may see lie there, quite by itself, in the middle, pointing towards the school goal	”

In 1851 a football of the kind used at Rugby School was exhibited at the first World's Fair, the Great Exhibition in London, this ball can still be seen at the Webb Ellis Rugby Football Museum and it has a definite ovoid shape. In 1862 Richard Lindon introduced rubber bladders and because of the pliability of the rubber, balls could be manufactured with a more pronounced shape and, because an oval ball was easier to handle, a gradual flattening of the ball continued over the years as the emphasis of the game moved towards handling and away from dribbling. In 1892 the RFU included compulsory dimensions for the ball in the Laws of the Game for the first time. In the 1980s leather-encased balls, which were prone to water-logging, were replaced with balls encased in synthetic waterproof materials.

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