Rugby..... League??

I was invited by one of my work friends to go to a Rugby League match in Melbourne. The Melbourne Storm Vs. the Canberra Tigers. We cheered for Canberra at my friends insistence because he hated Melbourne. Three of us went and we had some drinks and argued with some Melbourne Fans for fun, some got angry and left, others took it lightly. It could have been because Canberra lost by 30 some odd points.

Already, here comes the technical bit. In Australia (my research has shown in many other countries as well) there are two types of rugby. Rugby League and Rugby Union. Rugby Union being the game we know and love in Canada (apologies to the people who know little about rugby).

Here are the differences as far as I can tell. There is no rucking over (this is the big one), instead, when a player is tackled, the defending team must back up 10 metres and a player on the offensive will move the ball out again. They only have 5 attempts at this, if they get tackled on the 6th attempt, it is a turnover.

The rest of the gameplay is similar, there are scrums and the movement of the ball up the field remains the same, but there are only 13 players on the field instead of 15. And there are no Line-outs. If the ball goes into touch, a scrum is held with one of the teams putting the ball in. (I couldn’t figure out what determined who gets to put the ball in the scrum.

Anyway, after the loss, we headed back to Geelong on the train. It was a good night, work the next morning was less than good.

Jesse

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