The positions and their naming
The game started as a catch-as-catch-can, every-man-for-himself affair. Gradually it became more structured and settled into positions. This was an important facet of the game as it became a game for all shapes and sizes and for all sorts of skills.
When the game got to the schools and onto fields, the forwards were the important men, standing there upright, chests out, hacking manfully up the field. You had to earn the right to “follow up”, as they called it at Rugby School.
Of course, if everybody followed up, hacking merrily forward, the rear was vulnerable – and that is where the names first came in. As the forwards went manfully forward, they left behind a man near their goal, a player who was fully back – the fullback.
Then, because there could be acres of space between the forwards on attack and the fullback, they had two players who were halfway back – the halfbacks. They called them donkey halves as their dangerous job was to fall on the ball and risk boots to their bodies. They were interchangeable positions for a long time, settling to the modern style mainly under the inspiration of Adrian Stoop, the great Harlequin, in the first decade of the 20th century. The outer of the two halves came to be called the outside half, the out half, the stand-off half or the flyhalf, an Eton term from flying half.
Then there came three players who played in the quarters of the field. There were three of them, the three quarterbacks, three-quarters. The outside ones were called wings, the middle one a centre, which may not be mathematically as correct as a line has a middle, a circle a centre.
Then at Cardiff, in the 1880s, Frank Hancock, a brewer, had a brilliant game as a replacement for an injured Tom Williams, Williams back, Cardiff kept Hancock who played as a fourth three-quarter. The fourth three-quarter was born. Now, without logic, some of us refer to the middle two players as centres, inside and outside.
Having four three-quarters caught on in Dunedin, New Zealand, where a cobbler, James Duncan, was captaining Otago and then, in 1903. He decided that the whole thing was about fractions and, for the cobbler, the fraction between a half and three-quarter was a five-eighth. The inside centre became the five-eighth. Then when the halves were separated, the outside one became the first five-eighth and the next one the second five-eighth. So a New Zealand backline goes: halfback, first five-eighth, second five-eighth, centre, wing, fullback.
The forwards, who originally came to scrums on a first-up, first-down basis, gradually developed names for the positions which they had in the scrums. The two pillars in front were called props because they propped up the man with the swinging feet between them, the man who hooked the ball, the hooker. (He could conceivably have ended up called the heeler for heeling the ball, but that had a religious sound to it.)
The props, bless their simple souls, developed specialised names eventually – the loosehead prop, the one on the side where his scrumhalf puts the ball into he scrum. His head is defined as loose because on one side it is free, loose. The other prop is caught between his hooker and his opponent. His head is blocked. Instead of calling him a blockhead they call him a tighthead, the opposite from a loosehead.
The two players who push on the props and the hooker, keep the scrum stable. They lock it in the sense of keeping it stable and are called locks.
South Africa, in the days of Oubaas Markötter of Stellenbosch, developed a scrum formation that went 3-4-1, at a time when the rest of the world packed 3-2-3.
Mind you, it may have been Paddy Carolin who invented it and Markötter who made it famous during the Springboks’ tour of 1931. Paddy Carolin certainly claimed it for himself and then later regretted it as he felt the formation gave the flanks too much of a destructive reign.
The two men on the outside of the second row are called flanks or to some the flankers though what the er adds is unsure. The last man in the scrum is the number 8 or, in South African terms, the eighthman. It is fair enough for them to call him the eighthman as they invented the position and developed it.
Because they clung so long to the 3-2-3 formation the British refer to their loose forwards as the back row. The back row now mostly is just a back man but the trio – two flanks and the No.8 – are sometimes referred to, anachronistically, as the back row. In the Southern Hemisphere they are mostly called loose forwards, loosies in the Antipodes.
In recent times as the game has become more stylised/professional/uniform, there are some new names – the receiver, the first receiver, the back three as distinct from the front five and more.
The back three are the wings and the fullback. The front five are the front row and the locks. The receiver is the player who takes up a scrumhalf’s position though not necessarily a scrumhalf and a first receiver is the player who takes up the flyhalf’s position though not necessary a flyhalf.
The flanks, too, have acquired specialised names – an openside flank and a blindside flank.
That’s not all. There is also a fetcher, often the openside flank, the one who plays “to the ball”. Just as a dog will run and bring back a thrown stick and a hunting dog will bring back a downed game bird, so on the rugby field a fetcher will bring the ball back to his side from a tackle.
Increasingly, too, players are referred to by numbers, a development since numbers have become standard. So a move will be described as 8-9-14 when it goes from the No.8 to the scrumhalf and on to the wing from a scrum. It is all depersonalising.
We also have runners. After a tackle a scrumhalf will look to pick up runners – simple forwards who clutch the ball to their breadbaskets, put their heads down and charge, suicidally, at their opponents.
Ball-carrier is a new term, too, and if he offloaded to a team-mate, that would also be a new term, as would box kick, and so on. After all rugby is alive and still evolving.
