How to play Rugby Sevens

SINCE Rugby Sevens has half as many players as a normal game of rugby union, it should be twice as easy to understand. Unfortunately, the rugby law book makes the instruction manual for a Stealth bomber look like a model of succinct clarity, so for novices even the stripped-down game of Sevens is not simple to grasp.

A game consists of two seven-minute-long halves punctuated by a minute-long half-time break to allow beer-drinking fans to go to the toilet without missing too much of the action.

A Sevens team consists of three burly players called 'forwards', whose task is to wrestle the ball from the other team. This is to allow the more sylph-like players called 'backs' to score what are known as 'tries', worth five points each, by touching the ball down behind their opponent's goal line. Teams perform all sorts of ruses and tricks to score tries - although the use of weapons is banned, unless by prior arrangement.

Bizarrely for a game that places so much emphasis on possession, the match starts with one team kicking the ball to the other, and immediately trying to get it back. They charge at the man steadying his nerve to catch the high ball. If the receiver is lucky his teammates will bind around him to lessen the impact of the opposition's onslaught.

However, the cannier receivers get rid of the ball as soon as possible by flinging it at another teammate. Faced with the prospect of being walloped by the other side, the second man will in turn pass it on until finally it reaches someone who is in no position to pass it back to a teammate. To avoid the potentially serious physical damage caused by being hit by opponents weighing perhaps more than 100 kilograms, the player with the ball hares up the field, ducking, weaving and swerving, with a wild look in his eyes that says he is keenly aware seven powerfully built men are after his blood.

Unless the fixture is terribly one-sided, possession of the ball will frequently switch from one team to the other. Such a rapid turnover on a pitch that normally accommodates more than twice as many participants is terribly tiring and the laws of the game allow players several rest options.