Random Rugby Player Generator

So the tool gave you a rugby player

You wanted a rugby player and the tool up top gives you one, or several if you raise the number, from a list I keep by hand. It draws on both codes of the game, so a pull might give you a union lock or a rugby league halfback, and it spans the amateur era through to the current professionals.

The tool is the simple part. Rugby is worth explaining through its players, because it does something that no other major team sport does with the human body.

A team of completely different humans

Line up a rugby union XV and you are looking at a collection of people who could not swap jobs if their lives depended on it.

The prop, at the front of the scrum, is likely to be around a hundred and twenty kilos, built low and broad, with a neck that has been trained for years specifically to survive the compression of eight men shoving against eight men. The winger, on the same team, may weigh ninety kilos and run the hundred metres in under eleven seconds. The second row is two metres tall because his job includes being thrown into the air. The scrum-half is often the smallest man on the field and organises everybody. In football, every outfield player is essentially the same animal with a different set of instructions. In rugby, a team requires a giant, a sprinter, a wrestler and a general, and it fails if any of them is missing.

This is why rugby remains, physically, the most democratic of the great team sports. There is a position for almost every body, provided you are willing to be hit repeatedly by the others.

The shirt number is the job description

Here is the detail that unlocks watching the sport. In football a number is a personal brand. In rugby union it is a role, permanently, and the numbers run in a strict order that describes the team's architecture.

Numbers one to eight are the forwards, the heavy machinery: two props and a hooker in the front row, two locks behind them, then the flankers and the number eight at the back of the scrum. Nine to fifteen are the backs, the fast ones: the scrum-half at nine, the fly-half at ten, who is the sport's quarterback and its most scrutinised individual, then centres, wings and the full-back at fifteen. A player wearing seven is an openside flanker, and if you know that, you know that his job is to arrive first at the tackle and steal the ball, which is exactly what Richie McCaw did for a decade. Rugby league numbers its thirteen differently but on the same principle. Draw a player from this tool, look up his number, and you have his entire professional purpose.

The man who broke the game

Every so often a sport produces a person its categories cannot hold. In 1995, at the Rugby World Cup, New Zealand played England in the semi-final and a twenty-year-old winger named Jonah Lomu ran straight over the top of the England full-back, and then over three more England players, and scored four tries in a single match.

What made him an event rather than a great player was the arithmetic of his body. He was nineteen stone and he ran the hundred metres in about eleven seconds, which is to say he was the size of a prop and faster than the wingers he was playing against. Nobody had ever had to defend against that combination, because nobody had ever possessed it. He is credited, fairly, with turning rugby union professional almost by himself, because television audiences who had no interest in lineouts had a great deal of interest in him. He also played through a kidney disease that would eventually take his life at forty. Almost every one of the enormous, sprinting wingers who followed exists in the space that he opened.

The players who crossed

Because this list mixes both codes, it contains a rare and interesting group: the people who played each one at the top level. Crossing over is far harder than it sounds. The two games ask for different instincts, particularly at the tackle, where a league player is trained to complete the tackle and get up, and a union player is trained to fight for the ball on the ground.

Sam Burgess, on this list, was an English rugby league forward of the first rank, played a Grand Final with a fractured cheekbone sustained in the opening seconds, and then switched to union and to a World Cup squad, which went badly and became a national argument. Jonathan Davies left Wales for rugby league in the 1980s and was treated as a defector. Sonny Bill Williams went back and forth and won at everything. That a person can be a star in one code and merely competent in the other tells you these are genuinely different sports, whatever the shared name implies.

They were not paid until 1995

One last thing that recontextualises half these names. Rugby union was, formally and enforceably, an amateur sport until August 1995. Not amateur in spirit. Amateur in law, policed with real severity.

Willie John McBride, on this list, toured for months at a time and won everything the game had to offer and worked in a bank. Players were banned for accepting payment, for writing books about themselves, for going to league. Every union legend from before the mid-1990s was fitting international sport around an actual job, and the physical demands were not much lower than they are now. When the tool draws you a player, the year matters. Before 1995 you have pulled somebody who did this in his spare time. After it, you have pulled a full-time professional athlete whose body is the entire business.

What a random rugby player is good for

• Quiz and trivia prep. Ask what a number seven does. Rugby people will answer instantly and nobody else will.
• World Cup sweepstakes. Draw players for a group during a tournament in either code.
• Settling a debate. Pull two players and argue the greater career, remembering that one of them may have had a day job.
• Fantasy drafts and pools. Assigning players to a group for a game or a bracket.
• Discovering the sport. Draw a name and go and watch them. Start with Lomu against England in 1995.

Player questions

Why are rugby players such different shapes?

Because the positions require it. A prop is built to withstand the compression of a scrum, a lock is tall enough to be lifted in the lineout, and a winger is a sprinter. A rugby team needs a giant, a wrestler and a sprinter, and it fails without any of them.

What do rugby shirt numbers mean?

In union they describe the position, not the player. One to eight are forwards, nine to fifteen are backs, with the fly-half at ten and the full-back at fifteen. The number tells you exactly what that person does.

Were rugby players really unpaid?

In rugby union, yes, until August 1995, and the rule was strictly enforced. Players were banned for accepting money. Rugby league had permitted payment since 1895, which is why the two codes separated in the first place.

Can I pull several players, or narrow the pick?

Both. Raise the number for a few at once, with none repeating in a single pull, and use the text boxes to narrow things, such as a starts-with letter or a keyword the name has to contain.

References

1. World Rugby. world.rugby
2. Encyclopaedia Britannica, rugby. britannica.com