THE RL1908 BLOG

News, Reviews & Opinion - Sean Fagan - RL1908.com

Looking at the selected NRL and rep teams in 2008, the five-eighth seems headed the way of the dinosaur. Is it because we aren't developing them, or because there are no natural-born footballers emerging, or is it due to the way the game has evolved?

iIt seems to me that the demise of the 5/8th is linked to quite a few factors - I don't think you can point to one factor alone - but all the reasons seem to be converging on making the 5/8th position obsolete.

I think it would take pages to fully explore/debate the reasons. One thing I'd like to add is a bit of history (surprise! surprise!) that might help point to where we are headed.

Of all the positions in a rugby league team (and rugby union for that matter), the 5/8th is the most recently created.

RL in England pre-1908 was using two half-backs - one either side of the scrum (i.e. left or right, or sometimes one to put the ball in, one to collect it from behind the lock). At most, in English RL one of the halves would "stand-off" a little further from the scrum than the other half-back.

When RL started here in 1908, apart from Glebe's Tom McCabe, we'd never seen English RL (NU). We implemented backlines based upon what the NZrs had been using in RU, and also the NZ "All Golds" - these teams used a recent NZ invention - the "five-eighth". They assigned just one half-back, and stood the 5/8th half-way between the scrum-half and the three-quarters (hence the tag "5/8th").

Under the English system, the half would attempt to pass (more likely hurl) the ball to a centre who would have to stand still to catch it. Under the NZ system, with a 5/8th, this player could take the ball on the run, switch to whichever side of the scrum offered the best attacking opportunity, and his centres could be running when he passed the ball, or he could dummy and then run on his own, or kick.

This system was still used in RL when the 10m rule first came in, particularly in 1994 and 1995. But, as we all know, the premise of RL soon changed when it dawned on coaches that the 10m rule offered a free 10m piggy-back for opting to take a tackle instead of chancing the pass or the kick.

Coaches also began to dismantle the notion of a traditional backline, spliting their teams in half, placing a centre and a 2nd rower on each side of the field. That began to return us to the 2 half-backs system, and do away with the 5/8th. The diminishing number of scrums added to the evolution, and few teams attack from the few scrums there are now anyway, and certainly few put a classic backline together from a scrum.

if anything, the 5/8th is now an extra forward, and the team's half-back is akin to a quarterback. Which takes us back to rugby in the 1880s, where halves were in fact still called quarterbacks in rugby.

In the 1880s, rugby was termed a 'bullocking game" - passing the ball was a rarity, and certainly chain movements of passes were exceedingly rare - you can see where American football came from, given it evolved from rugby in the mid-1870s, before passing evolved in rugby.

The passing game came into rugby in the late 1880s - we kept that until the mid-1990s in RL, and the half and 5/8th system with a traditional backline always made sense.

To me, RL is now approaching a point on the rugby evolution tree roughly where American football got to in the 1890s - a game built on momentum, maintaining possession, and a very limited passing game. In the end, the Americans introduced in 1906 the forward pass to revolutionise (save) their game - I'm not advocating RL has a forward pass - I'm merely pointing out that it seems to me that we are at a point in the code's evolution where a major review needs to be made as to where we are going, what sort of a rugby/football code we want to evolve etc.

The same thing happened in 1906 (play-the-ball) and in 1967 (start of limited tackles) - these evolutionary points will come up a few times each century - we can't pretend that they won't.