Rugby's Strangest Matches: Extraordinary But True Stories from Over a Century of Rugby (Strangest S.)

What you get here are about 150 anecdotal accounts of rugby matches over the past 130 or so years. Many are interesting, some are quirky, some are humorous, but others are rather forgettable. The descriptions run anywhere from 5-6 lines to several pages. You can read about a match where father and son both played, a match with brothers on opposite sides, things of that nature. These you might not find all that strange. On the other hand, however, are accounts of matches where the referee clearly was unfamiliar with the rules--an example being where a referee called a player offsides for holding the ball for a kicker on a very windy day. Scoring rules have undergone many changes, and there have been matches where confusion abounded about points being scored. There are tales that rival Mike Tyson's famous in-match dining habits ("The battle of Waldron's ear"). You'll also read about the player whose shorts were mostly torn off during a tackle attempt--and be reminded that play definitely doesn't stop in that event. So there's a lot of good material here--evn though some of the stories are not as interesting.