Formerflanker - brokendown is talking about times before Greg Davis, before the change of the "tackled ball" law.
like the old dribbling=the forwards would move the ball forward with their feet,Woe betide anyone game enough to fall on the ball!
You are showing your age brokendown and perhaps your username is well-earned.
Those were the days and the great practitioners of dribbling, like Ron Hemi, had value that they would not have in these times.
Young shavers of 60 or so, or younger, would not appreciate why players did not pick the ball up and run with it rather than dribble the ball forward with feet and shins as old timers (now) practised so diligently in their young days.
And thereby brave men used to dive on the ball and get shoed, as they deserved and expected; and if he wasn't he was usually stepped over and the ball was on the wrong side of the ruck anyway - unless there was a counter-ruck. That isn't new.
It goes back to the early days of rugby when the ball was not handled in open play but was played with the foot when the ball squirted from the giant tank movements that they had, when men were men, and shins were hacked.
Gradually the tanks were no more and the game from the Rugby School diverged into either a sport played only with the feet (football/soccer) and a different game of rugby in which the ball could be carried.
But in the new rugby the constraint on not being allowed to pick up the ball any time you wanted to, prevailed: if a player was tackled, the ball could be not picked up before it was played by the foot.
This arcane law prevailed until the late 1950's and even before then it was deemed to be stupid: a law because it had always been a law.
But once you didn't have to play the ball with the foot first before you picked it up, the game blossomed as a running game. There was a bit of residual diving at the feet but the ball was more likely to have been picked up already.
It was the most significant change in the laws of rugby for the last 100 years.
The negative part of the change, when hands were used more to pick up the ball on the ground, was that hands gradually got further and further into the ruck to do so and players from both sides went to ground to maintain their handling rights.
The actions at most rucks now would have penalised in the early 1960's about five years after the law change but as the decades passed generations of referees allowed the hands-in and the flops.
Those refs claimed to be modern: they were speeding up the game; but they killed the old ruck: the ball moving upfield with the ball on the floor, and they created a monster, laughably called a "ruck".
They could have had both the old ruck and the new pick-ups.
I am still dribbling now but it has nothing to do with rugby.
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