Those of you familiar with my first article on the martial art of rugby know that I suggest there are many opportunities to practice your grappling techniques. On occasion, well almost every rugby game, I use some skill acquired from my sambo training. The first article dealt with submissions and this article is about takedowns. Rugby being a contact sport involving tackling, you are quick to say this article is about double leg takedowns. You would be right but only partially. I have made great use of many finishing techniques common to double legs however I have used other takedowns also. Hip throws, blocking throws and lots of sacrifice throws have been rugby battle tested.
I played football in high school and back then we were taught to tackle leading with the head. Dangerous but we were young, stupid and impressionable. Tackling like that would get you killed in rugby. Many football converts have learned this lesson the hard way. Some football players were taught to wrap the legs, which is good but with the head in front. This is suicide in rugby because some high knee pumpin' islander coming at you will a full head of steam would knock you out. I thought I would adopt some wrestling finesse to tackling in rugby. When I first started playing rugby, the referees didn't mind if you lifted a ball carrier up as long as you didn't slam him down. I used a sambo variant where I would meet the tackler head on and lift while swing his legs out and up. I hammered a lot of would be try scorers this way. It was always fun to see the look on the bigger guys faces because many of them had never been tackled that way. I always made it a point to step on them after and that is perfectly legal providing the ball is still in the general vicinity. We call that rucking. You rake your cleats to free the ball toward your side. Some runners would try to stiff-arm you. Here I applied an arm drag to bridge the gap toward the double leg takedown, which in these cases was a trip. After arm dragging, I would step deep and across to trip his far leg. Worked like a charm. If you're a regular grappler, you've probably never seen a sacrifice double. Let me tell you, when you see a huge South Afrikaans barreling down on you, it's a nice technique to know. You simply wrap his legs as you absorb the hit falling back and to the side. Continue the turning motion so that you have wrap up his legs while ending up on top and he on his back. If he needs to be punched, well you are ¾ the way to a mount.
Single legs are used because you've missed the double. So you hang on hoping he'll fall. Sometimes you are able to exert pressure so that his knee will straighten and take him down that way. Many times I've caught one leg and launched in to an alligator roll. An alligator roll is something that we sambist use as a takedown and in submissions. In takedowns similar to what I would do to ball carriers, you capture a single leg and roll under it. This made several ruggers scream like little girls. You mind gets the impression that the knee is going to blow in a serious way, so you scream in anticipation of the pain. A cartoon couldn't shade the embarrassment any better. I've had many a grin and giggle over that one, mostly because people rarely got hurt when I did the alligator roll. In submissions, the alligator roll is used to secure better position when attempting an Achilles lock especially if it is a test of manhood. What is a test of manhood you say? In sambo, this is where each guy has an Achilles lock. Each guy is trying to crank the shit out of the leg that they hold. The man wins every time.
During the confusion of the game sometimes you don't know who has the ball. On one similar occasion this rather tall guy popped out with the ball. My natural reaction was a hip toss and man did he fly. I couldn't pull off another move like that in a million years. He was in shock, I stood over him to gloat and play resumed where the opposition scored. Sure they scored but that was cool. When this piece of luck is recounted over beers, it takes on mythic proportions. First, it's a David and Goliath thing, big guy trying to run over a little guy. Then they say that I had so much amplitude on the throw that his feet hooked some clouds. Pulled 'em down and it started to rain. When he landed, it registered 5.2 on the Richter's scale. Wrestling for the ball with another opponent presents another opportunity to use a hip toss. It is in this situation that I used an inner thigh reaping throw (Uchimata for you judoka) and front blocking throw (Tai Otoshi). My technique with these two moves has been suspect enough to escape a warning from the referee (who knows what the hell he would say if he could figure out what I was doing). However, the skill has been good enough to achieve the desired end result, the ball in my hands and my opponent smack down on the ground.
During the melee known as rugby, your opponent sometimes seizes the occasion to grab you to prevent you from participating the thrashing of his teammate who has the ball. This creates fits and usually the guy being held back punches the grabber. This doesn't always cause a release. I have good use of this opportunity because the guy did grab me and that means he wants to engage in some sort of jacket style grappling, no? Here I have wound my arm around and got a whizzer to a hip toss. Or performed a one-armed inner thigh reaping throw, which is very painful because you end up putting a lot of pressure on the back of his straight arm. I have launched in to vicious cross reaping throws (O soto Gari) with chin jabs. I even had the occasion to do a shoulder throw. This happen after I was offside and tackled a guy from behind by lifting him up and slamming him down while using my knee to sweep his legs out. His buddy tried to choke me from behind. I grabbed his arm, lowered my center of gravity and popped my hips. He went sailing on dry land. I was really pissed about that and pinched his trachea until I saw fear in his eyes.
I have yet to use a belly to belly or belly to back yet. I have seen them done. I had a teammate grab a guy with the ball and execute a flawless step around belly to back suplesse. He had arch, he had amplitude, he knocked the guy out and he had 14 angry young men trying to stomp the shit out of him after. The referee sent my pal off just to protect him because he didn't see the throw to penalize him. It was definitely a 5-point throw if not a fall. A buddy of mine made this brilliant try saving tackle on a rather large prop forward. This prop was as angry as a bull that he was nearly the size of (280+lbs). We got the ball and play had continued toward the other end of the field when out of the corner of my eye I saw a belly to belly that Karelin would have been jealous of. He really hurt my teammate, put him out of the rest of the season with a neck injury. Well as you know one good turn deserves another. Our guy blew the big bulls knee out with a well-timed late tackle the very next season.
As you can see I take my rugby seriously enough to practice my sambo and to notice sambo in other things that I do. Rugby is a martial art in its own right; hell I have been able to practice submissions, takedowns and strikes. The strikes are another article all together. There is no better way to practice your stuff when you're in the fray. Under pressure and threat of pain makes you remember the little things that allow your moves to come off right. Train hard.