My first real exposure to the idea of “roles” in rugby came during a hotly contested debate in Cissie Youngs on the Bandon Road in Cork City back in the mid-2000s during the Six Nations.

“You don’t need locks because you can lift fellas in the lineout,” said my housemate. “So you should just select five backrows so that you’d have more guys who can carry the ball.”

Me, being totally fucking clueless really, just went “yeah!” and drank my Bulmers because, Jaysus, I just didn’t know any better.

More ball-carrying? I mean, what’s not to like? I didn’t make the correlation between the importance of second rows and successful ball carrying as in, the importance of having someone who could secure and clear the ensuing ruck while also making life easier in the lineout and lineout maul. I associated guys like David Wallace with big ball carrying but it was only the carry I was focused on. I didn’t look at the next sequence as being something that was connected to it.

While it’s certainly possible to have a back five of lads 6’2″ and under who are explosive ball carriers, the idea that they can just be “lifted” into place in the lineout to compensate for having no dedicated second rows is pretty fanciful, now that I look back it.

But, in my defence, back then it was simple or, at least, simpler. Backrows carried the ball. Front five cleared rucks and did set piece. Midfielders did a bit of razzle dazzle and wings scored the tries. It was a weird time. Miss a tackle as a winger? Never play for Ireland again. Those types of days in the early to mid-2000s were basically amateurism+. Everyone was flying by the seat of their pants.

Rugby is a game for all shapes and sizes, you’d regularly hear, but what they were actually saying was that rugby was a game for every single role type. My idea with roles is that not every player who wears #8 plays the same way and when pundits pretend that they do it simplifies the game down to child-like levels of comprehension. The same goes for every position on the field. For years, Peter O’Mahony was derided for “not being a real blindside” because he didn’t look or play like Dan Lydiate but the actual role twin for O’Mahony at that point was French #8 Imanol Harinordoquy.

But, if you were to say that, you’d be asked how playing two #8s in the back row (!) makes sense and you’re back to square one.

By the turn of the decade into the 2010s, the game as we know it today was beginning to take shape but, at the same time, there was less of the game we know in 2022. There’s a lot of talk about the game today being tougher than it was even a few years ago and that’s true, but not in the way you think. There were still hard hits – and big hitters – back in the early 2010s but the frequency of hits in the game and the consistency of the impacts has gone up every single year. It’s like the difference between being conditioned to take ten punches in the stomach off prime Mike Tyson in an hour, and being conditioned to take twenty in 45 minutes. It doesn’t read like much in pixels but it feels a lot different in reality.

Another massive change in the game has been what’s expected of the modern forward. One thing that really stands out to me in these stats I crunched today from two periods 10 years apart is how much more skilled and versatile all forwards are expected to be. When we look at the game in the past, we often focus on tackles and carries and, to be honest, they often look broadly similar.

The real change is in passing and the breakdown;

In 2012, Ireland’s starting pack and replacements made an average of 16 passes per game in the Six Nations and each Irish performance in that tournament averaged 79 rucks per game.

In 2022, Ireland’s starting pack and replacements made an average of 41 passes per game in the Six Nations with an average of 102 rucks per game.

That is a massive, massive change and illustrates, clearer than any other stat I’ve found, the differences that have taken place in rugby over the last decade. With that change, the importance of roles has skyrocketed because with so many demands on everyone in phase play – never mind the change of impact and complexity at the lineout, scrum and maul – teams have begun to segment what they need from their players.

To be clear, the more we speak about positionless rugby, the more important having a build of roles that suits the framework you’re trying to win with. To be clear, positionless rugby means that everyone has to be comfortable tackling, passing, offloading, running lines and screens and clearing rucks efficiently but understanding roles means that you want the right player in the right spot playing to their strengths 9 times out of 10.

When you have the right players in the right roles in the right system, you max out your ability over the course of a season.

In this series, I am going to create a glossary of all the roles that I use to segment players in all the lines of the pitch and try to explain my way of breaking down the puzzle of how rugby teams select and build their teams to succeed.

Coming next week I look at the role sets of the front row, the second row and the half-lock.