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[SHOUTING]
[CHANTING]
[WHISTLE]
CHARLES CLAY: I definitely noticed it's a tough man's game
to play some rugby.
JAMES BALLARD: It's a sport where large people supported
by small people run at large people supported
by small people chasing oddly shaped balls.
And I think that's a comparison that
is very obvious to most people.
ROBERT WOODS: We were riding around
with a couple of Uber drivers.
They were saying we were a little soft,
because we wear pads.
So we got to put on a show Sunday.
-The NFL will be on display once again
this Sunday at Wembley Stadium as the Buffalo Bills
play the Jacksonville Jaguars.
It's a huge sports weekend in England,
as rugby is also hosting its World Cup semifinal matches.
The connection between the two sports
brings American football back to the core roots of its game
here in the UK, a place that can be
traced to the earliest versions of the game through rugby.
PETER BREEN: Rugby evolved from soccer being played
in one of the public schools.
Economization and people who had played
the sport in this country then went in America,
where you had lots of ex-pats from the UK,
but you also had people who weren't expats in the UK.
So they tried to evolve a game, which was similar
to rugby, but with slight changes,
so we were learning a new one.
JAMES BALLARD: Because it's evolved so radically
differently, I don't think people are that
aware of the neutral origins.
PETER BREEN: There are distinct similarities.
But over the years, both sports have
developed in a slightly different direction.
-Some of the early evolution of American football
would be the line of scrimmage, down and distance
rules, legalisation of interference,
and of course, later, the forward pass.
But there are still a lot of similarities between the NFL
and its foreign cousin, rugby.
JAMES BALLARD: Obviously, they're
both very hard-hitting games, which are
the most obvious comparisons.
There are very few other sports that really introduce
that sort of level of combat.
PETER BREEN: There's a big mistake.
People talk about rugby being a contact sport, and it's not.
It's a collision sport.
JAMES BALLARD: They're both very inclusive.
You've got big, fat people like me who can play
and little, skinny guys who are fast
and get around the fat people like me can play, too.
"AJ" OLUFEMI AJAYI: Some of the timing.
You do have to hold your own quite a bit, especially
being on the wing.
[INAUDIBLE] like running backs and wide receivers
usually do something.
So I do kind of see some sort of relations in that sense.
PETER BREEN: We have a position in rugby,
an end called-- he's a number 10,
or the fly-half, or a standoff.
Same position.
He is the controller of the game.
And he's just like your quarterback.
JAMES BALLARD: A lot of people in this country
aren't aware of the terminology within American football,
such as "scrimmage," which is an obvious abstraction
of scrummage.
And so the mutual origins of the two sports
are a little lost on people on both sides of the Atlantic,
I would imagine.
-But for all the ways the games appear to mirror each other,
each sport has its own challenges
that the other doesn't have to endure.
COLTON SCHMIDT: You don't have to worry
about laces on a rugby ball.
So you don't try to kick a certain panel on the ball.
You just kind of grab it and hold it.
And it's a lot easier, just like a soccer ball.
PETER BREEN: Biggest difference--
when most of the players who enter the field of play
in a rugby match are going to be there
from the first minute to the 80th minute.
JAMES BALLARD: A lot of rugby players
probably couldn't sprint quite as fast
as some American football players.
But at the same time, I don't think
they'd be able to do that for 18 minutes straight.
We don't need a few minutes break in between.
-So there's no question these two sports will forever
be linked together as distant relatives.
But they can agree on a mutual respect for each other.
Yeah, I have a friend who actually-- I played football
with in college who played rugby.
And he would come and have bruises all over his face
and everything.
So I know it's a tough man's game.
PETER BREEN: Kind of uniforms or whatever,
you've got fresh helmets, padding, we don't have that.
JAMES BALLARD: If you were wearing pads,
you'd just hurt yourself more, because it's very much directed
impact into areas of the body that would hurt a lot if you
were wearing padding.
CHARLES CLAY: I'm glad I'm playing with pads.
Like I said, that guy had scars on his face and all
over the place, like he had been into a fight.
So you know, I'd definitely keep my pads on.