Rugby Breakdown Laws Explained: Ruck, Jackal and Offside

Slow a passage of Premiership rugby to quarter speed and watch the two seconds after a tackle. A centre is held and taken down five metres short of the 22. The tackler lands on top of him and now has an obligation. The tackled player has an obligation of his own, running on the same clock. An openside arrives, plants his feet and reaches for the ball. A cleanout arrives a fraction later and the referee's arm goes up.

Four laws were live in that window. Something like eight separate offences were available. The referee picked the one he judged came first.

That is the breakdown, and it is the part of rugby union that crowds at Twickenham and at every club ground in England argue about most loudly and understand least precisely. The laws are published by World Rugby and applied here by the RFU, from the Premiership down through the RFU Championship to a wet Saturday morning on a school field in Cheshire. They are not hard to read. They are brutally hard to referee, because nearly every one of them is about timing rather than about what a player did.

What follows takes them in the order the players meet them.

What actually forms a ruck, and the exact moment it happens

A ruck exists once at least one player from each team is on their feet, in contact, over the ball while the ball is on the ground. One from each side. That is the entire test, and a great deal changes the instant it is satisfied.

Before the ruck forms, hands are legal. A defender who has arrived properly may reach down and take the ball. After it forms, hands are illegal for everyone, and two offside lines appear where a second earlier there were none. The switch is binary, and it is thrown by a player's own team-mate at least as often as by an opponent. A supporting forward who piles into the contest to protect his jackaler has, by arriving, formed the ruck and killed the steal his own man was one heartbeat from completing. Coaches spend real time on this. It is why you see an English back-rower pull up short of a contest and stand there with his hands on his knees, doing nothing, when instinct says get involved.

A tackle is not a ruck. Worth saying plainly, because commentary uses the two words interchangeably. Two players wrestling over a ball that is still held off the ground is not a ruck either; the law is specific that the ball has to be on the deck.

Nor does a ruck need a tackle in front of it. A knocked-on ball lying in the grass with a flanker from each side driving over it is a ruck, with all the same consequences, even though nobody has been tackled.

Older law books set the bar differently, and coaching material written a couple of decades ago will tell you a ruck needs more bodies than it does. World Rugby simplified the definition, and it simplified it in the direction of forming rucks earlier, which in turn shortened the window in which the ball can legally be stolen. That was a deliberate choice about what kind of game the laws should produce.

1. 1Tackle completedThe carrier is held by an opponent and brought to ground. The tackle law is now running.
2. 2Tackler releasesThe tackler must let go of the ball and the player, then get up or move away.
3. 3Ball presentedThe tackled player must immediately make the ball available and cannot play it again until back on his feet.
4. 4Contest windowAn arriving defender on his feet may play the ball with his hands. This window closes the moment a ruck forms.
5. 5Ruck formsOne player from each side, on their feet, in contact over the ball. Hands out, offside lines on.
6. 6Ball wonThe ball is driven or heeled back until the referee judges it has left the ruck and the scrum-half can lift it.

The sequence the laws set out. How long each step lasts is a matter of judgement for the referee, not of law.

The tackler's obligations, in the order the law imposes them

Law 14 defines a tackle as the ball-carrier being held by one or more opponents and brought to ground. Brought to ground is itself defined: lying on the ground, sitting on the ground, with one or both knees down, or on top of another player who is already down. A carrier who stays upright while being held is not tackled, which is why a maul forms instead and why a different law takes over. Our guide to how maul law works picks that up.

Only a player who holds the carrier and goes to ground with him is a tackler. The team-mate who wrapped the ball up and stayed on his feet is not, and the distinction is not pedantry. A tackler carries three duties and an assist tackler carries none of them.

The duties, in order: release the ball, release the tackled player, and then get up or move away from both. The law uses the word immediately for all of them. Only once he is back on his feet may the tackler play the ball, and at that point he may play it from any direction, which is the one genuine advantage the law gives him for having made the tackle in the first place.

That advantage is the reason the fastest steal in the game usually comes from the tackler himself. He is already at the ball. If he can release, roll a shoulder, drive his feet under his hips and get his hands on it before support arrives, he has beaten everybody there by a metre and a half of running.

Failing to roll away is the offence that ends more English attacking phases than any other single infringement. It is also the one that most often looks harsh from the stand, because a tackler pinned under two arriving players genuinely cannot move. The law makes no allowance for that. He is required to get out of the way, and if his own opponents are what is stopping him, the referee is entitled to see it either way.

Why the assist tackler is a separate problem

A player who holds the carrier without going to ground is in a strange position. He has no obligation to release. He can hold the carrier up, drag him backwards, or drop him and immediately compete for the ball on the floor. What he cannot do is go to ground and keep holding on, because that makes him a tackler retrospectively and starts his clock. Referees in England watch for the defender who deliberately drops to the floor across the ball having never really made a tackle at all, which is sealing off dressed up as tackling.

What the tackled player owes the game

Being tackled buys a player the right to be on the ground. It costs him the ball. The law says he must immediately make the ball available so play can continue, and gives him three ways of doing it: release it, pass it, or push it along the ground in any direction other than forward.

Placement is where most of the argument lives. He may reach out and place the ball behind him in one movement, and the long placement of an English forward stretching an arm back through his own legs is entirely legal. What he cannot do is place it, find nobody there, and pick it up to place it again. One movement. Once placed, it belongs to whoever can legally get to it.

He also may not play the ball again until he is back on his feet, may not lie on or over it in a way that stops an opponent reaching it, and may not roll towards his own side while holding it in the hope of finding support. That last one gets called far less often than it happens.

The cynical version of this is deliberate: hold the ball just long enough that a defender's hands are on it, then let go and appeal. Some sides in the Premiership are notably good at drawing a penalty from a jackaler who has been fractionally slow to release once the ball comes free. It is not cheating. It is playing the law rather than the game, and referees know it well enough that the appeal often earns a lecture instead.

The obligation runs both ways in one respect worth noting. Where a defender is pulling at the ball and physically preventing the carrier from letting go of it, the referee should not penalise the man on the ground. Judging that in real time, with two forwards on top of the contest, is exactly the sort of decision the television match official is not usually permitted to help with, and the scope of those referrals is set out in our TMO explainer.

The jackal, and the moment it stops being legal

Jackal is a coaching word, not a legal one. Search the law book and it is not there. What the law describes is a player who is on his feet and who has arrived from a legal position, and everything a jackaler does has to satisfy those two conditions plus a third that the law states less crisply.

The three conditions are: on his feet, supporting his own body weight, and through the gate. He may not use the tackled player as a prop for his chest. He may not have a knee on the floor. He may not have arrived from the side. If any of those fail, the steal becomes an offence rather than a turnover.

The window is the interesting part. It opens the instant the tackle is complete and the tackler has released, and it closes the instant a ruck forms. On a good day for a defence that is a second and a half. On a bad one it is nothing at all, because the first supporting attacker arrives before the jackaler has his hands on the ball.

• 1Players per side needed to form a ruck
• 2Offside lines a ruck creates
• 5Seconds to play the ball after the referee calls use it

Fixed values taken from the laws of the game. They do not vary between competitions in England.

Clearing a jackaler out is its own field of law. A cleanout must be a bind rather than a shoulder charge, and it must not target the neck or the head. Rolling a jackaler by the neck is dangerous play, dealt with under the foul play law rather than the ruck law, with the sanctions that go with it. Going in below the waist to take a jackaler's legs away has been the subject of repeated refereeing guidance, because it is effective, it is difficult to see and it puts a player who is bent forward at real risk. World Rugby has not settled this to everyone's satisfaction, and an honest observer of the English game would say the law here is still moving.

The judgement that decides most of these calls is whether the jackaler is supporting his own weight. A defender bent at forty-five degrees with his chest resting on the tackled player is sealing the ball off, whatever his feet are doing. A defender in the same shape with his weight running through his own hips and legs is contesting legally. From twenty rows up they look identical, which is why this is the most disputed call in the sport.

The gate, and why entering from the side is treated so seriously

The gate is not painted on the pitch and it is not named in the law. What the law says is that a player joining a ruck must do so from behind the hindmost player of his own team, and must be moving towards the opposition goal line. The corridor that description carves out, roughly the width of the players in the contest and running back from the hindmost foot, is what everyone calls the gate.

Two things move it. It shifts sideways as the ruck rotates, and it slides backwards or forwards as the ruck is driven. A player who was legally onside a second ago can be offside without having moved a muscle.

There is a safety argument here that gets less attention than it deserves. A player entering from the side arrives at an opponent's flank, at speed, from a direction that opponent cannot see. The forces go through the ribs and the outside of the knee rather than through the shoulders and hips, which is where the body is built to take them. Side entry is not primarily penalised because it is unfair; it is penalised because of what it does to people. Anyone who has refereed junior rugby in England will have blown for it long before they thought about the tactical consequence, and the referee societies that run refereeing qualifications drill it early for exactly that reason.

The tactical consequence is real as well. A ruck's whole function is to commit defenders to a fixed corridor so that the attack can play against a shortened defensive line. Allow entry from anywhere and the ruck stops shaping the field, and the game loses the structure that makes phase play possible at all.

Sealing off, hands in the ruck, and the offences people confuse

Sealing off is going to ground on or over the ball to stop anybody playing it. A player who falls over the ball must move away immediately. A player who dives on it, wraps it up and lies there has committed a penalty offence, and the fact that his team-mates are now free to reset around him is precisely why it is penalised.

Hands in the ruck is a different offence and it catches people out constantly. Once the ruck has formed, nobody may handle the ball. Not the attacking scrum-half, not the defending one, not the flanker who was legally about to steal it a fraction of a second earlier. The one narrow exception covers a player who already had his hands on the ball before the ruck formed and stayed on his feet throughout, and referees interpret that tightly.

Off feet is a third and separate thing. A player who is part of a ruck and ends up on the floor is not permitted to keep playing. He has to get out.

Offence	What it looks like	Sanction
Not releasing the ball	Tackled player holds on after going to ground	Penalty kick
Not releasing the player	Tackler keeps hold of the carrier	Penalty kick
Not rolling away	Tackler stays over or beside the ball	Penalty kick
Sealing off	A player goes to ground over the ball and stays there	Penalty kick
Hands in the ruck	Handling after the ruck has formed	Penalty kick
Side entry	Joining from anywhere other than behind the hindmost foot	Penalty kick
Offside at the ruck	Not retiring behind the hindmost foot	Penalty kick
Unplayable ball	Nobody can win it and nobody has offended	Scrum

The pattern in that table says something about the design. Almost everything at the breakdown is a penalty rather than a free kick, which means almost everything is worth three points inside the opposition half and a lineout drive inside the 22. The reward for winning a breakdown decision is enormous, and the laws were written knowing it.

Offside lines, and how the hindmost foot drags them about

The moment a ruck forms, each team acquires an offside line running through the hindmost point of its own hindmost player in the ruck, parallel to the goal lines. Every player not participating has to be behind his team's line. Anyone in front of it is offside, and an offside player who stands perfectly still and takes no part whatsoever is still offside.

Hindmost point rather than hindmost foot is the technically correct phrase, and it matters when a player has a knee or a hand on the ground behind the level of his boots.

The line's mobility is what makes it hard to defend against. Drive a ruck two metres and the defending line has to come forward two metres or be offside; get shoved backwards and every defender who did not retreat with it is suddenly in front of the mark. Defences in England drill a scrum-half or a back-rower to call the line up so that eleven people move as one unit, and the reason a defensive line looks ragged is almost always that somebody was watching the ball rather than the hindmost foot.

Two players are treated slightly differently. The attacking scrum-half is effectively at the ruck and can stand where the ball is. The defending scrum-half may shadow him along the line but may not go past his own hindmost foot. The rest of the defence, meanwhile, is not held back ten metres as it would be at a scrum or a lineout. At a ruck the line sits right there at the back foot, which is why breakdown defence is so much more aggressive than lineout defence and why a well-drilled English blitz can be in a fly-half's face within a second of the ball leaving the base. The wider principle is covered in our guide to offside law across the game, and the scrum's very different arrangements are in the scrum law explainer.

When a ruck ends, and what happens to a ball nobody can win

A ruck ends in one of three ways. The ball leaves it, which the referee judges rather than measures. The ball reaches or crosses the goal line, which turns it into a different problem entirely. Or the referee decides nobody is going to get it out and awards a scrum.

The first of those is looser than people assume. No line on the grass marks the point past which the ball has legally emerged. The referee watches for the ball sitting clearly at the back, available, with the scrum-half able to lift it, and at that moment the ruck is over, hands are legal again and the offside lines dissolve. A defending flanker who reads that moment correctly and gets a hand on the ball is doing something entirely legal that looks exactly like an offence.

Then there is the use it call. Once the referee judges the ball has been won and is available, he calls use it, and the ball must be played away from the ruck within five seconds. If it is not, the opposition gets the scrum feed. That five-second clock is one of the very few hard numbers in the whole breakdown, and it exists to stop a side parking on a won ball while it rebuilds its attacking line.

For a genuinely unplayable ball, the scrum feed goes to whichever team was moving forward immediately before it died. Where neither side was going anywhere, the attacking team throws in. That default rewards possession, and it is the reason a side under pressure will sometimes drive into a ruck it has no intention of winning, purely to stop the other lot generating momentum before the ball is buried.

The signals are worth learning if you watch much rugby in England. An arm held straight out at shoulder height points a penalty towards the goal line the non-offending side is attacking. A bent arm is a free kick. Beyond that, the signals for individual breakdown offences are largely conventional mimes rather than codified law: a hand pulled into the chest for holding on, a rolling motion of the forearms for failing to roll away, a downward grabbing gesture for hands in the ruck. They vary a little between referees and a lot between countries.

The breakdown in England's age-grade game

Children in England do not play the adult breakdown, and they do not arrive at it in a single step. The RFU's age grade regulations set out a continuum that begins with tag rugby and no contact at all, introduces the tackle, then introduces the contest on the ground in stages, with limits on how many players may join a contest and on what they are allowed to do when they get there. Contact is added a piece at a time so that a fourteen-year-old meeting a fully contested ruck has already spent several seasons on its components.

The specifics have been revised more than once and the ages at which each element appears have moved. Anyone coaching or refereeing a junior side here should read the current version of the RFU's Regulation 15 rather than rely on what was true the last time they held a whistle. Our guide to the RFU age grade rules sets out how the continuum is structured, and the mini and junior rugby guide covers what a Sunday morning at an English club actually involves.

One element sits slightly apart from the rest. Tackle height in the English community game was lowered after a consultation the RFU ran with its clubs, and the change was made specifically to reduce head contact. A lower tackle produces a different breakdown, because a carrier taken around the thighs falls differently and presents the ball differently from one hit around the chest. The two laws interact far more than the argument about either of them usually acknowledges, and the detail is in our page on the tackle height law in England.

For coaches the practical difficulty is that the age-grade game and the adult game have not always been on the same version of the same law. A club coach running an under-16 side on Sunday and refereeing a second-team fixture on Saturday is genuinely working from two rulebooks.

Why the breakdown produces more penalties than anything else

Take the list of things a referee must establish about one contest: whether the tackle was completed, whether the tackler released, whether he then got up, whether the carrier presented immediately, whether the arriving defender came through the gate, whether he was on his feet, whether he was carrying his own weight, whether a ruck had formed before his hands went in, and whether the cleanout that hit him was legal. Nine judgements. Under two seconds. From one angle, with bodies in the way.

Nobody gets all nine right every time, and the honest position is that on a substantial number of breakdowns there is a defensible case for a penalty either way. That is not a failing of English referees. It is what happens when a sport asks for a contest for possession on the ground and then writes safety law around it.

The coaching arms race makes it worse in the sense of producing more decisions, and better in the sense of producing better rugby. Clubs at Premiership level employ specialist breakdown coaches, and the techniques they teach are built precisely at the edge of the law: the jackaler who gets his hips low enough to be genuinely supporting his own weight while looking as though he is not, the cleanout that arrives at the one angle that is legal, the carrier who falls in a way that puts his body between the ball and the contest without technically sealing anything off.

Refereeing emphasis shifts in response, and it shifts by competition and by season. World Rugby issues law application guidelines and English competitions apply them, but the version being refereed in a Premiership match, a Championship match and a county league fixture on the same Saturday afternoon can differ in emphasis even where the written law is word for word identical. Anyone who has moved between levels as a player or an official knows this perfectly well. It is rarely stated out loud.

My own view, for whatever it is worth: the volume of breakdown penalties is a design feature rather than a bug. A contest that could not be lost would not be worth having, and a contest worth having has to be policed. The alternative is the thirteen-a-side answer.

League's play-the-ball, and the problem it removes entirely

Rugby league solved the breakdown by abolishing it. There is no contest for the ball on the ground in the thirteen-a-side code and there has not been since the game began writing its own laws after the 1895 split, the story of which is in our page on the great schism.

1. 1Tackle completeThe referee judges the tackle over and the defenders must release the carrier.
2. 2Back on his feetThe tackled player regains his feet at the point of the tackle, facing the opposition goal line.
3. 3Markers setUp to two defenders may stand square in front of him. Everybody else retires ten metres.
4. 4Play the ballHe rolls or heels the ball backwards with his foot.
5. 5Acting halfA team-mate collects from dummy half and the next tackle in the set begins.

The play-the-ball sequence as set out in the RFL laws of the game. It replaces the union breakdown rather than resembling it.

The consequences run right through the game. Possession is guaranteed for six tackles, which is what produces league's set structure and the last-tackle kick. Defenders retire ten metres rather than to a back foot a hand's width away, which is why league's line speed and union's look nothing alike. And because there is no reward for winning a ball on the floor, league's wrestle migrated into the tackle itself. Slowing the play-the-ball became the currency, and the RFL has spent years legislating against grapples and third-man-in tackles for that reason.

Neither solution is obviously the better one. Union gets a contest and pays for it in penalties and stoppages; league gets continuity and pays for it by deleting a whole skill from the game. What is beyond argument is that a spectator arriving at Headingley after a season at Kingsholm is watching a different sport played with a similar ball, and the six-tackle structure is the clearest single reason why. Our guide to the six-tackle rule sets out how the count works, and the code comparison page runs through the rest.

For anyone new to watching the English game, the breakdown is the thing to learn first. Follow the hindmost foot instead of the ball for ten minutes at a rugby fixture and most of what the referee does will suddenly make sense. Everything else in the laws sits on top of it, and the other guides in this England section take them one at a time.