Having played soccer on field turf, I too think rugby would work pretty well on it. It looks and feels like real grass–the only way you can tell the difference if you’re on the field is to run your fingers through the ground; you’ll come up with specks of black rubber, not dirt.
I think it has a lot to do with the fact that the play carries on after a tackle in rugby. If the play carries on, you have an incentive to tackle and be tackled in a way that is planned and safe and sensible, rather than a “take him down at all costs” struggle.
In American (or Canadian, for that matter) football, the tackler should do whatever he can to knock down the ball carrier, and the ball carrier has every incentive to stay upright no matter what, and struggle to get those last few inches, because at that point the ball will stop and everyone will have a chance to regroup.
In rugby, tho, if you do a careless tackle, you’ll just be left lying in the muck watching the ball get passed on by the opposing team. If the ball carrier does something stupid to avoid a tackle, she’ll just make it harder for her teammates to recover it once she does eventually hit the ground.
Also, in rugby nobody gets tackled unless they have the ball. I’ve heard rugby described as a “contact” sport and football as a “collision” sport. In rugby the only contact is either a tackle (described here and above as a somewhat careful thing that the ball carrier can see and prepare for) or some sort of scrum (which involves people grabbing on to teammates and pushing; they rarely “collide” into other players with opposing force).
In football, from what I understand, you have armor-clad people running straight at each other (creating many opportunities for collisions that rarely happen in rugby).
I basically agree with the reasons given so far about differences in injurys between rugby and American football.
I strongly disagree. I’ve played on two pitches that use Fieldturf. The first is in Las Vegas, New Mexico, at Highlands University; the second was at Dick’s Sporting Goods Park in Denver. The “grass burn” you get on this type of pitch is much worse than on normal grass. The grip with boots is similar, but it gives about quarter inch before it sticks, so it feels like you’re running on a sponge. It’s much hotter, and radiates way more than regular grass. And finally, if it rained the day before, the humidity on the pitch is disgusting, especially at the bottom of a ruck.
I very much dislike playing on artificial turf.
Fair enough. I’ve only played on field turf in San Diego, so heat and rain weren’t an issue.
Well, that. And, since you were playing soccer and not rugby, you weren’t spending too much time sliding/getting stepped on/tackling/laying/getting tackled/etc on the turf, off your feet. 
Or maybe he was. 
However, we will hope for his sake…
I wasn’t. My opponents spent a lot of time on the ground, though, eating black rubber specks in my footprints. 
Actually, I was a defender. I did score a couple sweet goals though–off my feet, which is a little unusual for the “tall, slow defender” type. I couldn’t take a header worth a shit.
[nitpick]Actually, there is no position of “defender.” At any time on the field, there had best be 11 defenders, to combat the 11 attackers (as you apparently demonstrated yourself on occasion 
). There are, however, fullbacks, sweepers, stoppers, keepers and, all too often, lookers. [/nitpick]
I’m well aware, but it was a very loosely organized operation run by American-born people who had more enthusiasm for the game than technical knowledge. Of course, soccer was always much more interesting to me, but the basketball team was where I had a coach who actually knew the technical details of the game and ran a highly-structured system. (And we still got our asses whooped. High school basketball is pretty competitive in San Diego, though. Or at least, it seemed that way from the bottom of the table.)
And our league was full of lookers. C’est la vie americain.
I think part of it is similar to the difference between bare knuckle boxing and boxing with gloves. With bare knuckle boxing, you can only hit the other guy so hard without breaking your hand. With gloves, there is almost no limit to how hard you can hit the other guy, so contemporary boxers are hugely muscular and land blows that would probably kill ordinary people. Same with American football. If you have pads to protect yourself, you can hit a hell of a lot harder than if you didn’t have the pads. Ergo, players get bigger, hit harder, and a hell of a lot of them spend the second half of their lives basically as cripples. (There was a pit thread on this recently.)
duplicate post deleted
Yeah, here’s the Pit thread about the crappy behavior of the National Football League Players’ Association. It links to an article detailing some of the disabilities of some of football’s greatest legends, some of whom are only in their 40s or 50s but already terribly crippled from their years in the league.
I guess the financial rewards in American Football are such that injured players will play through pain to ensure victory - the same happens in rugby of course, but I get the impression there are a lot more NFL players who will go a season relying on pain-killing injections throughout each game.
How about having your scrotum stitched up so you can rejoin a match…
:eek: :eek: :eek:
Lets see an NFL player do THAT
Si
I would hazard a guess that there are far more injuries in Rugby League than in Rugby Union because of the nature of the defensive requirements. Unlike both American football and rugby union, the guy running with ball is generally running at a defender some metres away from him.
At the play the ball the defence is back 10 metres so a prop forward timing his run as the dummy half passes the ball will have plenty of room to build up a head of steam before meeting the defender running toward him. Typically in rugby union that pass to a man one off the ruck will see him only take one or two paces before he meets the defence.
There is plenty of footage streamed at www.nrl.com.au which would give you an idea of the difference in impact.