Nutshell: A Player's Guide to the Laws does exactly what it says on the cover  -  in the player's language.

 “I simply had to read it. Invaluable."
                     -  John Inverdale   DAILY TELEGRAPH
 "An entertaining, easy-to-read guide"
                     -   INDEPENDENT ON SUNDAY
 "Derek Robinson...has arguably done more to popularise the laws 
  of rugby than anyone else."
                    -  John Hopkins  -   THE TIMES

Better Rugby Refereeing  (Paperback; updated and reprinted 2007)

A year after Ed Morrison refereed the Rugby World Cup Final in Johannesburg, he and I created this book. Since then, many referees have gone out of their way to tell us how valuable they found it. “The best coaching I had,” was a typical comment.

Rugby refereeing can be a tough and lonely job. Our aim is to offer solutions to problems - solutions that we believe will work, because they’ve worked for us, time and time again. How did we learn this? The hard way - on the job. It’s fair to say that, between us, we’ve acquired a ton of experience in rugby refereeing, from the hairy grass roots (Derek) to the topmost heights (Ed) -  and on his way up Ed sorted out many a 3^rd XV fracas, too.

We’ve packed the fruits of that experience into 214 pages of down-to-earth conversation that’s highly readable, often funny, sometimes challenging. The points we make are brought to life in 40 graphic illustrations. We identify the crucial decision-­making moments in the game, everything from handling aggression to managing the scrum. We focus on essential referee skills, such as good lines of running; creative use of advantage; fast and positive communication; and putting responsibility where it belongs - on the captains.

For anyone, at any level, who wants to referee better, this book can help you discover how it’s done.

                                                        Top of Page

Run With The Ball  (Published 1984)

The history of rugby is full of surprises, starting with the shocking myth that William Webb Ellis had anything to do with it. The idea was cooked up by the Old Rugbeians’ Society, 72 years after it didn’t happen. This was in the 1890s, when the working classes had begun to play rugby. The Society was desperate to prove that Rugby School was its birthplace and they were its rightful owners, so they gave the credit to Ellis, who was, by now, conveniently dead. Nobody who was at Rugby in Ellis’s time (or shortly after) remembered that he ‘first took the ball in his arms and ran with it’, as the plaque says; nobody even remembers that he played football. He went to Oxford, took Holy Orders, was rector of various churches, and died in the South of France, having shown not the slightest interest in rugby. But if the Old Rugbeians’ claim wasn’t true then, it’s firmly believed now. Ellis didn’t run with the ball, and it’s the only thing he’s famous for.

In a brisk dash through 150 years of the game, I think I’ve managed to stampede a small hard of holy cows. For example: in its early years, Welsh rugby was very English. The Wales international team often fielded several foreigners, chaps who just happened to be in the area. No ‘golden age’ ever existed - Edwardian rugby was very low-scoring, and interwar rugby was dour in the extreme. On the sunny side, the game has had an extraordinary appeal worldwide, from Uruguay to China, from Israel to Afghanistan. Why? Because it’s a lot of fun. So is this book.                                                                                                        Top of Page

Rugby: A Player’s Guide to the Laws  (Published 1995 in paperback and updated 1996/98/2002/05)

Rugby Union is the only game whose players actually boast they don’t understand all its laws.(This phenomenon wouldn’t last ten seconds if they were playing, for instance, poker.) As a result of their slap-happy approach, players sometimes miss valuable opportunities (Advantage is the most obvious) and often they concede a hatful of penalties. That’s why I wrote this book.  It’s a user-friendly guide to the laws - not just useful but interesting, even entertaining. It covers everything from the demands of the tackle (how immediate is ‘immediate’?) to the mysteries of off-side/on-side and exactly what it takes to score a try (or fail to score). Because the laws keep changing, the book is always updated. And because players prefer pictures to words, the text is generously and vividly illustrated, showing just where the game can go wrong (or right).

At any level of the game, there’s an unwritten law that says: It’s even more fun when you win. Well - winning rugby starts here.

(Why me? Because, in 30 years with the whistle, mostly deep in the grassroots, I reckon I saw it all: the good, the bad and the downright bizarre. Would you believe that, in a match I was refereeing, a touch judge complained to me that buckshot kept falling on him from a nearby game shoot? It happened. Also, I learned a lot as the writer on the RFU team that rewrote the lawbook. Our version, called The Laws In Plain English, shines through the International Rugby Board’s new plain-language lawbook.)

                                                                                                                                    Top of Page