What Does a Winger Do in Rugby Union?

The winger wears 11 or 14 in rugby union and finishes what the team creates. Wings score most of the tries, chase and contest kicks in the air, come off their wing to carry, and defend the widest channel on the field one against one. Both shirts sit in the back three — see where they fall among all fifteen rugby positions.

What are the winger’s four skills?

The winger position in rugby is wider than the highlight reel suggests, and it reduces to four things. Call them the Winger’s Four Skills.

1. Finish. Take the chance the side has spent five phases building, with one defender and a touchline to beat.
2. Win the ball in the air. The wing is kicked to more than anyone, so the aerial contest is a first skill, not a bonus.
3. Work off the wing. Carry in the middle of the field when the ball is slow and the space is not out wide.
4. Defend the edge alone. The widest defender has no inside help, and what happens there is usually decisive.

What physical attributes does a winger need?

Four qualities, and where each one actually lives in a training week.

Wings are usually the quickest players in the side and rarely the heaviest, but the frame has widened as the aerial contest has grown: a bigger wing who can still reach top speed is picked ahead of a lighter one who cannot. The sourced bands sit on one page and one only, rugby positions body types.

11 or 14: what is the difference between the left and right wing?

The wing position in rugby carries two numbers and one job description. On paper the difference is none: 11 is the left wing, 14 the right wing, and the two do the same work on opposite sides of the field. What separates them is where a side puts its specialists.

Left wing (11)

Footedness is the usual reason a player wears 11: a left-footed wing on the left touchline can clear to the open side without turning back into pressure, so sides who care about their exit pair a left-footer at 11 with a right-footer at 14.

Right wing (14)

The 14 is more often the aerial specialist, because the open side is the wider half of the field and the half a team expects to be kicked at. Beyond that the job is identical: finish, chase, contest in the air, and defend the edge alone.

Increasingly sides do not fix it at all, naming a left and a right wing and then swapping them by phase, so the shirt records where a player started rather than where he spent the match. The names are looser still: wing and winger are the same shirt, and a rugby union winger is a back rather than a forward. One job, two numbers, two touchlines — and both sit in the same table on the hub, with all fifteen rugby positions.

What does a winger do in defence?

Defence is half this shirt and the half nobody writes about. The wing holds the widest channel, which means staying connected to the outside centre without drifting so early that the inside gap opens. Get that wrong and the break comes inside you, not outside.

Behind the line, the wing is one of two players who cover the kick: when the fullback goes up, one wing drops into the back field and the other stays in the line, and the pair swap that job through a match. The kick-chase runs the same way in reverse — the wing is the first chaser and has to arrive with the ball, not after it. Tackling in that channel is a technique problem before it is a courage problem, which is where rugby fitness drills earn their place.

How does a winger train?

A winger trains speed as a skill rather than as conditioning, because top speed is only trained by reaching it and you cannot reach it tired. Four qualities carry the week.

Put together, that is a four-block plan rather than a list of sessions. The four-week workout plan by position sets out the split, and the per-position workout PDF is the version you can take to the gym. If you would rather the speed and the aerial work were programmed for you week to week, ERA’s fitness plans are built by the strength staff behind international sides.

Is the wing the same in rugby sevens?

The name survives; the job does not. Sevens has no defensive line to stand at the end of, so a wing there defends space rather than a channel, and every player carries, passes and chases. Maddison Levi — whose title on the ERA roster is “Professional rugby sevens player (Winger)” — plays a version of this shirt with almost none of the fifteens structure around it. This page is about the fifteens wing.

How is the winger different in rugby league?

In rugby league this differs because the wingers wear 2 and 5 and take far more carries out of their own end, since there is no contest for the ball at the tackle and someone has to bring it off the line.

Where to find out more

The shirt sits inside a whole back line: rugby positions covers all fifteen numbers, including the question of which position asks least of a player, and rugby positions by body type runs it the other way, from the frame you have to the shirt it suits. To train the shirt rather than read about it, ERA’s fitness programmes put the speed, the aerial work and the conditioning in one place.

Frequently asked questions