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Rugby league football, commonly known as rugby league in English-speaking countries and rugby XIII in non-Anglophone Europe and South America, and referred to colloquially as football, footy or league in its heartlands, is a full-contact sport played by two teams of thirteen players on a rectangular field measuring 68 m (74 yd) wide and 112–122 m (122–133 yd) long with H-shaped posts at both ends. It is one of the two major codes of rugby football, the other being rugby union. It originated in 1895 in Huddersfield, Yorkshire, England, as the result of a split from the Rugby Football Union (RFU) over the issue of payments to players. The rules of the game governed by the new Northern Rugby Football Union progressively changed from those of the RFU with the specific aim of producing a faster and more entertaining game to appeal to spectators, on whose income the new organisation and its members depended.
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Mateaki Fonnama'atonga Mafi, also known by the nickname of "Matti", is a Tongan dual-code international rugby union and rugby league footballer, and sprinter. He played representative rugby union (RU) for rugby league and representative rugby league (RL) for Tonga, most notably at the 1995 Rugby League World Cup, and participated at the 1992 Summer Olympics as a 200m sprinter.
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References
- ↑ "England on the rampage". The Daily Telegraph . 16 October 1999.
- ↑ Berlin, Peter (16 October 1999). "England Mauls Short-Handed Tonga". The New York Times .
- ↑ "Rugby league: Chance for Wasps to put troubles behind them". York Press . 18 March 2000.