Rugby football is a popular quasi-amateur sport widely played in the United Kingdom, France, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa. It is rapidly gaining popularity in the US, Canada, Japan and parts of Europe. Recently, some of the rules of the game have been changed, with the aim of making play more exciting. In a study to examine the effects of the rule changes, Hollings and Triggs (1993) collected data on some recent games.

Typically, a game consists of bursts of activity which terminate when points are scored, if the ball is moved out of the field of play or if an infringement of the rules occurs. In 1992, the investigators gathered data on ten international matches which involved the New Zealand national team, the All Blacks. The first five games studied were the last international games played under the old rules, and the second set of five were the first internationals played under the new rules.

For each of the ten games, the data list the successive times (in seconds) of each passage of play in that game. One interest is to see whether the passage durations changed under the new rules.