three innings of four shots each before their opponents reply from the opposite end. At the end of the quarter, teams swap ends and play an additional three innings for a total of 24 shots per player. The team with the most goals at the end of the playing period is declared the winner. The most common technique for striking the ring is called tunnelling: the player stands facing away from the goals, feet either side of the plate; the short-handled mallet is then swung between the player's legs to strike the ring. The less common technique, used in the early years and more common in the women's version of the game, is known as sideswiping. With sideswiping, the player stands to the side of the plate and strikes the ring with a long handled mallet similar to a croquet mallet. History Trugo is said to have been inspired by the activities at the Newport Railway Workshops in the 1920s. According to tradition, workers knocked around discarded buffer rings from railway carriages in their spare time. In some versions of the story, the ring was hit along the aisle of a carriage with the goal being to shoot the ring out the end door without touching any of the seats. Alternatively, the buffer ring was said to have been struck along a piece of disused rail track either for distance or through makeshift goals. Either way, no source from this period has been found to support these oral traditions. Similarly, references to the length of the court being the length of a railway carriage or a span of track with the width of the goal posts being the width of the track, have not been substantiated. Some truth may yet be found in these stories but like the origins of many sports legend and myth prevail. The first historical references to the sport appear in the 1930s with the establishment of trugo clubs along the rail line between Footscray and Williamstown. The earliest of these clubs was Yarraville which was established in 1936 by a former railway worker Thomas Grieves and a local engineer Claus Ebeling. Thomas Grieves is generally accredited as the inventor of the game taking it from railway workshops to the streets of Newport and then on to the Footscray flats just below the Yarraville Gardens by the late 1920s. However, it was not until 1937 that