I'm not completely sure whether the tiactics are historically accurate or not, but it's an interesting watch anyway:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d8LiQFnkuJY

Looks pretty on the training ground but can they do it for real?

British shield tactics are based on Anglo-Saxon shieldwall. Light guys behind as snatch mobs.
While a student at Lancaster I was in police riot training in Runcorn a couple of times, great fun to be a rioter.

Looks totally staged. Bearing in mind that the police outnumbered the "rioters" by about three to one, why didn't they just wade in and arrest them?

No one went round the flanks either. I'd have headed straight for the unshielded side myself...

It is a demo.

During the Anti-Springbok tour protests in NZ in 1981 one of the protest organisers was an Ancients wargamer

The protestors tactics were much better than normal and on the day of the test a smallish group of protestors got within a few hundred meters of the ground with only a hand full of cops to stop them ...

One of the teams scored at that point and a huge roar went up from the crowd ...


Strangely the protestors couldn't 'force' their way past despite out numbering the cops 

Hard to imagine that anyone could object to us, isn't it?

I thought everyone was pretending they were 'enclosed' in a street with buildings down each side.....But then a lot of them cheated.
Cheers - Phil

Any combat training is going to be unrealistic.  Its to build 'muscle memory' so in the real thing you do the right thing without thinking.  The point is what works, keeps working if the situation is the same.

So yes, unrealistic.  But you get 200 wargamers together and recreate that- you won't, despite we 'all know' how it's supposed to work.  Training like this means you know when to go, what happens next. Do it enough and it doesn't matter if it's 50 cadets facing you, or 500 real rioters.  You know the drill.

Impressed with the passage of lines at full tilt, and retreat in column of platoons!

This is them doing it for real.



Doesn't have all the pretty running, but look at the difference between discipline and mob:  "They do this, immediately do that."

not sure about the Roman bit, But bloody impressive all the same.