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Speaking of 12 year old science pupils, if you are running at full speed and throw the ball flat, the ball would not keep up with the passer when watched from the side.
Friction would make the ball appear to slow down vs the passer. Friction would affect the passer too but he keeps putting energy to keep up the speed, the ball does not.
As someone who likes to educate you'd appreciate getting the science right, i assume.
What you are talking about is Air resistance. While it is a force that affects objects that move through the air, and there will be some influence on a moving football, it really only applies in any practical sense to fast-moving objects like aeroplanes, and would only be naked-eye detectable in slow moving small objects that had a long flight time, such as a kicked football. The influence of air resistance on a football travelling for fractions of a second at under 10m/sec is so tiny it can be discounted in a case such as this, particularly as the surface of the ball is so smooth. The shape of a rugby ball (a prolate spheroid) is also a variable that, while it influences the flight of the ball, would be minuscule.
I did some back of the envelope calculations based on the drag co-efficient formulae on this page (Which is quite interesting as it talks about air resistance with footballs)...
http://www.forbes.com/sites/chadorz...oying-physics-of-air-resistance/#1589946910bd
A rugby ball, not spinning or tumbling, but presenting its widest possible aspect (best case for maximum air resistance), travelling 10m/sec (that's 10 second 100m pace) on a 1 second flight (longer that the time this ball spent in flight), would slow down over the one second period by 0.048 m/s (so it would slow down from 10.000 m/s to 9.952 m/s.
You would need a Doppler radar to measure that; you would certainly have no chance of detecting that change with the unaided eye