In the early 1800s, British football begins to slowly take a more orderly form, becoming a sport for privileged boys at elite boarding schools like Eton, Charterhouse and Rugby—several of these schools are in towns with long folk football histories. Middleclass and aristocratic young men take the past and forge a future.
Britain’s political, theological, and military leaders encourage their heirs to passionately pursue football, viewing it as a vigorous activity that nurtures a boy’s “Anglo-Saxon pluck” and sends him on a path to become a virtuous, manly servant to the British Empire.
*** This is a companion article to the “Who invented this SPORT?” podcast on the Sports History Network, authored by David Neil Drews and co-hosted by Roger Harb. Below is the episode. ***
Hughes’ narrator gives us more play by play:
“The ball is kicked out and caught beautifully . . . trust Crab Jones—he has made a small hole with his heel for the ball to lie on . . . he is resting on one knee with his eye on old Brooke, who shouts ‘Now!’ Crab places the ball at the word, old Brooke kicks . . . there it flies, straight between the two posts, some five feet above the crossbar, an unquestioned goal.”
American football fans haven’t seen a dropkick since 2006, when New England Patriot Doug Flutie successfully dropkicked an extra point, but it lives on in Australian rules football like placekicking does in American football and very much like Tom Brown’s Old Brooke executed it.
Tom Brown’s Schooldays presents a sport gaining structure with playing and scoring methods and out of bounds rules, Hughes doesn’t speak of infractions, but we know from other sources that kicking an opponent in the shins was allowed at Rugby and other schools into the late 1860s. The practice was called hacking.
Folk football’s brutality was passed down to Victorian football, but the ancestorial version was recast from a boundless game of two mobs to a more regulated and structured competition played on a field measured by yards instead of miles.
Hughes’ narrator gives us more play by play:
“The ball is kicked out and caught beautifully . . . trust Crab Jones—he has made a small hole with his heel for the ball to lie on . . . he is resting on one knee with his eye on old Brooke, who shouts ‘Now!’ Crab places the ball at the word, old Brooke kicks . . . there it flies, straight between the two posts, some five feet above the crossbar, an unquestioned goal.”
American football fans haven’t seen a dropkick since 2006, when New England Patriot Doug Flutie successfully dropkicked an extra point, but it lives on in Australian rules football like placekicking does in American football and very much like Tom Brown’s Old Brooke executed it.
Tom Brown’s Schooldays presents a sport gaining structure with playing and scoring methods and out of bounds rules, Hughes doesn’t speak of infractions, but we know from other sources that kicking an opponent in the shins was allowed at Rugby and other schools into the late 1860s. The practice was called hacking.
Folk football’s brutality was passed down to Victorian football, but the ancestorial version was recast from a boundless game of two mobs to a more regulated and structured competition played on a field measured by yards instead of miles.
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