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News, Reviews & Opinion - Sean Fagan - RL1908.com

Has there every been a more tiresome parrot-cry than that of AFL and Australian rules supporters: "Follow our game - the game invented by Australians for Australians".

Australian rules is an oddity of football evolution, not an innovative creation of Tom Wills and other Melbournians in 1858.

I read recently in an 1890s book by Walter Camp (father of American football) comments from a former Yale Uni footballer from the early 1870s (at that time Americans were playing a form of football that mixed soccer and rugby) - anyway, this bloke had moved to Melbourne in the mid-1890s and said that the Australian rules game was more or less the same game they were playing at Yale in the early 1870s.

Also note that Canadian football had since its inception in the 1870s always given 1 point for missing a goal, and "minor points" (missed goals and defenders' touching down ingoal) were mentioned in rugby results in the UK (though they didn't count).

The reason Australian rules became a unique football code (rules) is not because of the innovation of 19th century Melbournians, but because the first rules were made up in 1858 (before the formalised rules of soccer [Football Association 1863] and rugby union [RFU 1871]) and because of isolation.

Australian rules mixed the rules of both soccer and rugby codes, as indeed did a number of other variations in England before soccer and rugby became ubiquitous - but the isolation of Melbourne allowed Australian rules to evolve on its own path.

In terms of the origins and evolution of the football codes, Australian rules is akin to "Charles Darwin's finches", and Melbourne is the long-lost Galapagos Islands.