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

The AFL is marking 150 years of Australian rules football in 2008 - the same year that rugby league is celebrating its centenary.

Is this an attempt by the AFL to rain on rugby league's centenary parade, or merely a quirk of history?

Australian football has lived in isolation. Like the fauna unique to the Galapagos Islands, the Victorian-born code has evolved oblivious of the outside world, and forgotten its true origins. Charles Darwin would have loved Australian rules football.

Its historians are apparently unconscious to the origins and history of other football codes and their customs, and seem to have had made little or no use of publications and archives outside of Melbourne. It appears that all in the Victorian-born game believe their game to be an entirely Australian invention.

Anyone suggesting that the game of Australian football was born in 1858, needs to address the fact that the so-called first match (Scotch College v Melbourne Grammar) was played under modified Rugby School rules.

However, rather than modifying rules being an example of Australian ingenuity, it was merely a Rugby School custom and no different to what was happening in football matches across the British Empire and North America during the 1850s and 1860s - informal teams and formal clubs all their had their own favoured variation of the rules of Rugby School.

Completely ignored by the Australian rules community is the football traditions in place at Rugby School, and how these customs continued to determine rules for matches outside of Rugby School until the formation of recognised football bodies (e.g. in England the Football Association in 1863 and the Rugby Football Union in 1871).

Prior to 1845 there were no documented playing rules at Rugby School. Rules were determined and varied by the students themselves each year, a tradition that continued even after the rules were written down for the first time in 1845.

The rules at Rugby School were more of a guide than a doctrine. It was within the prerogative of the students to meet and agree before matches and then decide which rules were to be added or deleted. Such "prerogative", or custom, continued when rugby football spread outside the School.

Rules for matches between schools, clubs and scratch-teams were decided specifically for each match between the captains of the two teams involved - as indeed happened in Melbourne in 1858. There was no new football code born that day. The next match no doubt would have used another variation of the preferred Rugby School rules for the day.

The only connection between the Scotch College match in 1858 and Australian rules is that the game was played in Melbourne.

The match holds importance - as Australia's first recorded rugby match.

The following year saw the birth of the Melbourne FC, founded by Tom Wills and others. In an effort to end the pre-match haggling of which rules were to apply, they adopted for their club's "in-house" games all the rules of Rugby School, making just two variations.

So the first rules of the Melbourne FC were still within the traditional ambit of how rugby rules were varied for matches at Rugby School. Indeed, few rugby clubs formed in Britain in the pre-RFU era (pre 1871) adopted the rules of Rugby School in their entirety.

More importantly, there was no uniquely Australian rule added to the game, and the Melbourne FC could be said to have been formed as a rugby club (thus being not only Australia's first "football" club, but its first rugby club). If anything, the rules of the Melbourne club have a striking resemblance to those used by the Sheffield FC in England (formed in 1857).

Significantly, the adoption of rules by the Melbourne FC did nothing to end pre-match arguments over rules against the teams the club played against - it only ended arguments for internal matches within the club itself. Hence they were called "Melbourne rules" i.e. the rules of the Melbourne FC. In England, the rules of the Sheffield FC were called "Sheffield rules".

A football code is not born until a group of like-minded football clubs collectively agree to a unique code of laws to play by.

The first time that any clubs in Melbourne agreed to follow agreed football rules for the coming winter was in 1866 (using the rules of the Melbourne FC).

It was also at this point that the first unique football rule appeared in Melbourne football: "The ball may be taken in hand at any time, but not carried further than is necessary for a kick, and no player shall run with the ball unless he strikes it against the ground every five or six yards."

Unsurprisingly, in England, the development of every club having its own variations on Rugby School rules (and/or other schools) reached a point where it became obvious to all that some uniformity needed to be achieved if clubs were to play each other regularly, and to end the pre-match negotiations and on-field disputes over rules.

The first attempt led to the formation of the Football Association (FA) in 1863 The meetings to form the FA and find agreement on rules initially included clubs who followed variations of the Rugby School rules.

However, agreement could not be reached, and the Rugby-devotees settled upon their own code of rules with the formation of the Rugby Football Union (RFU) in 1871. Thus soccer (1863) and rugby union (1871) can now point to their founding dates of their codes.

In Melbourne, there was no attempt to follow the laws of the FA or the RFU. No doubt, being Australia's largest city at that time, (together with its geographic isolation), meant there was no compelling need to find uniformity in its football rules with those being used in Sydney or elsewhere.

Formal agreement amongst the Melbourne clubs over rules came with the formation of the VFA in 1877 - at that point a full set of rules was drawn up and agreed upon by the founding clubs.

Arguably, this is when "Australian rules" was born (similar to soccer being born in 1863 under the FA, rugby union in 1871 under the RFU, and rugby league in 1895 under the RFL).

Until the 1890s Australian football was played on rectangular rugby marked fields and used an on-side rugby kick-off to begin matches and after a goal. In 1888 the game was still so close to rugby that a touring British team found little difficulty in crossing-codes for “Victorian rules” matches against South Melbourne, Fitzroy, Essendon, Port Melbourne and Carlton (the latter game drawing 25,000 to the MCG).

Scoring 1 point for a behind didn't start until the VFL (the fore-runner of the AFL) was born in 1897 - nor is it unique - with "minor points" existing in 19th century rugby, and surviving today in Canadian football (which also evolved from rugby).

A former Yale University footballer living in Melbourne in the 1890s wrote to the "father of American football", Walter Camp, and described the Melbourne game as little different to the "football" Americans were playing in the early 1870s, "a mix of soccer and rugby" - the same words used by rugby league's Dally Messenger when relating his Australian rules football experiences to English newspapers in 1907.

It is a nonsense for the AFL to claim Australian rules football began in 1858 - it can claim its origins back to 1858, but any suggestion that the Scotch College v Melbourne Grammar game was played as Australian rules football is plainly wrong.

The only recognised and accepted means to determine the birth of a football code, is to examine the date that a group of like-minded clubs met and agreed on a set of rules to play by.

In the case of Australian rules, that was the VFA in 1877. In the case of rugby union (in Australia), this was in 1874 with the formation of the NSWRU.

The first professional football code to be established in Australia was rugby league with the first season of the NSWRL in 1908 (which evolved into the NRL).

No doubt the AFL will persist with its celebrations of 1858 in 2008, but it will be commemorating Australia's first recorded game under Rugby rules, not Australian rules.

Charles Darwin would have been intrigued by Australian rules football - a football code that, born out of compromise and not invention, has lived its entire existence is isolation.

The result is its ignorant perception that all football history in Melbourne belongs to its breed alone.

A related article was published in The Sunday Telegraph - 18 November 2007 Read article here