Soccer rivisionist

[NoobPie]

Who is this muppet?

https://www.insidesport.com.au/news/is-this-football-or-afl-512927

Apparently this guy is actually a professional academic.


“The problem is all of the stories that are told of that period are told by people who are Australian rules supporters who love Australian rules and who see everything that happens in that period in their own image.”

Seriously...someone is going to establish a causal link between repeatedly tonking a ball with your head and completely losing all self awareness

 

[Our Game]

Who is this muppet?

https://www.insidesport.com.au/news/is-this-football-or-afl-512927

Apparently this guy is actually a professional academic.


“The problem is all of the stories that are told of that period are told by people who are Australian rules supporters who love Australian rules and who see everything that happens in that period in their own image.”

Seriously...someone is going to establish a causal link between repeatedly tonking a ball with your head and completely losing all self awareness

What a dickhead!Australian Football has very little in common with soccer.

Wills the father of Victorian/Australian "rules" Football went to Rugby School and played rugby there,
He adapted our game from Rugby and added more catching the ball to hone catching skills for cricketers during the winter months.Yes the first games were played with a round ball but that is about the only thing about our game early days that resembled soccer.

 

[Gigantor]

Who is this muppet?

https://www.insidesport.com.au/news/is-this-football-or-afl-512927

Apparently this guy is actually a professional academic.


“The problem is all of the stories that are told of that period are told by people who are Australian rules supporters who love Australian rules and who see everything that happens in that period in their own image.”

Seriously...someone is going to establish a causal link between repeatedly tonking a ball with your head and completely losing all self awareness

He is a revisionist.

He also writes often about how big soccer was before WWI and how it contributed more the war effort and stuff like that.

That someone would read so much into a drawing like that from the period shows that he doesn't know too much.

For starters, we have endless documentary evidence about the game during that period.

Also, people forget that it was still very much an amateur activity at the time (1874), there were no strict rules about the size and shape of the ground or the ball that could be used. People see a roundish ball and assume that it's soccer, which means they are putting a modern lens on the earliest days of the game (had only been going for 15 years at that point). The fact is that players would use whatever they could get their hand on, and play in whatever empty field they could find, regardless of its shape.

The last key point is that all the footballs of the period would have looked like a huge mass of people chasing the pig skin around a paddock.

 

[Professor Knowall]

The article is obviously a work of nonsense. As Gigantor correctly states, there is much documentary evidence from the period to thoroughly disprove the so-called "soccer origin" of our game as claimed in the article, based as it is solely on the extremely thin evidence of a single 1874 drawing (which to me looks very little like soccer in any case, with 2 players knocked to the ground).

All one has to refer to is the 1874 rules, e.g. rule #6 "Any player catching the ball directly from the foot or leg ... may call 'Mark'; he then has a free kick ...", or #7 "The ball may be taken in hand at any time ... and no player shall run with the ball unless he strikes it against the ground in every five or six yards ...". Then there's rule 8 "... Holding is allowed while while the player has the ball in hand ...".

These rules (which had derived from the earlier rules of 1866, which in turn was a revision of the 1860 and 1859 rules) were clearly never derived from soccer. Of course there is also quite a lot of other contemporary evidence from the 1870's, including references to the unique to our game of jumping up to take high marks. There's much more I could add, but that'll do for now. The article is rubbish.

 

[DERIBERATE]

The article is obviously a work of nonsense. As Gigantor correctly states, there is much documentary evidence from the period to thoroughly disprove the so-called "soccer origin" of our game as claimed in the article, based as it is solely on the extremely thin evidence of a single 1874 drawing (which to me looks very little like soccer in any case, with 2 players knocked to the ground).

All one has to refer to is the 1874 rules, e.g. rule #6 "Any player catching the ball directly from the foot or leg ... may call 'Mark'; he then has a free kick ...", or #7 "The ball may be taken in hand at any time ... and no player shall run with the ball unless he strikes it against the ground in every five or six yards ...". Then there's rule 8 "... Holding is allowed while while the player has the ball in hand ...".

These rules (which had derived from the earlier rules of 1866, which in turn was a revision of the 1860 and 1859 rules) were clearly never derived from soccer. Of course there is also quite a lot of other contemporary evidence from the 1870's, including references to the unique to our game of jumping up to take high marks. There's much more I could add, but that'll do for now. The article is rubbish.

In the 1863 rules of assoc. football, a player who caught the ball was awarded a free kick.

 

[Professor Knowall]

In the 1863 rules of assoc. football, a player who caught the ball was awarded a free kick.

And it was very soon abolished in 1866, 8 years prior to 1874. The original 1863 soccer rules (which were drafted 4 years AFTER the original rules of our Australian game) also never allowed for running with the ball at all nor for any holding a person with the ball, unlike our game.

 

[Gigantor]

And it was very soon abolished in 1866, 8 years prior to 1874. The original 1863 soccer rules (which were drafted 4 years AFTER the original rules of our Australian game) also never allowed for running with the ball at all nor for any holding a person with the ball, unlike our game.

soccer people are often unaware that the rules of Association Football were first codified in 1863, four years after the Melbourne Rules.

At the time, the Melbourne papers noted how the English rules approximated Melbourne Rules

 

[DERIBERATE]

soccer people are often unaware that the rules of Association Football were first codified in 1863, four years after the Melbourne Rules.

At the time, the Melbourne papers noted how the English rules approximated Melbourne Rules

Claiming that assoc. football was somehow invented in Melbourne would be, in your words, revisionism. At least an order of magnitude worse than what you are suggesting of Dr. Syson.

 

[NoobPie]

The article is obviously a work of nonsense. As Gigantor correctly states, there is much documentary evidence from the period to thoroughly disprove the so-called "soccer origin" of our game as claimed in the article, based as it is solely on the extremely thin evidence of a single 1874 drawing (which to me looks very little like soccer in any case, with 2 players knocked to the ground).

All one has to refer to is the 1874 rules, e.g. rule #6 "Any player catching the ball directly from the foot or leg ... may call 'Mark'; he then has a free kick ...", or #7 "The ball may be taken in hand at any time ... and no player shall run with the ball unless he strikes it against the ground in every five or six yards ...". Then there's rule 8 "... Holding is allowed while while the player has the ball in hand ...".

These rules (which had derived from the earlier rules of 1866, which in turn was a revision of the 1860 and 1859 rules) were clearly never derived from soccer. Of course there is also quite a lot of other contemporary evidence from the 1870's, including references to the unique to our game of jumping up to take high marks. There's much more I could add, but that'll do for now. The article is rubbish.

The irony is the two players knocked to the ground could very well be playing what was then soccer (apart from the fact that there is no documented evidence of soccer being played in Melbourne at the time and volumes of documented evidence that Australian football was being played in front of the biggest crowds in the world)

When the football association formed in 1863, not only did the mark still exist, there was an offside rule like modern rugby

The game differed from rugby in that you weren’t allowed to run with the ball or “hack” and trip. Other then that it would have largely been two opposing mauls pushing for territory.

Trying to reclaim the myriad proto football games played in schools, villages and fairs as its exclusive history is absurd. Trying to claim that activity in Australia is way beyond absurd.

 

[NoobPie]

Claiming that assoc. football was somehow invented in Melbourne would be, in your words, revisionism. At least an order of magnitude worse than what you are suggesting of Dr. Syson.

No one has claimed that. That’s called a straw man

Giganter claimed melbourne papers at the time noted the similarity between the soccer rules and the football rules written 4 years previously.

 

[BobbyMorri]

Yeah, not sure what he is talking about. Obviously trying to sell his book.

 

[BobbyMorri]

Since the Brownlow has stopped the count.

Aussie Rules looked a lot like soccer, which looked a lot like Rugby back then. There is a reason they all want to be called football(or a degree of that) They all come from the same chain of thought and through the same systems. All were a rolling maul which none of us could tell which one was which with a degree of certainty. nothing like the current games. What happened is that they evolved separately with different importance to different characteristics.

Hence, what he saying is a bit of a stretch.

 

[Professor Knowall]

The actual documentary evidence shows that Wills, along with Thompson, Hammersley and Smith, meeting to set football rules in 1859, consulted the school rules of Eton, Harrow, Rugby and Winchester, but all (particularly Wills) decided none of these school boy games were at all suitable for adults.

They thus quite deliberately devised an original brand new code, suitable to be played by adults in the local conditions. Further changes were made in 1860, so that the game rapidly evolved away from the early English schoolboy games that provided the initial template - so much so that Thompson, editor of the 1860 ‘Victorian Cricket Guide’, omitted the Rugby and Eton Rules that had previously been included in the 1859 edition and only included the local rules, writing – “… for we seem to have agreed to a code of our own … the game in Victoria is now universally played”..