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Football evolution: AFL and football's common ancestor

Roar Pro
4th October, 2012
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Roar Pro
4th October, 2012
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The humble town of Sheffield in Northern England provides both Australian Rules and association football with a surprisingly common ancestor.

The game of people chasing, handling and kicking a ball has a long history in the British Isles, dating back as far as the eighth century. Other cultures have a similar history but as we know, most modern types of the game of football have their beginnings in Britain.

Cambridge University was the first to codify a set of rules for ‘football’ in 1848 and were followed by prominent schools and colleges, but not adopted by the whole country. Many places developed their own rules, most notably the Sheffield Football Club in 1857, credited with being the oldest association football club in the world (technically the world’s oldest football club can be traced to Edinburgh in the 1820’s).

Sheffield Football Club developed the game known as ‘Sheffield Rules’. It was played for the first 20 years of the club’s existence and was one of the most popular games of football in the 1860’s and 1870’s.

The game shared many similarities with Australian Rules in that there was no offside rule (this was eventually dropped by the Sheffield game). There were also similarities in kicking off, kicking out, throwing the ball back into play and the ‘fair catch’ as it was called in Sheffield Rules, where the play would stop if a player caught the ball before it dropped to the ground.

Sheffield Rules also allowed a player to push or hit the ball with the hand but disallowed holding the ball (although this rule was somewhat relaxed when playing).

Some researchers believe the link from Sheffield Rules to Victorian/Australian Rules came through Henry Cresswick, who emmigrated to Victoria from Sheffield. He played cricket for Victoria with Tom Wills and three other founders of the Melbourne Football Club in the 1857/1858 season. The club was started the next year.

The link comes from the belief that Henry was the nephew of Nathaniel Cresswick, one of the founders of the Sheffield Football club.

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For two decades, the game of Sheffield Rules rivalled and exceeded in popularity the game followed by a little group known as the Football Association, formed six years after the Sheffield club.

As history will tell us, the FA would win the ‘code war’ of the 1800’s. Traces of the Sheffield game however did find their way into the modern game of football.

Sheffield Rules gave us innovations such as goals with crossbars, heading the ball, corners, free kicks, throw ins, the player position known as the ‘kick through’ – which became known as the forward.

Games under floodlights, umpires, umpire flags and the ‘corkscrew’ shot (bending the ball in flight) were also innovations that came from the city of Sheffield.

Family histories are complicated aren’t they?

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