Dave’s Football Blog

When you dig around the edges of football’s origins, you find some odd variations on a theme. It’s odder still that anyone is actually bothering to play these variations, but in some places, traditions die harder than Morten Andersen’s career.

Case in point: the Harrow School in London has its own football game that it’s been playing for the better part of two centuries. It was officially codified in 1865, though it was played for decades before then and continues to be played now. It’s a relic from the days when every English boys school had its own rules for football and had to agree on compromise rules before intra-school matches.

So what’s Harrow Football like? Start with soccer, and make these changes:

• Play on the muddiest, nastiest muck of a pitch you can find.
• Use a leather ball that’s bigger than a soccer ball by a couple inches in diameter, “approximately spherical” in shape, and capable of soaking up as much mud as possible to get really, really heavy.
• Replace the goal with two goal posts and no crossbar, similar to the center posts in Aussie Rules. Kicking the ball between those two posts is a “base.” Whoever finishes the game with the most bases wins.
• In addition to traditional soccer tackling, allow shoulder-charging, but not from behind.
• Don’t allow handling — except to let players catch the ball when kicked from a teammate from a position ahead of them. The catcher then gets “yards,” which is basically a free running drop kick from up to three paces past the point of the catch. (Apparently, because of the size and weight of the ball, scoring bases from yards isn’t so easy.)

That pretty much sums it up. According to the Harrow School’s web site:

With so many Old Harrovians now playing the Association game (or soccer, as it was to be universally known), the School had a brief flirtation with the idea of converting to it in 1864. Harrow Football might have died then and there but the decision was made to stick to it owing to the state of the grounds.

Yes, Harrow Football only survives today because their playing area made Heinz Field look like the greens at Pebble Beach. Now that the school has better-quality fields, it appears the boys play rugby more than anything else — which is kind of ironic, given how many of soccer’s earliest laws were derived from Harrow Football.

Nevertheless, a few die-hards continue to shepherd the old Harrow Football code, because someone has to. It’s a bloody thankless job, being a historian and all.