Dave’s Football Blog

Rugby viewers in New Zealand last weekend got a little surprise with their sport — four minutes of hardcore porn. It seems a scheduling screw-up caused Prime TV to switch off from the game and over to Desperate Black Wives 2. As opposed to Desperate All-Black Wives, I suppose…

The mother in this news report — which, sadly, does not show the slip-up — seems strangely aghast and bemused at the same time. Or is that just the normal reaction to porn down in New Zealand?

(Spotted on Deadspin. Video spotted on FanHouse.)

How do you define chaos? Try a soccer match featuring two teams of five hundred.

That’s what the loonies at SUNY Oneonta organized this week with their “World’s Largest Soccer Game.” Their goal was to get 1,000 people on the pitch at once to play a game. This would be Cristiano Ronaldo’s worst nightmare, because there would be no room for him to fall over at the slightest contact.

Of course, the “World’s Largest Soccer Game” isn’t exactly a new idea. In fact, it borrows from one of the oldest American football games ever created.

Old Division Football was first played at Dartmouth College in the 1820s. The idea behind that game was to pit all the upperclassmen against all the underclassmen — and yes, I do mean “all” — in game where they had to kick a ball to the opponent’s end of a huge 375-yard field. The game itself faded out in the 1880s, though some version of it was played at Dartmouth until 1948.

There’s a research paper about Old Division Football that you can find here. Maybe after this stunt at Oneonta, Dartmouth will consider making their old game new again. It’s a piece of American football history that’s gotten awfully dusty.

(Thanks to reader Another Joe for the tip.)

We haven’t gotten a fresh batch of football links from our man Carlito in a while, so it’s high time we spotlighted the new “silliest goal celebration ever” — though really, was it any worse than Steve Smith’s change-the-diaper touchdown celebration? — and looked around for interesting stories that I missed in the last week.

After all, trying to follow every football code on the planet is hard. Posting a load of links to other sites makes it a little easier:

• The genius of basketball and the genius of soccer. [The Run of Play]
• Ten things you should know about non-league football in England. [Pitch Invasion]
• NFL games in England could be here to stay. [Reuters]
• Speaking of Reuters, when did there bloggers morph into hookers from Leeds? [Reuters Soccer Blog (twice)]
• Could St. Louis beat Philadelphia to win the 16th MLS franchise? [Goal]
• Are Australian punters more mentally stable than the American ones? [UWire via Deadspin]
• Aussie-style kicking is definitely helping NFL punters. [World Footy News]
• Speaking of Australia, it just dropped domestic rugby union. [Scrumbag]
• One Super 14 club is using Aussie Rules for training. [World Footy News]
• Gary Ablett would be great at rugby league. [Fox Sports Australia]
• Watching soccer is different when you play it… [SoccerLens]
• …and more fun when you’re drinking. [Center Holds It]
• Medieval mob football isn’t dead yet. [Washington Post]
• An open letter to the NFL from a frustrated fan. [Joe Sports Fan]
• Tecmo Bowl predicts this Sunday’s conference championships. [ArmchairGM]
• Would computers ever replace NFL coaches? [NFL FanHouse]
• The scandal of African player trafficking in soccer. [Guardian]
• Your African Cup of Nations preview. [That's On Point]

In addition to the African Cup of Nations kicking off this weekend, the two participants in Super Bowl XLII will be determined on Sunday, the Pool Stage of the Heineken Cup finishes up, and on Monday, we’ll find out if Liverpool still has what it takes to remain in the Top 4 when they head to Birmingham to face Aston Villa.

Enjoy your football, everyone!

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.

Regular reader Sean Fishlock pointed me to an interesting footy find — a sketch of Australia’s indigenous people, found at Museum Victoria, that features kids playing Marn Grook in the background. As you might recall, Marn Grook is the aboriginal kicking game that became the inspiration for Australian football’s high marking rule.

Dr. Michael Green, the head of Indigenous cultures at the museum, says he came across the picture by accident.

“I was looking at the image with my colleagues for different reasons entirely, and it suddenly struck me that those kids are playing footy,” he said. “It looks like the games of kick-to-kick we used to play in the school yard.”

Click on the snippet of the image here to see the entire sketch, which was part of an 1850s expedition by Victorian scientist William Blandowski. Notes included with the sketch say that the point of the game was to “never let the ball touch the ground.” It is reportedly the oldest image of footy yet discovered in Australia.

Granted, it’s probably still not quite as old as some Cuju artwork out there, but still, anything that lasts 150 years must be pretty good.

(Thanks, Sean!)

I was going to put this in comments, but really, it deserved its own post, because it gets to the heart of what this blog has become this year…

Commenter JRR thinks Thierry Henry has a point when he said he can’t understand why American football is called “football.” Here are a few lines from his comments under that post:

i hope you can prove me wrong with your history lesson as i am very interested to know how your take on football relates to the technical use of your feet with acheiving the desired objective of scoring a point, try, TD etc what ever you want to call it.

Let’s see. Are you playing the game on foot? Are you playing with a ball? Does the game involve kicking the ball through a goal or reaching a goal on your opponent’s end of the field? Sounds like football to me.

the issue then relates to which game came first - because if the rules for football were developed based on the round ball then where is the relevance with other codes using the same name for their sport.

Well, if you’re going to talk about which game game first, then Australian Football wins. The first official Aussie Rules were written in 1858, a full seven years before the Football Association was formed…

Oh, wait. The Aussie Rules were based on the Cambridge Rules, which were published in England in 1848. In fact, the Cambridge Rules had elements from both Association football and Australian football. So let’s go back and play that, since it came before everything…

Except it didn’t. They were playing ballown back in New Jersey in the 1820s. That came before the Cambridge Rules, so perhaps that should be the one true football…

Until you consider that there were football games in England and Italy centuries before then. The creators of Calcio Fiorentino published the rules of that game in 1580. Perhaps that is the one true football. Let’s convert all our pitches into sand pits and let everyone have it out…

Oh, wait. There’s a football that predates that — mob football, which was played during Shrovetide celebrations in medieval England. 1,000 guys from one side of town vs. 1,000 guys from the other side of town, all in a big struggling mob trying to get the ball to their opponent’s bell tower. That must be first, right? Let’s throw out every other football code and start from there…

Except football didn’t start there. You still had Cuju, Kemari and Harpastum before that, and Cuju probably took even more forms than modern football does today. 1,000 years ago, you probably had whole rooms full of Chinese Cuju fans arguing over which game was “the real Cuju.”

Do you see the problem here? You simply can’t call any one game “football” and leave it at that. All these games we call football evolved over time, but they are all come from the same source, and they all share a common concept — playing on a field, on foot, with a ball, attempting to score a goal. In fact, every modern football game involves kicking the ball through a goal in some way.

Whether you run with the ball or kick the ball, it’s all football. That’s the point that both you and Thierry Henry are missing by a mile. You’ll never see Henry bounce a penalty kick off the corner flag quite like this.

personally i feel what ever you want to call your game needs to reflect what happens in that sport (or atleast differentiate it from other sports) for this reason, “soccer is football” and other codes using the name are harming their global popularity.

Give me one example of how any other code of football is harming its worldwide popularity by calling itself football. How fast did Wembley Stadium sell out for that Giants-Dolphins game? Likewise, I only see soccer getting bigger in places where other football codes dominate, and different types of football are coming into vogue every year. Football adapts and evolves all the time. I can’t be the only one that sees this.

as far as “soccer” goes, we are a country that plays “football” - if you are a historian then you will remember we officially changed the national games name from soccer to football - hence FFA aligning oursleves to the rest of the world.

You’re joking, right? Dude, you even know where the word “soccer” comes from? The answer is right here on this blog. Click here and learn something.

Seriously, they should teach this shit in college or something. “Football Evolution 101″ might start out as a running joke as “another typical class for dumb jocks,” but once people realized what was being taught and the conversations and arguments that came out of it, it would become the most popular elective on campus within two years.

I want tenure, bitches.

(An aside: as I finished typing this, my MP3 player started playing the latest episode of Coverville. First song — Prince’s cover of “What if God Was One of Us?”. I don’t know why, but that seems strangely appropriate right now…)

The good folks at The Offside found this video reenacting the traditional Japanese football game of Kemari, which I wrote about a couple of months ago.

I’m sure it was a simpler time 1,000 years ago, but man, if I were a kid visiting Japan, and this was what the fam stopped to watch, I’d be tugging on my dad’s pantleg and saying, “Whennawe gonna ride Steel Dragon? Whennawe gonna ride Steel Dragon? Huh? Huh?”

On the other hand, if we stopped to watch this… well, things would be very different, wouldn’t they?

Last Friday, those lovable scamps at We Are the Postmen found this video…

…just your typical montage of quirky stuff that happens in the game of Association football, like scoring goals off your face and taking a curtain call in front of a whole bunch of empty bleachers.

This particular sequence in the middle of the montage, though, got my attention…

It’s funny because it shows a guy punching the ball into the goal — which, of course, you can’t do in soccer, because using your hands makes you a wanker.

But what if it didn’t make you a wanker? What if the laws of the game allowed this?

Consider, if you will, the old American game of ballown, which first became popular at the College of New Jersey in the 1820s. This was essentially a full-contact football game in which you couldn’t catch the ball, but you could either kick it or beat it with your fists. You could also physically block other players from approaching the ball-handler — yet another twist Walter Camp & his generation added to rugby to turn it into American football. (Blocking in rugby is called “obstruction,” and it’s a penalty. Seriously.)

In fact, this early game of ballown may have been the basis for the first intercollegiate football game in 1869 between Princeton and Rutgers. It was a completely different game than modern college football, and if some Canadians hadn’t introduced rugby to Harvard footballers five years later, American football might look very different today.

The idea of using your hands may have been frowned upon at the early Football Association meetings, but many American fans — especially American football fans — still scoff at soccer for disallowing use of hands. After all, Americans have a rich history of working with their hands. Everybody loves a “handyman” in this country. Home Depot and Lowe’s have been making billions off that concept for years now.

So what happens if we take that old ballown rule of striking the ball with your fist and add it to the modern Association football game? What does the game become then? Wouldn’t it be interesting to find out?

Now this is real Italian football. You don’t see any Calcio Fiorentino players flopping to the ground like dead fish. No, these are men of the renaissance, men of nobility, men who dress up in the colors of their town, jump into a sand pit with two goals and a ball and beat the living crap out of each other. Forza!

Calcio Fiorentino (which is now called Calcio Storico, or “Historic Football”) was once the primary football game of Italy. It might have been a direct descendant of Harpastum, though it probably evolved into something else after so many centuries. Sometimes the Pope would jump in and start kicking ass and taking names. Presumably, anyone who tackled the Pope would be forgiven for it later.

The first written rules were published in 1580, though the game itself was played for centuries before then. In fact, the most famous Calcio Fiorentino match was played on February 17, 1530, when the city of Florence was under siege by the Spanish army. Playing a Calcio match in full view of enemy soldiers was the ultimate message of defiance, and that message was, “You can take our homes, you can take our land, you can take our women, and you can even take our dignity, but you will never take our football! So there! Eat it!”

Calcio died out by 1739, but it was resurrected in the 1930s by Benito Mussolini to celebrate Italian pride. They still play it in Florence today. It’s mostly an excuse for the locals to punch out those bastards who nailed their girlfriends — which is probably just how it was back then, too. Settling scores has always been a big part of football, after all.

You wanna know where football really comes from? Here, let me show you…

800 years ago, football was not an orderly battle between two teams of 11 people on a precisely measured pitch. No, football was a city-wide brawl. You had 1,000 guys on one team and 1,000 more on the other, and everyone played, and the playing field was the entire town.

What’s that? An offside rule? Please. You wanna know what a foul was in this football game? Manslaughter. Headbutting a guy in the chest was nothing. You could punch a guy in the head, kick him in the knee, knee him in the nuts, whatever. Is he still breathing? Yes? Play on!

Oh, and no cars or grocery bags. It’s football, dumbass. If you can’t carry a ball by your own power, there’s no use for you.

Yes, the only thing that mattered in this football game was that you got that ball to your opponent’s goal at the edge of town, and you used any means necessary to do it, whether it be kicking the ball or kicking that schmo in the shins. And when the game was over, everyone patched up their wounds, shook hands and said, “Let’s do it again next year.”

That’s where all your modern football games come from, kids, and that’s just how it was right up until the Industrial Revolution. In some places, it’s still like that. After all, why ruin a good tradition?

Yeah. Try playing that kind of football, JaMarcus Russell. Then we’ll find out how glad you really are to be in Oakland.