The Sporting Hero Who Thought Outside the Box
One hundred and fifty years ago next
month a bunch of blokes went down the pub and invented football. The 1860s
marked the high Victorian summer of British sporting inventiveness. It seemed
that whenever two or three men gathered together they created, or systematized,
another great sport.
Inventing a sport requires three
essentials: power, self-confidence and leisure. Victorian Britain had all three
in abundance. Sport was the hobby of Empire, and most of the world’s most
popular games emerged from Britain: cricket, golf, boxing, tennis, rugby, snooker
and more.
If one man embodied the Victorian
spirit of sporting creativity, it was Ebenezer Cobb Morley, a solicitor from
Hull, whose legacy has brought sporting pleasure to millions across the world,
but whose name is all but unknown. As we prepare for football’s 150th
birthday, it is surely time to remember Morley and celebrate a spirit of
sporting ingenuity that has all but vanished.
On October 26, 1863, Morley gathered
a dozen former English public school men at the Freemasons Tavern in Lincoln’s
Inn Fields to try and make sense of football. The result was the Football
Association, the first formal rules of the game and the birth of what would
eventually become soccer – the word probably comes from the abbreviation of
‘association’ into ‘soc’, and thus ‘soccer’.
Football dates back to the Middle
Ages, but until Morley called his meeting, it was closer to chaotic brawling
than organized sport. Different teams played by different rules, and sometimes
by none at all, some wearing pointy hats that made them look like garden
gnomes. Rival public schools clung to their own versions: one set of rules
could be played in the first half, and another in the second. In some schools,
younger boys served as goal posts.
Violence was integral. Traditional
Shrove Tuesday games might range over open countryside and involve hundreds of
players. A Frenchman, observing one such game in Derby in the early 19th
century, remarked: ‘If the Englishmen call this playing, it would be impossible
to say what they call fighting.’
The first 13 rules drawn up by Morley
and his chums described a game far closer to rugby: handling was allowed, and
there was no forward passing, no crossbar and no goalkeeper. Players were
forbidden to wear boots with projecting nails or iron plates, or to attach
gutta percha, a hard rubber substance ideal for stomping on opponents, to their
heels.
The modern game might benefit,
however, from some of Morley’s laws: under the original rules there were no
penalties, no shoving or pushing, and pitches could be up to 100 yards wide and
200 yards long, which might make for a more fluid game.
The association’s rules were revised
almost as soon as they were written down. A new offside rule allowed the ball
to be kicked forward to another player, so long as there were at least three
(later two) opponents between the kicker and the goal. Queen’s Park Club in
Glasgow then came up with the truly game-changing tactic of ‘combination play’
– passing the ball rapidly from one player to another, a technique that utterly
flummoxed English public schoolboys trained to charge wildly at the opposition.
Partly as a result, Scotland lost only
two of the first sixteen matches against England.
Once the rules were established, they
became all but immutable. The fluidity of sport in its early stages gave way to
rigidity. Britain invented most sports when it ruled the waves but then, in a
reflection of imperial hubris, flatly refused to waive the rules once they had
been established.
Religion, politics, literature all
evolve over time, but the major sports have hardly changed in the past century
and even the most minor tweak is accompanied by vast gusts of controversy. As
sport becomes more professional, its adherence to set rules becomes ever more
fixed.
It is a measure of Britain’s imperial
reach that boxing still sticks to the rules endorsed by the Marquess of
Queensbury in 1867. (Queensbury didn’t actually devise the rules: that was done
by Welshman John Graham Chambers, another of history’s unsung sporting
architects.)
Almost the only substantial change in
cricket has been the acceptance of overarm bowling, an innovation initially
dismissed as a ‘singular, novel and unfair style’. Adolf Hitler played only
once, with British PoWs during the First World War and tried to change the laws
of the game by banning pads and making the ball even harder – a crime, in the
eyes of some Englishmen, on a par with invading Poland.
Of the major sports, only rugby
regularly attempts to improve itself by altering he rules. The others remain
immovable. Tennis was invented for a Victorian garden and has hardly changed
since, even though the power-hitting of the modern game means that a better
sporting spectacle would be created with a slower ball, wider court and higher
net.
The football goal remains the same
size (8ft high and 8 yards wide) as it was in Victorian times, even though
human beings are generally taller, and goalies vastly so.
Next month there will be a flurry of
events marking the birth of modern football, but it is also an opportunity to celebrate
the heyday of sporting entrepreneurship when people in pubs sat around
discussing how to invent, regulate and improve a multiplicity of sports, and
proving that sport is an intellectual as well as an athletic pastime. Britain
led the way in devising modern sports; it should also take the lead in revising
them.
Morley drew up the outlines of what
would eventually become the beautiful game; today he lies at the edge of an
unlovely and abandoned graveyard on Barnes Common, despite a contribution to world
culture that is without equal.
Ebenezer Morley, Britain’s forgotten
football star, is my candidate for the fourth plinth in Trafalgar Square: for
what better symbol of Britain could there be than a statue of a man with
Victorian whiskers, a pint of beer in one hand and a football in the other?
Adapted from: Sporting hero who thought outside the box,
Ben Macintyre, The Times, 27.09.2013.
