So who came up with Australian Rules football?
Australian Rules football emerged from humble beginnings.
Some say it was the evolution of a running game played by
Australia's Indigenous people, others say it was just a
more organized version of a cross between Gaelic football
and hurling, as played by miners in the mud and dust of
the Victorian goldfields. Either way, "footy",
as we know it, was kick-started by Thomas
Wentworth Wills, his cousin Henry Harrison and a couple
of other keen sportsmen in the 1850's. Wills had spent time
in England, playing cricket for Kent and captaining Rugby
school in the sport of the same name. He returned to Australia
and was reportedly alarmed at how the Victorian cricketers
lost condition over winter. Aerobics hadn't been invented
back then and Wills feared that his beloved rugby would
be too punishing on the harder Australian ground, so he
and Harrison were instrumental in forming the Melbourne
Football Club in 1858, as an off-shoot of the already
famed Melbourne Cricket
Club.
On August 7, 1858, the first officially recorded Australian
Rules football match was contested between two large Melbourne
schools, Scotch College and Melbourne Grammar. With 40 players
per team and ad-hoc rule decisions, the game was a wild
and disorganized affair played between goalposts planted
half a mile apart. The match went from noon until dark with
Scotch somehow scoring the only goal. A fortnight later,
the match was resumed and then again two weeks later, but
nobody could score and eventually the match was declared
a draw.
It was a bizarre beginning for a sport that would more than
a century later be played across the nation and routinely
in front of 70,000-plus people, with hundreds of thousands
more tuned in on TV. In the wake of the inaugural game,
teams were quickly reduced to 20-per-side and the goals
were brought closer together and to a more uniform distance
apart. The game started to take off.
Why are there 16 teams? And why are so
many from Melbourne? In 1877, the Victorian
Football Association was formed and became the premier
competition right up until 1896 when six of the top teams
walked and formed their own breakaway League. Yep, cut-throat
politics and football have never been far apart. The Victorian
Football League was founded by Carlton,
Collingwood,
Essendon, Fitzroy,
Geelong, Melbourne,
South Melbourne and St Kilda.
Essendon won the
inaugural League Premiership. Richmond
and University joined the League in 1908 although University
only lasted until 1915, a casualty of bad form and World
War One. Top VFA performers Hawthorn,
North Melbourne and Footscray joined in 1925. Twelve teams
made up the VFL for the next 62 years, the most dramatic
moment probably coming in 1982 when struggling South Melbourne
moved north, made its players don unfeasibly tight shorts,
and was bought by a man who allegedly also owned a pink
helicopter. The team became the Sydney
Swans. But the Swans' move was not the only national
interest in Australian Rules. The sport had long been the
dominant football code in South Australia, West Australia
and Tasmania, while Queensland played a bit of Aussie Rules
on the side of the more popular Rugby League and Union.
In 1987, the VFL made it's concerted national push, becoming
the Australian Football League and introducing the West
Coast Eagles and the Brisbane Bears. Four years later,
Adelaide joined, followed
in 1995 by Perth's second team, Fremantle,
and then in 1997 by a second Adelaide team, Port
Adelaide. With so many teams joining up across the nation,
at least one of the AFL's struggling sides had to go and
it was poor old Fitzroy, formed in 1884, which was the casualty,
officially "merged" with Brisbane, which now became
the Brisbane Lions.
While the sport remains largely focused in Victoria, with
so many teams based there along with the biggest, best stadiums
and the Grand Final, its national appeal continues to grow.
The AFL continues to have
grander plans too, as the games in Auckland and South Africa
earlier this year showed. Only one thing remains sure: even
if Aussie Rules ends up taking over the world, umpires will
still be called "White maggots!"
For Danish Austrailian Football Leauge (DAFL) history, you
can check out the DAFL homepage
and for Copenhagen Crocodiles history check out the Crocs
History page.
