FOOTBALL LONG AGO.

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXV, Issue 19986, 30 June 1928, Page 1 (Supplement)

FOOTBALL LONG AGO.

BY MATANGA.

SOME PRIMITIVE PRACTICES.

Followers of football in New Zealand seem to think that the game was providentially invented for their own special joy. Perhaps it was. There is no knowing. But appearances do not support the idea. Football is old, very old—older, indeed, than the oldest born Aucklandcr, if one may be allowed to say so. There was football history long before the All Blacks started to make any. Of course, there is football and football —as alii who have heard the din of battle of the codes know full well—and what once went by the name may not have been anj - more like real football than an egg is like a "roop rooster." But 11 was called football, and that's something to its credit; and it was thought to be football, which may or may not be so creditable.

In the long ago of more primitive man it was little more than a thin pretext for fisticuffs and blood-letting; now its votaries must accept coded rules for its enjoyment and elect to play one or other of several distinct varieties of the game. They may give stout allegiance to it in tlie form that Tom Brown knew it at Rugby, or prefer it as played at Harrow and afterwards controlled by tho "Association," or be pleased to espouse it in the form that the League gavo it in the North of England. These modifications all show a growing obedience to law and order: indeed, football might well be cited in proof of human advance—and atavism. " Not Very Conveniently Civil." A few generations ago, with a football for a casus belli, parish fought parish in Merrio England, each side (the numbers being left at the discretion of the localities) trying to knock the other out. The men of* one county would be pitted regularly against the men of an adjacent county," and all would kick and grapple and punch until exhaustion ensued. Loudon streets were, in those good old days, the scene every now and then of what a frank contemporary called " a bloodV and 'murthering practice rather than "a fellowly sport or pastime." In the spacious days of Queen Elizabeth there were complaints about this use of the city's streets. In Restoration times a Frenchman recorded of his London adventures: —"I would now make a safe retreat, but that methinks I am stopped by one of your heroic games called lootball, which I conceive (under your favour) not very conveniently civil in the streets, especially in such irregular and narrow roads as Crooked Lane.' In the reign of the second Charles dear old Pepys went " to my Lord Brouncker's, by appointment, in the Piazza, Covent Garden, the street full of foot-balls, it being a great frost." Addison made complaint of his meditations being disturbed by the noise of footballers in Westminister's cloisters. It was not over-safe to be among the spectators of such sport, whtsre line-umpires and referees were delightfully unnecessary. But it was away north on "the Border " that the real thing in scrimmages was most joyfully experienced. There this favourite sport gave superb facilities for making raids; and in the Border records are narrated bloody endings to meetings of rival players. In 1600, for instance, Sir John Carmichael, of Carinichael, the Warden of the Middle Marches, was killed by a band of Armstrongs returning from a football match, at which (as the murder trial showed) the slaying of the Warden was planned. There is a record in Carey's " Border Transactions" of his excited apprehensions on hearing that a great meeting had been appointed at Kelso for the purpose of " playing at football." The actual outcome was a raid into England. A Border Battle. It *was in Waterloo's year, however, that there was fought—yes, fought —the most famous match in Border football. It took place at the junction of the Etlriek and the Yarrow, and the teams were the Souters o' Selkirk " and the retainers of the Earl of Homo in the Forest of Yarrow. Sir Walter Scott was then " Shirra of Selkirk," and tho Earl challenged him to fight out at football the old feud celebrated in the ballad: 'Tis up wi' the Sutors o' Selkirk, An' 'tis down wi' the Earl of Home.

An' 'tis up wi' the bonnie braw lads That sew the single-soled shoon. " Sutors," as every properly educated Sassenach kens, is good Scots for shoemakers.

Well, when the great day arrived, as Scott tells, the sides marched to the place of rendezvous with all the pomp of war; banners were flown and pipes played, and the air shook with shouts. The unfurling of the banner of the Buccleuch family was the warning for action; then the Duke of Buccleuch threw in the ball, and pandemonium raged. In the struggling of the immense mass of players nothing could be distinguished for u time, until two stalwart Yarrow men got the ball out between them by main iorce. One passed to the other, and he ran for the goal by a long route past a wood until lie was run down by a horseman. Lord Home swore afterward that if he had had a gun he would have shot the horseman. An hour and a-half's play gave a goal to the Selkirk-men. Three more hours of struggling, and a goal was notched hv Yarrow. The game was left at last undecided, after passionate blows had been dealt with great freedom. "The ba' had nearly ended in a battle."

Scott tells how, before lie left the ground, he threw up Ins hat and challenged the Yarrowmen, on behalf of ihe Sutors, to a match of a hundred picked men on each side. Lord Home accepted the challenge, which stipulated the first convenient opportunity; but the match never came off. Perhaps wiser counsels prevailed. " Meeter for Laming than Making Able."

On ilie Continent there was the same fierce use of football as a handy means of adjusting accounts between rival classes or localities. In Brittany the ball was big and stuffed with bran or hay —unlike the little ball that our Suffolkmen threw a,id carried—and its name was " soultt" in reference to its supposed resemblance to the sun. A cheerful chronicler of early nineteenth-century times (ells how a man whose father had been killed by Francois, surnamed significantly " le Souleur," and who had lost an eye himself at the hands of that same exponent of vigorous football, lay in wait for the renowned player until, in another game, he had a chance to get him down, ball and all, under the water of a boundary stream. In the exposition of the game that was thereabouts favoured, the ball, was fought for over miles of country, and that side was accounted victor which first drove it into a- town other than that where it was thrown anions; the players. Often townsman fought against rustic, and jealousy got easy means of paying grudges. Kvidcncc is complete that, in Brittany, malicious mannings, and even vengeful murders, were committed in the fights for the ball, although they were made to appear accidental. Of course there were protests against this sort, of thing. Our James the First wrote thus to his eldest son:—" From this Court I debarre all rough and violent exorcises, as the football, meeter for lameing than making able the users thereof." Later, Bishop Butler, when headmaster ■of Shrewsbury, forbado football in the earlv vears of his headmastership there as " only fit for butcher boys," although he was 'himself from Rugby. ' Well, well: football as played long ngo may not have- been the real thing it is in this enlighted age.