Volumes One and Two come together in a special ebook compendium edition!

It looks like ebooks are the future, and Kindle users can now buy both volumes of the true story of the origins of the world’s football games in one single edition.

Just click here to download your copy in a matter of seconds, for the price of just $US 5.99*, including VAT & free international wireless delivery. If you don’t have a Kindle you can download a PC version for free from this link. If you use a different system for viewing ebooks, you should be able to work around the problem using the free Calibre program available here.

But I must admit I’m new to this ebook malarkey, so don’t quote me on all this. Please make sure you are able to read the ebook somehow or other before you send anybody any cash.

Unfortunately, the ebook format doesn’t support indexes and the footnote system is a right chore to have to deal with. But that’s no fault of my own, that’s the way it is with ebooks!

**€EU 3.79, £UK 3.80, $AUS 5.61, $CAN 5.99, $NZ 7.24… prices not in $US subject to fluctutation.

Each volume costs $US 15.99, which for reference purposes is roughly the following in selected other currencies: *€ 11.87, £UK 10.14, $AUS 15.99, $CAN 16.42, $NZ 21.07 … prices not in $US subject to fluctutation.

The books are also available from amazon.com, although please bear in mind that when customers purhase direct from this website, the author gets a bigger royalty

The Same Old Game is printed in the USA, so please bear that in mind regarding delivery times. I’d also like to make it clear that despite the book being printed there and priced in $US, and also using the word ‘soccer*’, the author is from the UK.

*I had to use ‘soccer’ to avoid confusion with the other codes.

Ever since 1880, the American game had been played eleven-a-side.  Burnside suggested Canada fielded twelve. Perhaps teams of eleven would have made it too laughingly obvious that he was not far short of suggesting a wholesale imitation of the game that was going down a storm in the States.

The lack of unity made it easier for American innovations, from the snap to downs-to-go, to gradually find their way in differing measures into what the Canadians were still calling rugby.

And just as Ontario and Quebec looked to be settling their differences, a new division emerged between the eastern clubs and the newer ones emerging in the west.

Not even when the Grey Cup was instigated in 1909 was there anything remotely resembling a standard code of Canadian football.

Eventually most American innovations, including the forward pass, found their way north, but there was never a wholesale importation of the American code, meaning that several quirks of history remain in the CFL.

To read the full story, order your copy of the Same Old Game!

Canada is like its football. Similarities to the USA are only to be expected, but exact imitations are best avoided.

Canada was stuck between being a British dominion on the one hand and living on the United States’ doorstep on the other, and its football was Americanised along with so many other aspects of its culture.

Rugby arrived in North America via Canada, but what happened next is a difficult story to tell. There was division between the teams preferring to play it the British way and those wanting to introduce changes. There were also differences between the college and city teams, and between the clubs in Ontario and those in Quebec.

The result was a disjointed affair, with no standard Canadian game as such. Instead there was a variety of different interpretations, with the potential for unity further exasperated by the arrival of new ideas from south of the border.

16. CANADIAN CLUBS: 20th century Canadian football

Maxwell himself never complained but others were less impressed, and photos of his battered face the day after the Pennsylvania game were splashed across the papers, and one of the people who saw them was the president of the nation. Football was in crisis, and this was no longer a matter for Walter Camp. This was a matter for the White House.

The rules changes led American football to become little more than one group of eleven men trying to batter their way through another to gain the required number of yards. It was brutal, to the extent that serious injuries and even deaths were commonplace, but was it ever really under serious threat of being outlawed entirely?

This chapter looks at all the different reforms that were made, and reveals how none of them really made any difference, not even the controversial introduction of the forward pass in 1906, which was supposedly designed to open up the game.

American football remained as violent as ever, and ultimately it was improved body protection rather than changes to the rules that managed to make it any safer.

15. SLEEPING WITH AN ELEPHANT: The early years of football in Canada

Penn was on the receiving end of many an accusing finger, where its dental school, which didn’t require any entrance exams, was a particularly handy place to fast-track young men into the college who you wouldn’t trust to go poking around any cavities in your mouth, but would be more than relieved to have standing next to you when slamming headfirst into tightly constituted packages of ogre flesh.

Rather like learning to play the guitar, the American colleges learned the basics of rugby and then let their imaginations do the rest. But a sport is like a Rubik’s cube, and if you move one piece, then all the others start moving too.

The man with many of the solutions to the different problems that the intercollegiate game faced was Walter Camp, although this chapter questions whether some of ideas were entirely his own working.

In came the snap to remove the unsatisfactory randomness of the scrum, which led to probably the dullest kind of football ever played until Camp rectified the situation by announcing that yards had to be won in a certain number of downs, and the field was marked out with its gridiron.

Little by little, a peculiar chain of events led the American colleges to turn British rugby into something very different…

14. THE KILLING FIELDS: American football and the issue of violence

Not even the argument that American football evolved from Harvard and the Boston Game holds up too well in court. The reality is that it grew out of rugby, and had the British dominion of Canada to thank. It’s not something they like to make a song and dance about in the United States.

Rutgers and Princeton’s match in 1869 is said to be where it all started for American football, but how much was that really the case? That game, and the one standardised by the Intercollegiate Football Association in 1873, was basically soccer. But the Stateside penchant for off-the-ball physicality was already rearing its head.

It was Harvard’s disinterest in the IFA that paved the way for modern American
football, when instead they turned to a rugby-playing university from Canada for opposition.

The other Ivy Colleges soon came round to Harvard’s way of thinking, but it would be wrong to say that the rules they drafted in 1876 were ‘rugby-inspired’. It was British rugby as codified by the RFU, pure and simple. But the Americans wouldn’t be sticking to the British rules for long…

13. DOWN ON SCRUM: Walter Camp and American football in the making

By 1831, America had its first sports paper in the form of The Spirit of the Times, primarily covering angling, baseball,  boxing, cricket, foot racing, fox hunting,  horse racing, rowing and yachting. There would be no football column until 1882.

For a variety of reasons explored in this chapter, football was surprisingly slow to catch on in the United States of America. Even in the mid 19^th century it was still a very low key affair, but what little evidence has survived suggests that the most widespread form was something very similar to soccer.

Although new research has shown that the Oneidas weren’t really anything like the oldest club in the country, their Boston Game would prove hugely influential when they took it to Harvard University.

Before then, football at American academia had rarely been much more structured than the brutal ‘football rushes’ in which wrestling ability was often the only skill that really mattered. It was out of this culture that the Ivy League created America’s somewhat more physical take on British football.

12. THE NOT SO ALL-AMERICAN GAME: Early soccer and rugby in the United States

And so they came to their decision, and their ten original rules of football were handwritten on paper and stored carefully forever. Well, not quite. They would eventually be tucked away in an old tin trunk, and would remain there for over a century until 1980, when the curator of the MCC Museum, Bill Gray, discovered them.

The first rules for Australian football were written in 1859, but the original game,
played for many years on a rectangular field with a round ball, would look decidedly strange to fans of the AFL today.

Where did the founders of the game get their ideas from, and what did they really mean when they said they wanted to create ‘a game of our own’? And how and why were such characteristic elements as behind posts, marking, the oval field and bouncing the ball on the ground introduced as the game evolved?

But despite its immense popularity in Victoria, it would be some time before this game truly became Australia’s national football code. For well over a century, although it was adopted in many parts of the country, there were other places where rugby reigned supreme over the ‘Victorian’ rules. This chapter ends with an exploration of Australia’s complex footballing geography.

11. COMING TO AMERICA: Colonial football in the United States

It was one thing to convince the whole of the British Isles to do away with local traditions for the sake of a national standard, and another matter entirely to convince the handful of teams in a geographically secluded community that had very few local traditions to be sidetracked by.

Australians are often as surprised as anybody to learn that their code has a valid claim to be the oldest and most ‘authentic’ of all the different forms of football.

In the 1850s, there was probably nowhere in the world with such a vibrant footballing scene as the colony of Victoria, and by the time soccer and rugby were standardised, the local rules were already far too widespread to even consider adopting the British rules.

But how much of this was really the working of Tom Wills and HCA Harrison, the traditionally recognised ‘fathers’ of Australian football? Here we learn of the role of lesser known figures like Dalmahoy Campbell and James Bryant in the development of Australian rules football.

10. A KICK UP THE BEHIND: The early years of Australian rules football