Episode 110: How professionals saved soccer – but not cricket – from public school amateurs, explains sports historian Richard Sanders

Cricket authors (and obsessives) Peter Oborne and Richard Heller launched a podcast early in 2020 to help deprived listeners endure a world without cricket. They’re no longer deprived of cricket, but still chat regularly about cricket topics with different guests each week – cricket writers, players, administrators and fans – hoping to keep a good line and length but with occasional wides into other subjects.

In the British isles cricket had a start on association football of over a hundred years as a game with Laws, organization and popular following. In the late Victorian era it was overtaken in a short time. Based on his fascinating book Beastly Fury on the strange birth of British football, the distinguished documentary maker and sports historian Richard Sanders teases out the reasons why. He is the latest guest of Peter Oborne and Richard Heller in their cricket-themed podcast.

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Richard’s book begins with an account of the astonishing mass football match – or more accurately battle – all over Derby in 1846. It was a survival of mediæval festivities on Shrove Tuesday when normal life was turned upside down by a lord of misrule. But alongside these exhibitions of mass mayhem were much more organized and disciplined local matches of “folk football”, with set numbers playing over a prescribed area. In these are the true origins of the modern football which emerged in the late nineteenth century. 2-3 minutes

He combats the persistent myth that public schoolboys civilized and controlled the anarchy of folk football. The opposite was more true: contact with folk football civilized the public schoolboys. The historic seven “great schools” of the early nineteenth century had all evolved their own bizarre forms of football filled with psychotic violence. Deep-seated rivalries made it almost impossible for old boys to agree common rules when they wanted to continue playing: the much-cited 1863 version, an attempted compromise with rugby football, was an almost total failure. Agreement came later when London and Sheffield players, not all from the historic public schools, encountered surviving folk football. 4-7 minutes

Cricket’s last great innovation – overarm bowling – was legitimized in its Laws in 1864. From then on all first-class cricket matches looked recognizably like those of today. The same happened with the rules of football used for the first international (England v Scotland) and the first FA Cup (Wanderers v Royal Engineers) both in 1872, although the goal still had a tape not a crossbar, throw-ins were taken at right-angles like rugby – and charging was still allowed. For some years, games had two umpires and a referee who arbitrated when they could not agree. 8-11 minutes

Richard suggests that football lacked the motive for the codification of cricket in the eighteenth century: aristocratic participation and gambling. The various versions of public school football evolved in a short time in the early nineteenth century before public school sport generally was disciplined by reforming headmasters such as Thomas Arnold and subsumed into the cult of muscular Christianity. 13-17 minutes

Richard explores the class issues which strongly marked all Victorian sport and the processes by which association football became identified as a sport for the working classes and was abandoned to them by the upper classes. Public schools in general switched to rugby union although the so-called “great schools” continued to play association football and their bizarre versions sometimes survived, especially at Eton. 18-21 minutes

Public school amateurs soon yielded their early control of association football, while retaining it in cricket and rugby union. In spite of their horror of professionalism the amateurs compromised with it in 1885 and from then on professional association football teams were the driving force in the game (not least because they had become so much better than the amateurs). The beneficiaries of the power shift were not the players (tightly controlled for nearly eighty years by wage and employment restrictions) but middle-class club owners, especially brewers and industrialists. He contrasts the differences in treatment of professionals in football and cricket, where the amateurs retained a two-tier status system in county and international cricket for years after these disappeared from football. 22-30 minutes

Richard analyses the reasons for association football’s rise to dominance in British and international sport and in particular its victory over rugby union. The simplest explanations are the ease of participation in soccer (particularly the ability to play it on any terrain) and the quality of communal spectatorship it offered to fans. One critical factor was the introduction of soccer in the state elementary schools created by successive Education Acts. Another was pressure from early “soccer moms” in favour of a sport which offered less chance of serious injury and death for their sons. This was primarily due to the early dominance of professional footballers, who could not afford to get injured and lose their livelihood. 31-38 minutes

Richard describes the early revolution of football tactics, from the crude mass charges prevalent in public school version to the passing game induced by relaxation of the offside rule and the ending of the taboo against “unmanly” delivery of the ball to a player in front of goal. He pays tribute to the middle-class non-public-school players of Queens Park in Scotland as the prime inventors of passing, also adopted by the northern professional clubs and the Royal Engineers. Queen’s Park formed the nucleus of the first Scottish teams, which beat England almost continuously in the earliest internationals. 38-40 minutes

He contrasts the international spread of soccer from Britain, primarily to continental Europe and South America, with that of cricket, concentrated on the British empire. Until the Great War, England fielded amateur teams against foreigners and reserved its best sides for the contests against Scotland, Wales and Ireland. 41-43 minutes

He tells the sad stories of Arthur Wharton and Billy Meredith. Wharton was the first black professional in English football, as goalkeeper in the conquering Preston side of the 1880s. He was the victim of racist abuse in contemporary media and felt compelled to act out a racist stereotype, to win over crowds: its antics cost him his place when his form dipped. 44-45 minutes

Billy Meredith was the greatest player before the Great War. A strong trade unionist (with a Welsh mining background) he was embittered by the crushing of the infant players union in 1907. The low maximum wage of £4 a week forced him to continue playing until he was almost fifty: he died destitute in the aftermath of the Munich air disaster in 1958, still remembered for its toll on Manchester United. A few years later Johnny Haynes, captain of Fulham and England, became the first £100 a week footballer, and the ending of the maximum wage began to open the present giant earnings gap between footballers and cricketers. 46-51 minutes

Richard describes the pioneers of women’s football before the Great War, notably Lady Florence Dixey, sister of Oscar Wilde’s tormentor, the Marquess of Queensbury, and the mysterious Nettie Honeyball (probably a self-mocking pseudonym.) The women footballers faced far greater hostility than the minority of women cricketers, possibly because of their connexion with the suffragettes and other political causes, and were forced to shut down. A revival in the Great War was snuffed out by the FA in 1921 which banned men’s clubs from offering grounds and facilities to women – a restriction which lasted until 1971. 51-55 minutes

Richard Sanders’s book Beastly Fury was published by Random House.

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Peter Oborne & Richard Heller

Peter Oborne has been the chief political commentator for the Daily Telegraph and the Daily Mail, a maker of several documentaries and written and broadcast for many different media. He is the author of a biography of Basil D’Oliveira and of Wounded Tiger, a history of Pakistan cricket, both of which won major awards.

Richard Heller was a long-serving humorous columnist on The Mail on Sunday and more briefly, on The Times. He worked in the movie business in the United States and the UK, including a brief engagement on a motion picture called Cycle Sluts Versus The Zombie Ghouls. He is the author of two cricket-themed novels A Tale of Ten Wickets and The Network. He appeared in two Mastermind finals: in the first his special subject was the life of Sir Gary Sobers.

Oborne & Heller cricketing partnership

Jointly, he and Peter produced White On Green, celebrating the drama of Pakistan cricket, including the true story of the team which lost a first-class match by an innings and 851 runs.

Peter and Richard have played cricket with and against each other for a variety of social sides, including Parliament’s team, the Lords and Commons, and in over twenty countries including India, Pakistan, the United States, Ireland, Spain, Portugal, France, Greece, Australia, Zimbabwe, New Zealand and Morocco.

The Podcast is produced by Bridget Osborne and James Willcocks at The Chiswick Calendar.

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