Description |
A number of pages in this book feature the Oneida Football Club of Boston in 1863 and some of the players on that team. Included are some general rules and terms used about the game as it was played back then. There is also a full-page sepia illustration of a Trophy ball from a game in that 1863 season. This was the first book talking about the club which was founded in 1862 and ceased to exist in 1867.
Were the Oneidas playing soccer or not?
They were the first organized football club in the United States. But how much of a place does the Oneida Football Club deserve in the history of soccer in the United States? Specifically, were they the first soccer club or not? What was the game that they were playing on the
Boston Common in the 1860s? Was it soccer, rugby or some sort of hybrid? The reason for our doubt has to do with the fact that when the representatives of various English football clubs gathered in 1863 at the
Freemasons Tavern in London for the series of meetings that resulted in the formation of the Football Association, they did not invent a game unlike what most of them had already been playing. Their purpose was to standardize the rules, to iron out differences, not to create a new game.
Some differences were too great to be smoothed out. Some clubs that were using rules that were based on handling the ball rather than dribbling with the feet split off from the group, resulting in the parallel but separate development of association football (soccer) and rugby football. I think that there clearly exists a possibility that when the Oneidas began play in 1862, they could have been using the rules of one of the clubs that met to form the Football Association the following year. The rules formulated at the Freemasons Tavern meetings were not the first set of written football rules. They are believed to have depended heavily on the Cambridge University rules, which were first formulated in 1848 and had been
repeatedly updated since. In addition, several clubs leaning toward the dribbling style had been formed, and rules for their games drawn up, in the London area and the English Midlands in the 1850s. There seem to have been several sets of rules for the dribbling and handling games in existence in England before 1863. The Oneidas were mostly students at a private Boston boarding school. They were the sons of privilege. Miller,and possibly some of the others, had made trips to England. One of them might have brought back one of the sets of rules being used in England,or those rules might have come to Boston by some other hand.My own guess is that what they were playing was a hybrid, neither fully soccer nor rugby. But it is only a guess. I don’t know, and neither, I think,
does anybody else. Perhaps that is a rather unsatisfying answer in this day and age, but history is not an exact science. So, we are back to our original statement. The Oneidas were the first organized football club in the United States. Not soccer club — at least not that we know — but football club. But does it really matter whether it was soccer? The key to the fame of the Oneidas is not the identity of the form of football being
played but the word organized. Earlier teams had been formed for the day or for the game. But the Oneidas were organized on a continuing basis.They were not just a pickup team. This is why they are owed homage, not just by historians of American soccer, but by those of American rugby and American football as well.
23 x 16 cms, hardback, 244 pages.
1906
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