Representative Football Begins

BOYS returning from English public school had a part in framing the rules of early football matches in New Zealand. C. J. Monro, of Nelson whose father was one of the early Speakers in Parliament, was among them. R. D. D. McLean later Sir Douglas McLean, was another. F. Whitaker, of Auckland, was a third. He had attendee Westminster School and introduced what were known as ‘ Westminster’ rules.

When Auckland in 1870 began playing its regular matches against Thames (an annual fixture to this day), players had to bounce the ball as they ran, but this was not required in 1871 the intention being to play Rugby Union rules but unfortunately no copy of them was avail­able. In 1872 the match was theoretically played under Rugby rules, but there were only ten men in each team.

Nevertheless football in Auckland was making rapid progress, with five clubs in existence, so in 1875 the stage was set for an epochal event in New Zealand sport, the first tour of the country by a football team. The organisers of this whole venture were T. Henderson, H. W. Henderson, H Whitaker and an ex-Melbourne man named G Dunnett. The team included F. Earl, better known to later generations as Fred Earl, K.C., and F Pilling, of Hamilton, who in 1877 achieved the melancholy distinction of being the first man to be fatally injured playing football in New Zealand.

That first Auckland team played five matches in a fortnight, against Wellington, Otago, Canter­bury, Nelson, and Taranaki, in that sequence, and lost every match. Travel was entirely by steamer and they were a weary band who limped ashore from the steamer Taupo to play Taranaki at ‘Poverty Flat,’ New Plymouth, in the last match of the tour. The game had been introduced to Taranaki only two years earlier by a bank official named R. J. Marshall, a half-back who had the novel and ingenious idea of playing in a wet can­vas jacket to make it harder for the opposition to grasp him.

The Auckland rugby team’s tour in 1875 stimulated interest in football throughout New Zealand and led to an exchange of visits between the main centres. Canterbury went on tour in 1877 with the intention of playing Nelson, Wellington, Tara­naki, and Auckland, but owing to rough weather the steamer could not call at New Plymouth, and this match had to be abandoned. T, W. Stringer, later Sir Walter Stringer, was a member of this team, and he, like Fred Earl, is still alive.

Otago undertook a northern tour in 1878, and then in 1879 Wellington, Otago, and Canterbury met in a triangular tournament at Christchurch. The following year Wellington paid its first visit to Auckland. There was some dispute before the match over the size of the balls, Auckland having a 6 and Wellington a 4. Eventually a spell was played with each. Few of the early matches be­tween Wellington and Auckland were free from acrimony. The 1883 match has gone down in the official records as disputed, and in 1886 an effigy of an Auckland umpire was hung derisively from a window in Manners Street, though the affair, according to a contemporary writer, was ‘ greatly ‘exaggerated,’ and the culprits were reproved.