Tom Wills of Rugby

Sean Fagan - ColonialRugby.com.au

Tom Wills, Australian football’s founding father, always reckoned rugby football was worth having a closer look at. In fact, if Wills had initially got his way, there might never have been an Australian football code at all.

Tom Wills Founder of Australian rules football in Melbourne - had attended Rugby School.

As John Harms explored in The Age [16/5/09], Australian football turned 150 years old on May 17 of 2009, marking the anniversary of the initial rules meeting of the fledgling Melbourne FC, in which Wills took a major role.

While Wills was Australian born, he spent all of his teen years as a boarder at England’s Rugby School.

His father had hopes that young Tom’s time at Rugby would lead to his emergence as an educated and refined gentleman.

Wills though quickly found that he much preferred Rugby’s cricket and football, games at which he excelled.

William Hammersley, a fellow member at the Melbourne FC rules meeting, recalled how the debate to the set the laws down began: “Tom Wills suggested the Rugby rules, but nobody understood them except them himself.”

Wills recognised there was no point in being obstinate. He was reasoned enough to realise that some adjustment was needed if English school football was to be transformed into a leisure game for men played on the harder grounds of Melbourne.

The group went on to reach a comfortable compromise, formulating and putting down in writing the first rules of Australian football, but as Greg de Moore, author of a 2008 biography on Wills [link] explains, rugby was at the forefront: “Australian Rules football owes its defining features – emphasis on handling the ball, the importance of kicking, the shape of the ball, receiving a free kick after marking the ball and much more – to the Rugby School rules that Tom Wills brought.”

Wills unsuccessfully argued for further rugby traits, including the addition of a cross-bar between the goal posts (to eliminate fluke goals and “grubbers”), and even dared to suggest that each team should appoint a designated kicker to take place-kick shots at goal.

The Melbourne rules committee cast aside Rugby’s complex off-side laws, as were the code’s darker attributes of scrummaging, wrestling and full tackling – all features that led to hard falls, serious injuries and the frequent loss of temper.

It was argued that men could ill afford to present themselves for work on Monday morning still suffering sore bones and deep bruises from Saturday afternoon’s football.

So, the codes went their separate ways, as indeed did Australia’s cities in their football preferences.

In Sydney and Brisbane “the Melbourne game” gained enthusiastic adherents from the 1880s onwards, but not the ascendancy.

More than they cared to admit it though, both codes still had much in common, particularly in regard to kicking the egg-shaped ball.

The rugby traits of place and drop kicking for goal were by far the most regular form of scoring in Australian football well into the 20th century. The “treacherous punt” kick was derided by generations of Melbourne old-timers as the resort of the novice footballer.

No doubt if Albert “the Great” Thurgood (Essendon and Fremantle star of the 1890s) could be resurrected he would find much in modern AFL to marvel at, but if he wanted to re-live his favoured “places” and “drops” he would have to venture out to one of the city's rugby matches.

Melbourne and the rugby codes are far from unacquainted with each other, with the first rugby clubs founded as long ago as 1888.

© Copyright - Sean Fagan - ColonialRugby.com.au