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Originally Posted by The Roamin' Umpire
I'd like! I really thought I'd read at some point, though, that the beginnings of what we call "football" were made at the Rugby School,
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Even that is disputed, in that people differ as to how much of their version of the game originated there and how much was taken from a Welsh version of football. Rugby may not have contributed anything more than its name to the game, or may have contributed a lot.
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who played the game with much more contact than some other places. When the other schools changed the rules to outlaw such contact, the Rugby folks wrote their own.
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What I think you (or your source) may have had in mind was the attempt to come up with a widely played standardized form of football in England outside of the schools. Rugby School by that time had little or no influence on the course of development of rugby football, it having been taken up by clubs. Anyway, the clubs had fairly well standardized rugby, and other clubs had standardized another version of the game, which you might consider either soccer or a precursor thereof, depending on where you want to draw the line. But when it came to an attempt at a grand amalgamation, a compromise game that would merge both camps, the ruggers were swayed by a particular club which was really anti-merger and sank the merger by insisting that the compromise game have hacking (kicking your opponent's shins -- sometimes knocking them over with a violent leg whip) be legal under at least some circumstances. So rugby & soccer continued to develop separately.
To show how insincere that point had been, the ruggers outlawed hacking just a few years later, with no opposition from the club that'd ostensibly insisted on hacking at the time. (Even at the time of the merger talks, many or most rugby clubs played by rules disallowing hacking.)
Robert