{"id":594,"date":"2019-08-29T15:40:22","date_gmt":"2019-08-29T15:40:22","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.football-stadiums.co.uk\/handball-rule-in-football\/"},"modified":"2024-01-03T16:06:00","modified_gmt":"2024-01-03T16:06:00","slug":"handball-rule-in-football","status":"publish","type":"articles","link":"https:\/\/www.football-stadiums.co.uk\/articles\/handball-rule-in-football\/","title":{"rendered":"The Handball Rule In Football"},"content":{"rendered":"
There are obviously many things that separate football and rugby as sports, though many people today who don\u2019t know the history<\/a> won\u2019t realise how closely aligned they were during their more formative years.<\/p>\n There is an apocryphal tale that it was during the foundation of the two sports that a student at Rugby School picked up the ball and ran with it, thus giving birth to the sport of rugby, for example. Apocryphal it may be, but it indicates the extent to which they were aligned until they became the two separate entities that they are today.<\/p>\n It is certainly the handling of the ball that differentiates them more than any other rule in the modern version of the games. After all, both of them allow players to run when in possession of the ball, both require teams to score more goals than the other and the pair of them see the game re-started with a throw when the ball has gone out of play at the sides of the pitch.<\/p>\n Yes, there are many rules that make them different sports but the moment that rugby allowed all players to handle the ball rather than just the goalkeeper was the moment that they shifted away from each other in a seismic manner.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n In order to understand how the handball rule has developed you firstly need to grasp the rules of the game before the split with rugby came about. Indeed, the very reason that rugby and football exist as independent sports from each is down to the fact that the various schools and organising bodies that played the game couldn\u2019t agree on the rules that should be put in place.<\/p>\n The first attempt to offer some sort of codified rules came about in 1848 when the various schools around the country that played football met in Cambridge to discuss a unification of the rules of the game. One of the major points of contention came about because of the fact that some schools still employed a rule whereby all players could carry the ball with their hands.<\/p>\n There were seven schools around the country that offered football to their students, namely:<\/p>\n The game being played was not one that fans of either rugby or football in the modern era would recognise, though if anything they bore closely resemblance to rugby. They took their inspiration from the Middles Ages game called \u2018folk football\u2019, which essentially saw two neighbouring villages battle against each other over a \u2018ball\u2019 with few rules involved.<\/p>\n Most of the schools had rules whereby the players were allowed to catch the ball if it was kicked up to them, meaning that they could claim a \u2018mark\u2019 and re-start play from where they caught it. Some of them didn\u2019t allow this, however, hence the confusion. Most of them boasted similarities, including the shape of the pitch<\/a>, the use of a single ball and a goal<\/a> to defend at either end of the playing area. They were similar enough to mean that the schools arranged games against each other but different enough to ensure that confusion was common.<\/p>\n The confusion really started to come to the fore when boys that had grown up with their version of football went to university and came across boys that had learned a conflicting version of the game. Attempts at organising matches descended into chaos, with the story of the boy from Rugby School who picked up the ball and ran with it far less likely to have given birth to a new sport and far more likely to have caused anger and derision amongst the players who didn\u2019t play the game by those rules.<\/p>\n Sometimes players would agree to play one set of rules in the first-half of a match and then another set of rules for the second-half, whilst sometimes the players would discuss the rules that they both played by and develop a compromise based on discarding the rules they didn\u2019t share and just playing with the other ones.<\/p>\nHandball Rule In The Early Days<\/h2>\n
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