This article was originally featured in the Palace v Brighton matchday programme...
In the middle of the 19th Century, cricket was the major team sport in England and had had its own laws for more than a century. Football, by contrast, was disorganised; it had been taken up at the beginning of the century by public schools as a healthy outdoor sport but there were no universal rules as each school made up its own.
The style of football played by the schools broadly fell into two camps: the ‘dribbling game’ played by Eton and Winchester, where the ball was kept at the feet; and the Rugby game which allowed handling the ball, the holding of players and hacking, the practice of kicking away the legs of a player who had the ball. These were the two extremes, with Eton prohibiting the handling of the ball and the holding of players and Rugby vehemently defending the rights of its players to hack. Most other schools adopted rules somewhere between the two.
As many of the schoolboys got older, they went on to the universities of Oxford and Cambridge and, naturally, wanted to carry on playing football. But which school’s rules should take precedence?
In 1848, a Cambridge student, Charles Thring, came up with a ‘universal code’ by adopting the key parts of the major schools’ rules so that the students could carry on playing each other, at least while they were at university. But the schools, themselves, jealously stuck to their own rules, so little progress was made.
At the same time, serious cricketers, saw the benefit of playing football among themselves in the winter to keep up their levels of fitness and it is here that Crystal Palace come into the picture.
The Crystal Palace, which originally opened in Hyde Park as The Great Exhibition, had moved to Sydenham in 1854 and in 1857 laid its own cricket pitch and set up its own cricket club, known, not surprisingly, as the Crystal Palace Club.
