A Football Expedition
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THE following is an account of The First Anglo-Australian Football Team
of 1888—a touring party of Rugby footballers who have come to be
retrospectively recognised as the very first in the celebrated 125 years
history of the British and Irish Lions Rugby team, an elite group of players
selected just once every four years from the Home Unions—England, Ireland,
Scotland and Wales—to tour Australia, New Zealand and South Africa.
The scale of the remarkable and lasting influence of the 1888 team on the
development and popularity of Rugby football in Australia and New Zealand
cannot be understated. To the Rugby communities that lived in those now
faraway times—from the old-timers who shook their heads in bewilderment
to the then youngest child, who in the 1950s was still lauding the tourists
to anyone that took the time to listen—they were universally adamant that
1888 was a seminal year for the sport. Before 1888 there were the old ways
of Rugby. After 1888 there were the exciting and revolutionary new ways of
Rugby. People would arrive before a game believing one Rugby philosophy
and leave two hours later mesmerised by an entirely new understanding of
the possibilities. There was no going back to old ways, there was no slow
evolution. The game dramatically, radically, and irrevocably changed for the
better—for both the player and the spectator.
But rather than contentedly rest basking in these well-won plaudits, the
1888 tourists then turned their hands—and feet—to tackling the top club
sides and expert footballers of Australian Rules football in Melbourne and
Adelaide, taking on a code they knew of in Britain only by reputation.
They aimed high, challenging first no less than the redoubtable Carlton FC.
Over 26,000 Melburnians flocked to the MCG to see how these Britishers
would fare, to see if such a daring transformation was even possible.
The pioneers of 1888 departed scorning authority and, after heartbreak and
sorrow, they returned home in glory, having gained pride of place as the first
of all British Lions teams … a team with a unique story to tell.
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