The famous Carlton team photograph of 1868 – the earliest known photo of an Australian Rules football outfit – depicts a group of players in all manner of dress posing beneath the gum trees of Royal Park.
One of them, the bearded figure standing front and centre in his creams, is believed to be the then Carlton captain Dave Adamson – and the football he is clasping by the lace is round.
With Sunday’s Hyundai A-League final at AAMI Park fast approaching, it’s worth reminding that the round ball seemed to be the Carlton Football Club’s prolate spheroid of choice more than 150 years ago.
A Challenge Cup match report involving Carlton and the then cup holder South Yarra team, which was published in The Argus on Monday, September 11, 1865, bears this out.
The report detailed South Yarra’s two-goal to nil victory over the visiting Carlton combination, amid great controversy, as this match, according to one eye-witness, was the first in which the Carltonites had been exposed to the oval ball, “and a little one, too, at that”.
Significantly, the report noted: “The Carlton Club ascribe their defeat to the fact that they were obliged to play with the oval, or Rugby ball, while they had always been accustomed to a round ball; and they complain that their opponents would not allow a round ball to be introduced even after they had won the first goal”.
In 1860, the Australian football pioneer Tom Wills argued that the oval rugby ball travelled further in the air and made for a more exciting game – hence, the oval ball became a more customary component of the game by the 1870s.
Photo: Carlton Football Club
But it should also be noted that the Carlton Football Club’s annual report of 1887 carries a distinctive monogram, which features a “football” (more akin to a watermelon) encased in a circular buckled belt. For whatever reason, this monogram reappeared in the Carlton annual report of 1902.
Thomas William “TW” Sherrin is accredited as having manufactured the first air conveyance configured for Australian Rules in 1879, which suggests that previous “footballs” used were imported English rugby or medicine balls.
It may be that the spheres booted around the paddocks by Dave Adamson and Co. were acquired by Melbourne importers and retailers Levy Brothers from as early as 1852.
An Argus advertisement, dated May 11, 1865, proclaimed: “Footballs, Footballs, Footballs, best quality, on SALE, at Levy Brothers’, 24 Bourke-street east”.
Whatever the case, round pills were obviously in vogue more than 130 years before the now-defunct Carlton Soccer Club was founded, as the choice of champions of the supposedly oval ball craft.
