As the England-Italy UEFA Euro 2020 Final fast approaches, it’s timely to turn back the hands some 133 years, to an historic Test match involving members of England’s touring rugby union team and the then reigning Premiers Carlton.

On the afternoon of Saturday, June 16, 1888, in what was effectively the first Australian Rules (then Victorian Rules) international, the Carlton-England Test was staged before an audience of 29,355 discerning football followers at the Melbourne Cricket Ground.

The Illustrated London News' image of the touring English team of 1888, aboard the ship bound for New Zealand and Australia

The Test was factored into a British Isles New Zealand and Australian tour (April 28 – October 3) initiated by the enthusiastic Australian Rules pioneer Henry Colden Anthill Harrison, who, on a tour to England with the Australian cricket team in 1884 sought to elicit interest in what he considered “the universal game”.

Harrison’s push did not fall on deaf ears, as the former English cricket captains James Lilywhite and Arthur Shrewsbury later saw fit to sponsor an Australia and New Zealand tour.

Robert L. Seddon, posing in his Lancashire uniform, circa 1887. Image E. Hawkin & Co

Led by Robert Lionel Seddon, and immaculately attired in red, white and blue, the touring English players, most of them from the nation’s north, competed in 35 union matches (predominantly in New Zealand and New South Wales), though no Tests against international opposition.

Of those contests, the tourists won twenty seven, drew six and lost two.

To capitalise on the codes of football played in each colony, the tourists also committed to 19 Rules contests, the Carlton Test included.

An unnamed correspondent for The Leader reported the following:

The very greatest interest was taken in the contest by the public, and as it fortunately happened that the afternoon was gloriously fine, there was a great crowd of people besieging the turnstiles which admitted them to the enclosure between 2.30 and 3 o’clock.

At the last mentioned time there were about 22,000 people present, the crowd being one of the largest ever present on the ground, and, as one of the English players said, a more closely packed one than he had ever seen at an English football match.

Tommy Leydin, who captained the Carlton team in the historic Test match with England

Despite the fact that the visitors’ team is one fairly representative of English footballers, the feeling entertained by the large majority of those who went to see Saturday’s match was the Carlton would score an easy victory, because the great reputation which the Englishmen known to have as exponents of the Rugby game would not enable them to beat so fine a team as the Carlton, playing the Australian – still lately known as the Victorian – game.

On a ground considered in excellent playing order, the Carlton players, captained by Tommy Leydin, not surprisingly emerged comfortable winners in that famous Test – 14.17 to 3.7 - and the English reportedly managed just six victories from the 19 Rules matches played against others including Sandhurst and Ballarat.

The English Rugby tour of 1888 did not prove financially viable for Messrs Lilywhite and Shrewsbury – and it ended in tragedy for the tourists. Just eight weeks after the Carlton Test, Seddon drowned in an accident on the Hunter River in the northern News South Wales town of West Maitland.

The England captain was laid to rest in the Church of England section of West Maitland cemetery, and a movement to raise funds for a monument to honour him was initiated by the Newcastle and Sydney Rugby Unions.