Features

Rugby Rugby's Oracle, Paul Dobson, continues his interesting series on how rugby's jargon developed. This week he looks at the 'goalposts'.

The goalposts have become a metaphor – moving the goal posts, which is not the same as leveling the playing fields. The metaphor is taken from games and has a homely origin.

Get a new pair of goal post pads or a set of goal posts from the World Rugby Shop.

Rugby football's goal posts are the famous H, adopted by gridiron and Rugby League, but not always thus.

The word goal in lots of games means aim, purpose, object. When the game - called football - was played from village to village the aim was to take the ball - or whatever the object being used was - back to your village. That was the goal and often it would be the market cross or the village fountain where the ball would be ceremonially killed, drowned in the fountain or rubbed in the dirt. It would then be given to the leader or sometimes cut into strips and shared amongst the main men. The ball was the trophy, as in a hunt.

We still get home for a score, we still kill the ball and we still ground it.

Things changed when the game was played within a village. Then the object was to take the ball back to the leader's house. This meant taking it through his wicket gate or door - thus giving all goal games the shape of their goal - except for the antennae which make rugby's goal different.

Then the game came to the schools and was played on fields. Various ways were found to produce a goal, as boys would do and still do in pick-up games. At Winchester, for example, the goal was made by laying a scholar's ground at each end, for on the schools’ grounds the mode of play changed. Instead of taking the ball back it was now taken forward. The goal and its posts had shifted!.

How the H shape came about is not immediately clear. Jean-Jules Jusserand in Les sports et les jeux d'exercice dans l'ancienne France, has H-shaped goals represented in the 17th century.

Thomas Hughes wrote Tom Brown's Schooldays, published in 1857, about life at Rugby School. The boy called East is Tom's cicerone and tries to tell him about the coming football match when School House would play the whole school.

"Tom .....  followed East across the level ground till they came to a sort of gigantic gallows of two poles, eighteen feet high, fixed upright in the ground some fourteen feet apart, with a cross-bar running from one to the other at the height of ten feet or thereabouts.

"'This is one of the goals,' said East, 'and you see the other, across there, right opposite, under the Doctor's wall. Well, the match is for the best of three goals whichever side kicks two goals wins: and it won't do, you see, just to kick the ball through these posts – it must go over the cross-bar any height'll do, so long as it's between the posts. You'll have to stay in goal to touch the ball when it rolls behind the posts, because if the other side touch it they have a try at goal.'"

The measurements in Tom Brown's day are given as 14 feet wide, crossbar 10 feet above the ground, uprights 18 feet high.

The 1866 Laws of Football as played at Rugby School, the first written Rugby laws, state: 18 ft 6 ins wide, crossbar 10 ft above the ground, uprights exceeding 11 ft high.

In 1926: 18 ft 6 ins from inside to inside of the goal posts, crossbar 10 ft from the top of the bar to the ground.

That's how it stayed till the metrification of the Seventies when it became 5,6 metres wide, crossbar 3,0 metres above the ground, uprights exceeding 3,4 metres high.

Why above the crossbar when in soccer and hockey the ball needs to be under the crossbar?

The reason may well be that matches at Rugby School involved so many boys. A Big side levee would involve the whole of the Upper School. The "bloods" would follow up, while the younger boys massed in the goal. It was not easy to score and eventually would lead to an extension of the goal and the try.