Moving the goal posts

My home town football team just lost 8-0 this evening to bankrupt Wigan Athletic. This piece of writing is from a few years ago as another case of nothing going right for The Tigers

The evolution of the football goalmouth has been a long, contentious and occasionally lethal process.

In many instances of Shrovetide football throughout Middle Ages Europe the ‘goal’ was the rival town’s church  although rarely contemplated in those annual events of communal mayhem ,legitimised violence and the settling of personal or group feuds.

Chinese documents from 2500BC record the kicking of  objects through holes in a cloth stretched between sticks. By the first century BC, this had evolved into zu qiu, the Chinese word for football.

Around 200 AD, Roman armies indulged in harpastum, which involved kicking a ball but as a puny excuse to just fight each other rather than the Gauls, Germanics and other enemies of the Empire.

The Aztecs were known to have laced-up leather footballs and practised trying to slot them through holes in a wall, a bit like at the sideshows of modern travelling Fairs and Carnivals.

The first mentions of a physical goalmouth was in the late 16th and early 17th centuries as in a descriptive passage of “Two bushes in the ground, some eight or 10 foote asunder, they terme their goales.”

By the end of the 17th century, the idea was commonplace. An English Midlands play area was described in Francis Willughby’s Book of Games as having “a close that has a gate at either end. The gates are called goals"

There was, critically, no specification and the size of the goal continued to fluctuate until the newly-formed Football Association in 1863 deemed that posts should be eight yards (24 feet) apart, which remains, today, the official width of a goal.

So far there was no mention of a height  although some clubs ran a piece of string as a horizontal marker. It was not until the first ever FA Cup final in 1872 that a tape was strung between the posts replacing string and in 1875, experiments with crossbars began.

The crossbar was made compulsory in 1882, marked eight feet above the ground, but construction quality was an issue. In 1888, Kensington Swifts were disqualified from the FA Cup after one of their horizontals was found to be lower than the other.  A  goalkeeper broke a bar by swinging off it during an 1896 fixture.

In the increasingly competitive leagues it became common for teams to dispute whether a ball had actually gone under or over the bar or inside or out of the posts as it was sometimes difficult to tell.

The idea of goal nets, reputed to have been inspired by trouser pockets,  was trialled in Nottingham , quickly accepted into the official laws  and used in the 1892 FA Cup Final.

Issues remained over standardisation, however.

Square goalposts, strangely popular in Scotland became controversial when in the 1976 European Cup Final, Saint-Etienne  argued that, had the crossbar been rounded, a certain goal bound shot would have gone in. Instead Bayern Munich grabbed a second-half winner. Square designs were followed by round and then an elliptical shape .Crossbars today are scientifically engineered to counteract gravity and made from aluminium to replace wood.

There have been tragic consequences from the collapses of badly-constructed, heavy steel goal post structures in Public Parks but a change in the law, even under a campaign led by a grieving parent has not led to that all important change in the law.

Although seemingly perfect now there have been some in the world of football who have considered tinkering with goalposts.

Sepp Blatter, in 1996, toyed with the idea to lengthen the goals by the diameter of two balls, around 50cm, and to increase the height by the diameter of one ball. For once he was out-voted although logically, since the first goalposts in the late 19th century the average height of a goalkeeper has increased to 1.9 metres and so the target size has, in real terms, shrunk.

Modern football goals are now constructed from extruded aluminium or steel sections and comply to strict safety laws. FIFA have recently trialed goal-line technology integrated into the goal post to finally put an end to disputed goals.

Goalposts will always play a role in the professional and amateur game. As for my home team, Hull City. Well, in a crucial English Premier League match at the weekend,just passed , they hit the post four times, including an attempt on their own goal by the opposition but could just not score. They lost to a controversial penalty in the last quarter of the game and assumed the dreaded position at the foot of the table.

Rock-bottom boss Mike Phelan said: “It's difficult when your team are doing ever so well, you feel for them because you want them to score the goals and get the credit. If we can play like that, we just need a stroke of genius or luck to get us goals. The post is there to stand in the way of a goal and it did that a few times today.You have to have a wry smile on your face or you'd be very, very depressed."

Such was the opposing fans verdict that their team had been pretty useless that the vote for Man of the Match went, by an overwhelming majority to the goalposts.

So it came to pass that the football match at the London Stadium between West Ham United and my home team, Hull City added a further chapter to what is the weird and wonderful history of goal posts.