1871, started as a competition among former pupils of private schools, but in
the 1880s became dominated by teams from the industrial regions. Crowds of
10,000 could be attracted to soccer games between local rivals, and by the end
of the decade the FA Cup Final attracted over 20,000 spectators; in 1888 twelve
teams from the industrialized parts of England formed the Football League.
In Australia, attendance at sports contests was even bigger than in England.
Cricket was the most popular summer sport, while in 1866 a crowd of 34,000
watched an Australian Rules football game between South Melbourne and
Geelong (Vamplew, 1992, p. 437). The 1880 Melbourne Cup was watched by
an estimated 100,000, and contests in other individual sports, such as rowing,
could also attract large crowds (Ward 2009, p. 588). In the late nineteenth
century, an international boxing circuit of topfighters developed in Britain,
North America, and Australasia (Taylor 2013), and a world heavyweight
champion has been recognized since the 1880s.
The evolution of the principal winter sports was different in the leading
colonies of Victoria and New South Wales (NSW). As in the USA and UK,
modern winter sports were often played as adjuncts to the major summer
sports, and there was more disagreement over the appropriate rules, for
example, for rugby or Association Football in England. In Melbourne during
the gold rush of the 1850s, Australian Rules were devised as the best combin-
ation of both nascent English football codes, but failed to catch on in NSW,
where spectators preferred rugby. In Sydney, a crowd of 52,000 saw NSW play
New Zealand at rugby in 1907, just before the Australian split in favour of
rugby league over rugby union.^3 With Australian Rules dominant in three of
the large states, and rugby league in the other two (plus, later, Canberra), the
Australian football situation lacked the dominance of a single code as in the
USA, South Africa, or New Zealand, and was little influenced by the spread of
soccer until the immigration of southern Europeans in the 1960s.
The most popular truly national sport, cricket, was imported from Britain,
and remains the greatest cultural glue between Australia and Britain, even
while language, entertainment, and other aspects of Australian life became
Americanized. Yet the organization differed in the crucial respect that Australia
did not share the class distinction that characterized English cricket until the
1960s. This is not to deny the existence offinancial disputes between players
and a hidebound board, which boiled over in 1912 when several top cricketers
refused to tour England, and the weakened Australian team‘set records for
poor performance on thefield, and for alcohol consumption and disorderly
(^3) In contrast to the situation in Britain, the origins of rugby league in Australia lay not in the
issue of amateurism versus professionalism but in a conflict between well-to-do administrators and
wage-earning players. So, as in cricket, Australian rugby became a commercial sport without
conventions of‘gentlemen’and‘players’, although disputes over money couldflare up between
players and administrators (Chesterton 2007).
Richard Pomfret