Match Reporting in the 1800s

Printed in the Cray Wanderers matchday programme on Tuesday 19 August 2014 v Barkingside

Newspaper coverage of football matches played was very thin on the ground when the game was first being properly organised. The problem was that little notice was taken of games and football itself was not taken very seriously. What little reporting that existed was localised, short in content, consisting of just a few lines of formal comment and little or no amusing anecdotes.

The big daily newspapers mostly ignored the beautiful game altogether, happy to instead leave any little coverage to regional publications - and only then in prolific footballing towns. Football had to push, shove and elbow its way into sharing space on the sports pages alongside horse racing and croquet!

If a football club wanted to see their information in print, it was usually down to the Honorary Secretary to supply the copy to the editor of the local rag. No surprises for us to understand that match reports were often biased and exaggerated. However, as organised association football became more popular around the 1880s, the bigger newspapers decided to take a keener interest in games being played.

Dedicated sports reporters were shipped out to matches involving the growing number of professional clubs, as editors came to realise more and more of the populace enjoyed the game and that meant more sales of newspapers that included match reports!

Readers were encouraged to write in to newspapers with their views on games played, which players were picked, which teams deliberately put the boot in and how many referees couldn't tell a goal from a miss. Column inches were given over to sports writers who used pen names such as 'Spectator', 'Off-side' and 'Goal Post'. Keen followers of the game of football found newspaper coverage of games invaluable for reading about the venues they couldn't get to.

There was an agonising wait of two days until the Monday issue of the newspapers that reported on the Saturday games hit the streets. We have to remember that the 1800s was a time long before mobile phones and computer technology, so in order for news and updates of matches to get around the country, telegraph boys and even carrier pigeons were employed for the purpose of delivering the information.

With the gathering interest in the game in the 1880s, recently-invented, yet basic, telephones and telegraph poles were installed at many grounds and these permitted faster transfer of the match details between stadia and the newspaper sports desks.

Matches were often reported on in high-brow fashion; formal writing and perfect usage of the English language, eventually making way for more down-to-earth descriptions that the average man in the street could properly comprehend. Significantly, after the newspapers' initial reluctance to have anything to do with reporting on matches, football journalism eventually went a long way to promoting the growth of this seedling in its developmental stage.

Trevor Mulligan