This weeks opponents Edinburgh Accies are Scotland's oldest club nine years older than Glasgow Accies-- but has a lot changed since 1857

From Edinbrgh Accies website
1857, a year Britain was obsessed with sex, drugs, a nasty foreign war and football - what has changed?

It was a good year for explorers, generals, Crimean War nurses and football players. It saw the birth of two great Victorian icons, Sir Edward Elgar and the Victoria and Albert Museum - and Florence Nightingale was second in fame to the Queen herself.

It was exactly like present day Britain and yet utterably different - fighting dubious wars - a society riddled with drug problems (opium being the choice in the drug dens). The Prime Minister, Lord Palmeston, was under attack for getting embroiled in a distant and expensive foreign conflict (in Chinese territorial waters), but insisted it was Britain's duty to act against 'a set of kidnapping, murdering, poisoning barbarians'. The spring saw the start of the Indian Mutiny (or First War of Indian Independence) which was put down with ferocity and massive loss of life.

The best seller of 1857 was Tom Brown's School Days - fiction about Thomas Arnold's Rugby School, the school that became the model for dozens of new private schools and of course where our game got its name - and Charles Darwin was secretly working on his theory of the Origins of Species that would be published two years later.

Australia was still first choice place to send villains and medical diagnosis was a matter of guess work. Lack of sanitation, dinginess and overcrowding resulted in TB, rickets, widespread alcoholism and recurrent outbreaks of various fevers, including typhoid.

It was in this world, that in December 1857, the Academical Football Club played their first game of football at Raeburn Place against Edinburgh University, a side made up of 'visitors' to Edinburgh.

That first game was be decided on the best of seven goals - in the days to touch the ball down over the line gave you a 'try at goal'- with 25 players on each side. And it lasted for four Saturdays - starting on 26 December 1857 and finishing on 16 January 1858! On the first day the students scored one goal; there followed two scoreless days but on the fourth Saturday - with the teams increased to 30 a side - the Academicals kicked the four goals to win between 2.00 and 3.30. Although outweighed, Accies 'owed much to three or four of their number who had learned to drop kick and played the game in England' - the first reference to that rugby curiosity, the drop kick.

This article was posted on 18-Sep-2007, 21:50 by Hugh Barrow.