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This is where the ball is thrown in from, often by some local dignitary. In 1928 and 2003, it was do...
This is where the ball is thrown in from, often by some local dignitary. In 1928 and 2003, it was done by the respective Princes of Wales, which is why the event has come to be called the Royal Shrovetide Football.

Even now, there are very few rules to the game and I get the impression that there would have been even fewer in the past. I came to watch on the Wednesday this year and, because there had been an infringement the previous day, the person in charge gave us a reminder of them. Deliberately injuring anybody is not allowed. Neither is deliberately damaging property, although it's accepted that with thousands of people climbing over structures and swarming all over the town, some damage could occur and many residents take steps to protect their windows and so on.

Hiding the ball, for instance by putting it in a bag, isn't allowed. Transporting it in any motorised vehicle is also banned. The rule doesn't ban bikes although the ball is larger than a modern football and would be difficult to carry on a bike if you weren't allowed to use a bag.

Churches, cemeteries, the Memorial Gardens, construction sites, the allotments, the doctor's surgery and the hospital are all out of bounds. Apart from that, the game can go anywhere and that definitely includes private property. In fact one of the goals is on private land so I can't go there now because I'm not playing the game.

The goals are about 5 km apart, both in the river, one upstream of here and one downstream.

One of the other villages which hosts a similar game claims to have the largest playing area of any ball game in the world because the entire parish is the playing area. However, here there seems to be no boundary. In this game, the start point and the two goals are in three different parishes. As far as I can tell, you could take the ball to a goal by as wide a route as you like. There's nothing in theory to stop a team setting stationing people all along the road to run the ball in a relay to Derby, and then continue to rampage over buildings when they got there because the rules of the game allow it.

What actually happens resembles a rugby match rather that a soccer match and both games were derived from this. A crowd of thousands of people, known as the hug, spend a few hours trying to grab the ball off each other. When it eventually gets to the edge of the crowd, it is thrown to the waiting runners who then run off towards the goal, with the other team trying to stop them.

The match can last for anything between three and eight hours each day, depending on whether a goal is scored. Because it takes place in February or March, that means that several hours could be played in the river outside the town in the dark.


UTC Time: 09:16, Friday 14 August 2015
Local Time: 10:16, Friday 14 August 2015
Estimate of longitude: 1° 43' 48.18" W = -1.730050°
Estimate of latitude: 53° 1' 2.10" N = 53.017250°
Possible error on position estimate: 100 metres