Marble Football.

When I was a youngster in the 1960s I devised my own miniature football game called "Marble Football". Eventually this developed into a mutant form of "Subbuteo". The players were of course marbles or taws. A "Mum Rolette" semi-transparent ball provided, well, The Ball! I built goals from lego and used tiddlywinks etc. as pitch markers (my preferred pitch was 54 inches long). As in Subbuteo I employed a "Shooting\Offside Area", bordered by a line one third of pitch length. At one time I tried to align my rules with those of Subbuteo, but only did this up to a point. Of course, The Rules are still up for "Development" (they are half drafted in a paper folder somewhere). As in Subbuteo there is a "Possession Rule". However, every "move" of an attacker is followed by a move from a defender of choice plus one from the goalkeeper (a marble). These defenders cannot touch the ball (apart from the goalie in the goal area).

I also recall playing "Coin Football" in the sixth form. Each human player had one player: a penny (now would be a 2P) coin. The "ball" was a tanner (now would be a 5P). The goalposts were marked in pen or pencil on a desk - the pitch! (Our thumb-nails were used as goal-posts). We just took it in turns, no holds barred (no possession rule). A lad called Andrew Allen introduced the tactic of "tackling" whereby a "player" would "close down" the "ball" rather than hitting it. This was a good way of "smothering" an opponent. I made sure that such "tackling" was retained in "Marble Football". Andrew used a phrase, "Put up your dooks" when ready to shoot so you could place your thumb nails over the "goalposts!

Back to Marble Football: I ran my own "league" for many years. My star side was "Real Brown United", actually a mixture of brown and red marbles. "Yellow..." then "Golden Wanderers", "Green Spartans", and "Skyblues" were other sides. In the late 1960s I played my cousin Martin quite often. He had teams like "Yellow Vampires", "Bluelings" and "Grey Mirrors". We later discovered he has a colour defect, hence he often questioned whether I was using his players! His "Grey Mirrors" were actually sky blue! Still, he later became the manager of a semi-professional football team (the real thing) so he must have learnt something. Playing the real thing on my Mum's path with her cat with a tennis ball might have helped too. As he remarked, the cat was better than both of us! It was a poor Marble Football Player though: just pouncing on all the players and scattering them everywhere.