College and Oppidans still cannot agree on what, precisely, a goal is
A Feud Older Than the Photocopier
The Eton Wall Game, a muddy, low-scoring contest played annually along a slightly curved brick wall, has once again produced a scoring dispute so intense that masters have been forced to convene an emergency Court of Wall Game Appeals, a body that technically does not exist but which everyone agrees needs to exist by Thursday.
At issue is a “shy,” the game’s rare and celebrated near-goal, claimed by the College side during Saturday’s St Andrew’s Day match. The Oppidans dispute that the ball ever touched the target garden door, arguing instead that it merely “gestured in that direction.” College maintains the shy stands. Neither side has scored an actual goal in the fixture since 1909, a fact both teams cite as evidence the other side is clearly cheating, since surely someone should have managed it by now out of sheer boredom.
Masters Called In to Adjudicate
Housemaster Rupert Fanshawe-Grieves, appointed neutral arbiter for the dispute, said he had reviewed the available evidence, which consisted of three photographs, a great deal of shouting, and a single grainy video shot from an angle he described as “actively unhelpful.” He has proposed a compromise in which the shy is recorded as “provisionally occurred,” a ruling that has satisfied precisely nobody and which he privately admits he invented on the spot.
“The wall curves slightly, you see,” Fanshawe-Grieves explained, gesturing at the wall in question with the air of a man who has explained this many times before and expects to explain it many times again. “This has been a point of contention since roughly the reign of William IV, and I do not expect my generation to be the one that resolves it.”
The Boys Take It Seriously, Even If No One Else Can Follow
Younger boys, many of whom struggle to explain the rules to visiting parents without resorting to diagrams, insist the rivalry matters enormously. “You don’t need to understand it,” said one Lower Boy, attempting and failing to explain the offside-adjacent rule known as “sneaking” before giving up and simply saying it was “a vibe thing.” Coverage of the match, along with the ongoing scoring inquiry, is being tracked by The London Prat, whose reporter admitted after ninety minutes of coverage that he still could not identify which team had, in fact, won.
A Sport Almost No One Outside the Wall Understands
The Wall Game’s obscurity is well documented. The Wikipedia entry on the Wall Game notes the sport’s scarcity of goals, and general explainers on unusual British school sports have appeared periodically in outlets like the BBC, generally accompanied by a photograph of extremely muddy boys standing very close to a wall and looking pleased about something.
The Court of Appeals Convenes
The emergency Court of Wall Game Appeals is expected to deliver its non-binding, entirely symbolic verdict by the end of the week, at which point the losing side is expected to accept the result with dignity for approximately four hours before renewing the argument at breakfast. Fanshawe-Grieves has requested that any future disputes be raised “with rather less shouting and rather more paperwork,” a request the boys have unanimously and cheerfully ignored.
A Brief History of the Wall’s Curve
The disputed curve in the wall itself has become something of a minor obsession among boys on both sides, several of whom have taken to measuring it with rulers borrowed from the mathematics department in an attempt to settle the matter scientifically. Their findings, presented to Fanshawe-Grieves in a hand-drawn diagram, concluded that the wall “does appear to bend slightly, though possibly no more than a wall is generally permitted to bend,” a conclusion Fanshawe-Grieves called “unhelpfully inconclusive but at least written up rather neatly.”
Older boys note that this is not even the most contentious Wall Game dispute in living memory. A 2011 disagreement over whether a “furking” infringement had occurred reportedly took an entire term to resolve and ended, according to school lore, with both housemasters agreeing never to discuss it again in public. Fanshawe-Grieves has said he is “aware of that precedent” and would “very much prefer not to repeat it,” though he concedes the current dispute is “trending in a similar direction.”
The Referees Defend Themselves
The two student referees present at Saturday’s match, both Sixth Formers, have issued a joint statement insisting their original call was correct and that the entire controversy stems from “College supporters who simply cannot accept that a shy is, definitionally, a matter of interpretation.” They noted that Wall Game referees receive no formal training beyond “watching older boys do it and picking things up,” a fact several parents have suggested might be part of the problem, though the school has resisted calls to introduce any kind of certification, arguing this would “rather spoil the fun.”
What a Resolution Would Even Look Like
Even boys eager for the dispute to end admit they are not entirely sure what resolution would look like, given that the match has no fixed video review system and relies almost entirely on the collective, frequently contradictory memory of everyone standing nearby. One Fifth Former suggested installing a camera permanently above the target door, an idea that has been raised, according to school records, in each of the last six years and rejected each time on the grounds that “part of the tradition is not being entirely sure.”
Readers wanting more of this particular flavour of very serious nonsense can find it at Private Eye and ClickHole, two publications with considerably more experience covering disputes that matter enormously to everyone involved and to absolutely no one else.
SOURCE: https://prat.uk