THERE are moments when history turns, and there are moments when history is seen to turn.

Ten years ago, I wrote a book on the 1970 grand final. That's a moment when the history of Australian football was seen to turn, when a static game is said to have become a running game after Carlton coach Ron Barassi told his players to handball, handball, handball, after half-time.

Barassi spoke to me for the book with some reluctance. When he finally agreed to meet, he lent across the table, fixed me with his famous glare and said: "I did not invent the use of handball — Len Smith did at Fitzroy in the 1960s."

By one view of history, Barassi was right. And being a fundamentally honest man with a sense of legacy to the Smith family — Len's brother, Norm, was Barassi's father figure — the oft-repeated statement that he invented handball in the 1970 grand final drives Barassi nuts.

But I also think, at some level, Barassi knows there is nothing he can do because the 1970 grand final is when the idea of handball being used in this way was born in the popular mind.

Another moment when football history is seen to have turned was the playing of the First Game between the Melbourne Church of England Grammar School and Scotch College in the parklands outside the MCG on August 7, 1858.

Last Saturday, Gillian Hibbins argued in this paper that the AFL's 150th anniversary was happening one year too early, that the commemoration of this game was to blame, that the proper 150th would date from the the first set of rules in 1859.

My response is that it's not a big thing to argue about.

Basically, our game is a product of evolution. Tracing its origins is like following the path of a river. Some of the bends made by the water as it pushed along are bigger than others. The First Game is a big one.

A decade before the First Game, a book had been published about the Rugby School in England called Tom Brown's Schooldays, which had generated enormous enthusiasm among schools throughout the British Empire with its advocacy of manly games. The hero of the book is not really Tom Brown, the boy who becomes a young man in the Rugby mould. Rather, it is the headmaster of the Rugby School, Dr Thomas Arnold.

We live in a period of great change. They lived then in a period of enormous change. Industrial cities were being born, people were flooding the cities, there was a wild upsurge in disease and crime.

One response was the transportation of the new underclass as convicts to Australia. Arnold's response was to envisage a new sort of leader — one termed a muscular Christian.

Tom Brown's Schooldays begins with an account of the village games played in Tom Brown's village in his childhood — that is, before the Industrial Revolution.

The lesson of the book is that the time for these simple recreations is past. By the book's end, Tom is captain of the Rugby cricket 1st XI and understands the importance of team games as a means of training young men to do their duty.

No less an authority than the Duke of Wellington declared that the Battle of Waterloo had been won on the playing fields of Eton. Playing football at the Rugby School, the boys wore jerseys marked with the insignia of the royal houses of Europe.

In 1854, four Rugby old boys died in the Charge of the Light Brigade. In 1855, like the fictional Tom Brown before him, Tom Wills became captain of the Rugby cricket 1st XI. On his return to Melbourne, he was described by a journalist as the model of a muscular Christian.

Twenty months later, Wills captained Melbourne Grammar in the First Game. By the end of his life he would be viewed like Ben Cousins, but at this point he had the golden aura of James Hird.

In 1858, Victoria, then in its infancy, was rich and socially ambitious. Within three years, Scotch College's captain in the First Game, a Scottish naturalist called John MacAdam, would be secretary to the Burke and Wills expedition, another Victorian drama which continues to reverberate.

And the optimism of the day extended to all classes. The Eureka Stockade was a recent memory. A generation of colonial youth was growing up who saw no reason to kowtow to authority as their convict parents had done. Ned Kelly was one of them.

This generation took to football like fish to water. If they didn't play, they identified with clubs and followed them, often clashing violently with opposition supporters. The trade union movement's push for a 40-hour week would also serve the cause of Saturday sport. It was one of those times when various social forces meet like streams of water in a flood and suddenly a new river is created.

I first interviewed Barassi during his spell as coach of Sydney. I am proud to say I managed to ask two questions he hadn't been asked before. One of them was this: So what's the big deal if Australian football does go out of existence? What's lost?

He thought and said: "One of the world's great sporting inventions."

In the course of that interview, he also told me something I didn't know. In the 1890s, Australian football — then known as Victorian Rules football — made a concerted bid to get into Sydney. By the 1890s, Victoria was the powerhouse of the Australian colonies. It was spawning a new notion of Australian identity through the Australian Natives Association and the drive for federation.

One of the major reasons Victorian Rules was repelled in Sydney, Barassi said, was that the sports masters at Sydney's leading private schools were Englishmen who saw Rugby football as symbolic of the imperial tie and deliberately blocked the introduction of the Australian game. I have since seen this written in reports of the Jubilee of Australian football in Melbourne in 1908.

This one fact explains the significance of the game we are here today to celebrate. It helped make the team game of football socially acceptable, if not virtuous. The push was on to make boys play, some of whom hated it.

If you don't believe me, ask Melbourne Grammar old boy and satirist Barry Humphries.

This is the edited transcript of the speech given by Martin Flanagan before yesterday's re-enactment of the First Game.