Identical nets- when did it start ??

[rugbyblue]

Young un recently asked me do goal nets have to be square?.  I didnt know the answer .  They didnt used to be and i, along with lots of others most likely, would be able to tell you what ground you were at just by looking at the goal in many cases. 

 

I remember seeing foreign games as a kid and being in awe of the loose nets or how far back they went.  It made goals look better than a lot of english nets that were so tight the ball just bounced out or hit a stantion and the net didnt ripple. Filbert street was like this at times .It wouldn't surprise me if these days there is a law stating clubs must have certain style of nets.

 

Anyway im displaying my geeky side here..... Im a big boxing geek too and had a similar question as to when the 4 rope (rather than 3) ring became standard. 

 

Well....if anyone is as geeky as i can be, i found the article below interesting 

 

https://that1980ssportsblog.blogspot.com/2016/11/goal-nets-posts-and-stanchions-of-1980s.html?m=1

Edited 1 March by rugbyblue

[STEVIE B]

…….l thought this was another cricket thread. Oh well. 

[oxford blue]

Yes, goal nets in football (UK) do have to meet certain standard size regulations, though there is some flexibility regarding the amount of netting used.

1. Standard Size of Goalposts and Nets: According to the Laws of the Game, as set by the International Football Association Board (IFAB), the goalposts and the surrounding netting must be of a certain size:

   • The goalposts must be 7.32 meters (8 yards) wide and 2.44 meters (8 feet) high.
   • The netting itself should be positioned in such a way that it doesn't interfere with play but catches the ball when it crosses the goal line.

2. Netting's Optional Amount: While the basic dimensions of the net are regulated to ensure consistency and safety, the amount of netting or how the net is designed can vary slightly from club to club. The net must be strong enough to withstand the force of the ball but doesn't need to cover every inch behind the goal. Clubs can adjust the depth of the net or the material used based on their preferences, as long as it does not hinder play.

So, in short, the size of the goal and the net's position behind the goal are standardized, but clubs do have some leeway in terms of how much netting they use, as long as it serves its purpose of catching the ball without disrupting the game.

 

[Courtesy Chat GPT!]

[stripeyfox]

might not answer the OP question but a couple of lovely articles from WSC about Goal Nets. Enjoy!
 

 

 

 

https://www.wsc.co.uk/the-archive/the-joy-of-nets/

 

 

The joy of nets

Jonathan Wilson revisits a former footballing preoccupation and laments the loss of a once unique part of any ground

Reading fans’ accounts of their first visit to a stadium, it seems most are struck by two things: the pure greenness of the pitch (which seems odd given how ungrassy most pitches of two or more decades ago look by comparison with modern football) and the intensity of the noise.

 

I suppose I was taken by both those things when I first experienced football live (Sunderland 1 Southampton 1, Roker Park, October 1982), but what made a bigger impression on me was the net. Drawn, not quite taut but far from baggy, across the red stanchions, it seemed impossibly huge. (It had to be, how else could Steve Williams have sidefooted a finish past the great Chris Turner?) It was quite possibly the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen – pale, white, ethereal, the smallness of the holes and the neatness of the string giving it the delicacy of a bridal veil.

In my mind – and I fully accept the possibility that my memory has embellished some details – it was a misty afternoon and small droplets of water hung from the knots glinting in the floodlights like the tiniest diamonds. Seventeen years later I scored the final goal of my – low-level, largely indifferent – university football career. It was the year after I’d left, but having gone back for a piss-up I was drafted in to make up the numbers for the college thirds. They’d changed the nets while I’d been away, replacing the old functional cords with something far more like the virginal lace of early Eighties Roker Park. That was a damp afternoon and as my free-kick fizzed down the back of the stanchion, water-droplets cascaded from the strings. It was so perfect, I didn’t really want to score another goal.

I recognise this may make me sound a little odd – although Subbuteo used to sell several different versions, which suggests I wasn’t the only one with this obsession – and I also realise that nets, in the wider scheme of all that could be better about football, probably don’t matter all that much. But I’d also suggest that their development is indicative of a disturbing wider trend in football.

As you do when you’re a kid, I suppose I believed these things were permanent. I noted that Arsenal had nets quite similar to ours, that Tottenham’s stanchions were dark blue and West Ham’s white, that at The Dell and at Kenilworth Road the nets seemed to come almost straight down, absurdly close to the goal-line, and that Newcastle and Sheffield Wednesday preferred a D-hoop on the post to the full A-frame. I revelled in the deep-red Liverpool preferred and the fact they used so much netting that the give in them smothered even the most powerful of shots.

I loved Wembley’s neutral green stanchions, slightly more rounded than most (although not as rounded as Hampden Park) and deeper net, which seemed to give goals scored there extra gravitas. And I despised the raggedy big squares of Selhurst Park and fully admit the absurdity that Sunderland’s relegation there in 1997 hurt me more because we’d been beaten by Wimbledon, a side with so little concern for aesthetics that they leased a ground whose nets looked like the tattered fishnets of a cheap whore. If you’d shown me a photo of a net in the mid Eighties, I could have told you the ground.

Abroad, of course, was even more exciting – the vast yellow boxes of Mexico that seemed to invite long-range drives, Italy with its hexagonal holes, the enormous tents of Barcelona and Benfica (about which I developed the theory that by making the goal seem bigger they encouraged forwards to shoot from narrow angles), the red-and-white striped posts of parts of the eastern block, the black-based posts of Argentina. Basically, I loved the range, the difference, the fact that a goalframe was a thing to be interpreted as a club desired (obviously encouraged by the fact that Sunderland interpreted them with such a sense of class and dignity, until they switched to a D and a coarser gauge of net, sewn by prisoners at Durham jail, in 1990, a betrayal for which I’ve never quite forgiven them – no wonder we went down that season).

And now, of course, if you showed me a photo of a net, it could be anywhere in the world from the Premier League to Japan to Cameroon. Colours occasionally change but they all share the same basic shape, with a pole behind the goal holding up a basic functional cuboid. Obviously it doesn’t really matter, it’s just my little obsession, but as with so much, globalisation has led to homogeneity and another little piece of football’s romance has died.

From WSC 276 February 2010

 

 

https://www.wsc.co.uk/stories/from-the-archive-the-joy-of-nets-from-playing-in-gardens-to-wembley/

 

From the archive ~ The joy of nets, from playing in gardens to Wembley

Most people keep quiet about their childhood fantasies. But not Olly Wicken in WSC 59, January 1992, who explained why goalnets were at the heart of football’s appeal

 

It may be a healthy passion or it may be a fetish. I’ll leave you to judge. But ever since a very young age I have had a strong interest in goalnets. Great big, bulging goalnets. I love them.

They do something for me: if ever I’m looking out from a train and I see a plain set of goalposts, I get a shiver of excitement; but if the nets are up, I’m clawing at the windows. I slaver and I yelp; I just want to get out there and test their breaking strain by spanking a twenty-five yarder into the top comer. Am I alone on this one? Or very alone?

Because although nets were initially introduced to football primarily for the mundane function of helping referees judge whether the ball had passed inside or outside the goalpost, for me, they adom the very heart of soccer’s appeal. Let me explain.

 

I think it all started at around the age of seven when my older brother and I used to play “three-and-in” in the back garden at home. Even though all we had to use as goalposts were cricket stumps, I used to imagine that there was a net: it added enormously to the fantasy of being Sepp Maier between the sticks. (My brother was bigger than me, so he always got to be Gordon Banks.)

Embed from Getty Images

 

Imagining the existence of a net made a big difference: at the very least I felt less inclined to worry about the usual props one would employ for total Sepp-simulation and therefore having to find Dad’s huge gardening gloves as well; but, at it’s most positive, the imaginary net transformed a mundane suburban kickabout into the high drama of goalmouth action in the heat and altitude of Mexico City; and whenever it was my turn out of goal it was Barry Endean who was rattling the rigging in the Aztec Stadium. Deep joy.

When it was my turn to be keeper, my movements in and around the goal always acknowledged the presence of a goalnet: whenever one of bruv’s left-footed piledrivers from across the rosebed thundered narrowly wide, I would always go to fetch the ball by walking around the goal. And whenever one of his deft chips from behind the magnolia went over my head (and he won the ensuing scuffle about whether or not it was a goal), I would always fetch the ball through the goal and disconsolately mime holding up the back of the goalnet when picking the ball out of the runner beans.

As a kid, I really aspired to goalnets. They symbolised proper football – the real thing. It was a source of unending disappointment that my primary school team played its home games with naked goalposts – it spoke volumes for the school’s meagre footballing ambitions.

Retrospectively, however, maybe our goalkeeper suffered the same excitement: perhaps the 0-16 and 0-12 defeats owed something to his own personal thrill at seeing the goalnet bulge at close quarters. Nevertheless, these were formative experiences: I think it was then that I first became enamoured with the noise a net makes when a goal was scored: that sharp scratching scudding sound of leather skidding to a halt against twine. Even today, just thinking about it gives me a tingle.

Embed from Getty Images

 

Inevitably, I suppose, as a child who enjoyed his “creative play” sessions at junior school, I soon turned my hand to trying to build my own goal complete with nets. Long hours were spent in the garden shed until my creation finally took shape: a wobbly concoction of bamboo canes and strawberry netting, it had no crossbar and its net was unrealistically taut along the goal-line.

Looking back now, the ingenious answer would have been to attach a triangular wire coathanger to the top of each cane to act as a stanchion. Now that would have been an idea. And if I’d thought to cover the whole thing in sticky-back plastic I might have got invited to take my invention onto Blue Peter and bang one past Lesley Judd high into the roof of the mesh.

But this is all wishful retrospective thinking – when bruv and I actually tested the shambolic construction, the first goalmouth melee we had left us wrapped in plastic netting, helplessly ensnared and virtually impaled upon the splintered bamboo. But even to this day I insist that the whole of the ball never crossed the line.

By the time I started going to watch League games, I was becoming something of a connoisseur of goalnets. As anyone who has ever scored a goal in a goalnet will know, it’s vital to one’s full satisfaction that the ball nestles in the net. It must make that sharp scratching scudding sound and then nestle, perhaps still slightly spinning, with the net flopping down over it.

Embed from Getty Images

 

If the ball only creeps over the line and doesn’t reach the net, if it’s kicked away from behind the line, or if it rebounds from an over-taut net, you get a sense of incompleteness, a sense that it wasn’t as good a goal as it could have been. So why oh why do West Ham and QPR have such shallow nets from which the ball always rebounds? I’ve never seen the ball nestle at Upton Park or Loftus Road: no matter how fantastic a thirty-five yard screamer might be scored at those grounds, it’s never as good a goal as one that nestles in the spacious, luxurious, bulging, voluptuous, gorgeous nets at Wembley.

The power of the goalnet is enormous. Not only does it have this exceptional emotional hold over people like me (if there are any), but it can bring out the strangest behaviour in Sunday morning players. Have you noticed the Sabbath sight of squat beer drinkers in shorts jumping up and down underneath the crossbar before a game? And have you noticed how any player over 5’11” always arrives as late as possible before kick-off?

The reasons are connected: nets are bloody awkward to put up, so the rest of the team always tries to leave it to old Lanky. And goalnets have the power to cause terrible injuries: week in, week out, players mysteriously develop dreadful limps and back strains just in time to prevent them from taking the nets down after the game.

But perhaps the most bizarre power possessed by goalnets is their physical magnetism. Have you noticed how, whenever either an attacker or defender chases the ball over the line and into the goal, he seems impelled to leap high into the netting at the end of his run, jumping up and grabbing a handhold as high as possible.

Why? What possesses them? Maybe, for a striker, it’s to do with the extreme excitement of being there to hear the sound of ball on net that makes him jump for joy. But for a defender, what can explain the strange attraction of the goalnet at such a time of grief?

Every time you leap up into the netting, you’re deluded into expecting to be suspended there in either tragic or heroic majesty, but suddenly – surprise! the taut-looking goalnet is not a solid structure after all and it swings you down like some incompetent gibbon until your arse hits the ground and you’re left with your feet sticking in the air and hideously entwined in the onion bag. Goalnets can be cruel: they’ll even deny you your dignity.

So there it is. Goalnets: the passion, the power and the glory. For me, they are the most emotive icon of this manysplendoured game of ours. For me, they will always evoke the tender emotions of thumping home a full-bloodied volley from twelve yards, the finer feelings of sending a rasping drive low into the far comer.

Hmm. You’re right: it is a fetish.

 

This article was originally printed in WSC 59, January 1992. Subscribers get free access to the complete WSC digital archive – you can find out more details here

Top photo by Simon Gill/WSC Photography: The nets are tied up after The Northern Premier League game between Stamford AFC and Marine from The Daniels Stadium

Bottom photo by Colin McPherson/WSC Photography: A groundsman putting up the goalnets prior to the Northern League Division One fixture between Horden Colliery Welfare and Billingham Synthonia at Welfare Park

Monday, October 31st, 2016 - Stories