As it was unlawful to kick the football into touch on the full, and no one had yet mastered the art of kicking the ball on the bounce into touch anyway, the football was constantly on the move – this was rugby played with the frenetic urgency and, yes, scrappiness, of Australian football.

The effect was that rugby league quickly attracted not just rugby union devotees, but also many of the footballers and fans who had over the past decade turned away from rugby union to Australian rules. The legendary South Sydney

fullback Howard Hallett was just one example of an Australian rules player who turned to league and found fame.

In a telling example of the closeness of the two codes, in 1911 the leading kickers in Sydney (Easts’ Dally Messenger) and Melbourne (Essendon’s Dave McNamara) both scored just over 180 place- and drop-kicked goals for their premiership-winning teams. The “treacherous punt kick” was reckoned by Melbourne footballers to be the tool of the novice and the schoolboy.

It had quickly dawned upon Giltinan in mid-1908 that in Sydney’s favoured code of rugby league, he had in his hands a brand of football that could be readily “fused” with Melbourne’s Australian rules and that a football code to bring the nation’s two largest markets together was within realistic reach.

There was also acknowledgement that while soccer wasn’t an immediate threat to either code (with the FA clubs in England repeatedly rejecting calls for a tour due to the likely poor gate returns and lowly standard of Australian soccer), it did have the potential to one day give the nation a “uniform football code.”

Giltinan travelled to Melbourne to meet Australian football officials and financiers. The Age in Melbourne reported that Giltinan, armed with a set of modified rules (later called “Australeague”), put to the VFL that neither code had a chance of usurping the other in its adversary’s home city and that the only solution was for them to merge.

Giltinan was even bold enough to suggest that if quick agreement could be arrived at, he’d broker a deal with English rugby league officials during the Kangaroos’ upcoming British tour to adopt the merged code, thus creating international competition as well.

Australian rules officials were far from dismissive of Giltinan – offering a means for rapid interstate competition and the chance for Ashes-style Tests against England did far more than just pique their interest. It was agreed that Giltinan and his Kangaroos, on their way to England, would attend Australian rules’ “Jubilee of Australasian Football Carnival” at the MCG in August 1908.

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