Who Wants To Play Horse Football?
There are lots of games and team sports you can play on horseback – everything from the classic game of polo to simple chase games.
Why then, don’t we have a proper horse football league yet?
It would work. Horses would love to play, and it would be a great game to watch too. It would also be safer than polo which involves a lot of swinging dangerous looking sticks and very hard balls flying at a hundred miles per hour.
But with horse football you could use a ball similar to a regular soccer ball, but just make it bigger. Or maybe something like one of these indestructible footballs. Then make the goals wider too so it’s not impossible to score, and you’ve got a great game. It would work just the same way as a normal football game. With riders of course – I don’t think the horses would just happily play all on their own, I’m not quite that silly. I’d certainly love to play, and ride in a game.
Spectators would love the game too I think, because it would be quite fast and exciting. Like all sports it would depend on the skills of the riders – expert games would be faster and more skilfull. Can you imagine though how much people would enjoy betting on the game too? Because not only do we have horses which people bet on all the time in races, but we also have football, and people bet on that game all the time too (although it works a bit differently and can be a little bit confusing). Put the two things together and you’ve got double excitement for the spectators.
It would be a little tricky to teach your horse how to dribble and kick the ball – you’d need to polish up on those essential riding skills, but I think you could do most of the work with just a simple canter and let the horse just naturally run in to it rather than actual kicking. There wouldn’t be much tackling but there are plenty of games, like netball, where you don’t tackle at all. Or ice hockey where it’s so fast that there isn’t much tackling anyway.
I wonder if the regular Premier League would like to help me out..?
Let me know if you want to join my horse football team 🙂