Water Polo Betting and Sports Guide

The Sport’s Formative Years

During the early years of water polo’s existence it was first known as water rugby, played with a ball made from Indian rubber. When Archibald Sinclair and William Henry published their book ‘Swimming’ they referred to a committee that the London Swimming Association had appointed in 1870 that was given the specific job of drawing up a code of rules for the burgeoning game of ‘football in the water’.

It had also been given other names like ‘aquatic-football’ and ‘water base-ball’, with the name of water polo not entering the records until September of 1873.

That was the year that the Morning Post and the Standard wrote of a match of ‘water polo’ being played at Crystal Palace in London. It’s believed that the name was a bastardisation of the Balti word ‘pulu’, which means ‘ball’.

Early rules included the idea that the goalkeeper actually stood out of the playing area and simply jumped on top of any player that was trying to score. The game was developing in Scotland at the same time, with Glasgow’s Arlington Baths Club seeing the sport played for the first time there.

The Game Becomes More Official

In 1884 the Midlands County Swimming and Aquatic Football Association set up what is almost certainly the world’s first water polo league. On the 13th of April 1885 the Swimming Association of Great Britain, which would later become the Amateur Swimming Association of England, officially recognised the sport for the first time.

The following year the Scottish Amateur Swimming Association held the sport’s first championship, which saw West of Scotland achieve a 1-0 win over South Side. In 1888 England’s first national club championship was formed, fittingly being won by Burton Amateur Club, which had been formed ten years before.

The team that Burton beat in the final was Otter Swimming Club, which became one of the driving forces behind the formation of the London Water Polo League in 1889. The first international water polo match occurred in 1890 when a Scottish team defeated a team from England 4-0.

Two of the players that played in that match were the aforementioned Henry & Sinclair, who produced the book ‘Swimming’ in 1893. Soon leagues began springing up all around England, with the first match between Cambridge and Oxford occurring in 1891 and a club being formed in Manchester in 1892.

The Sport Moves Out Of The UK

As the rules of the game developed to mean that it became slightly less violent, with players not allowed to be held under water any more and only the player with the ball being tackled, so too did its appeal to countries outside of England Scotland begin to grow.

The Montreal Swimming Club had been formed in 1876 and by 1887 it had a water polo team, with matches played in the St. Lawrence River. The following year an English swimming instructor named John Robinson took the game to the United States of America when he introduced it to the Boston Athletic Association.

Soon clubs began to spring up around America, with J. H. Smith and Arnold Heilban creating the Sydenham Swimmers Club’s water polo team in Rhode Island in 1890. The New York Athletic Club played the game for the first time that year and Sydenham Swimmers Club defeated them in the country’s first championships.

In the decade that followed, the sport saw its popularity spread around Europe into the likes of Belgium, Austria and Germany. In spite of the sport only really moving outside of the UK when the rules were changed to make the game less violent, there were different codes played in Europe and the US with the latter’s code for the sport notably for the manner in which it allowed rough play.

The Game Becomes Formalised

In 1900 the Summer Olympics added water polo to its roster, which was the first time that a team sport had been played in the modern Games. European teams refused to play on account of the different code played in the United States, leading to years of uncertainty regarding the official rules of the game. By 1914 the Americans had agreed to conform to international rules, but there was still no overall set of rules that everyone could abide by.

In 1929 an international water polo committee was formed with the hope being that it would put an end to the confusion and disputes that had dominated the sport on the international stage for so long.

The committee consisted of representatives from the International Amateur Swimming Federation, Great Britain and America. They decided on a set of rules that would apply to international matches and would come into effect in 1930. It was also confirmed that FINA would be the governing body for the sport from that point on.

Each time a new twist was put on the rules, such as Hungarian coach Béla Komjádi’s decision to encourage his players to pass the ball from hand to hand without letting it hit the water, FINA would be asked to rule on the matter. This included the 1949 decision to allow play to continue uninterrupted if a referee was only blowing their whistle for an ‘ordinary’ foul.

The Core Rules According To FINA

According to FINA, senior games are for teams of seven, which are made up of one goalkeeper and six outfield payers. There are also six substitutes that can come into and out of the game throughout; though it’s important to note that the goalkeeper can only be replaced by the substitute goalkeeper and outfield players can only be replaced by outfield substitutes.

Players can only be substituted during the intervals between play, during a timeout and after a goal has been scored.

Matches are split up into four quarters of 8 minutes each quarter, with the clock being stopped every time the ball goes out of play. That means that quarters generally tend to last more like 12 minutes rather than the allotted 8.

The overall objective of water polo is to score more times than the opposition, which is achieved by throwing the water polo ball into the goal that the opposite team is trying to defend.

Each team is only allowed possession of the ball for 30 seconds, in which time they need to try to have a shot at goal. If they fail to do so then possession passes to the opposition.

In order to get the ball around the playing area, players can either push the ball in front of them or else throw it to teammates. Only the goalkeeper is allowed to use both hands, with everyone else restricted to one.

When quarters are first started, all players line up on their goal line and the ball is released into the middle of the pitch. The players then have to swim into the middle of the pitch to collect the ball before a player for the opposition. When a goal is scored, the team that conceded re-starts the match.