For those of you who believe that Christmas Day should remain sacred and exempt from professional sports, you may want to look away.
Pitches and courts across the country have been silent on December 25 for almost half a century, but not anymore as the NBL prepares to host its first game on Christmas Day.
Melbourne United travel to the Sydney Superdome to take on the Kings at 6.30pm AEDT.
The NBL promoted the match as “the last scheduling frontier in sport in Australia” when it was announced in July, and from a modern perspective it’s true.
However, Christmas Day was once a fixture around the world, and in some places it still is.
Football, a British Christmas tradition
In the UK, football is a staple of the festive season, with fans looking forward to Boxing Day all year round.
However, football was also regularly played on Christmas Day, from the first days of the league in 1889, when Preston North End beat Aston Villa 3-2 at Deepdale, until the last match on Christmas Day in 1965.
Playing matches on one of the few bank holidays of the year actually makes sense – especially in the pre-television era – and the crowds have regularly been very healthy.
Some memorable matches took place on Christmas Day, often with plenty of goals scored.
Christmas Day 1940 was particularly wild as Norwich beat Brighton 18-0 – although Brighton had to resort to fielding young players and even pulled in some people from the crowd to make the team – Southend United beat Clapton Orient 9-3, Bournemouth beat Bristol City 7-1 and Bury drew 5-5 with Halifax.
In 1937, Charlton goalkeeper Sam Bartram not only had to play on Christmas Day, he was left alone on the pitch for 15 minutes.
After thick fog descended on Stamford Bridge for the Chelsea v Charlton match, the referee ordered everyone to leave – but Bartram didn’t realize he had stayed on the pitch until a policeman emerged from the fog to tell him everyone else had left.
Christmas Day matches ended in the late 1950s, with the last English Football League match played on Christmas Day being Blackpool v Blackburn Rovers in 1965, with Blackpool winning 4–2 in front of a crowd of 21,000.
However, not only men played on Christmas Day.
Dick, Kerr Ladies – a pioneering women’s team that once attracted 53,000 to a match on Boxing Day – played their first match against Arundel Coulthard Foundry on Christmas Day 1917, with 10,000 fans at Deepdale Stadium in Preston North End.
In Scotland, matches were scheduled on Christmas Day until 1976.
However, the most famous match to take place on Christmas Day was to take place in No Man’s Land in 1914, when German and British troops stopped fighting to play a series of impromptu matches between the trenches.
In the rest of the world, football continues apace over Christmas, with this year’s matches scheduled in a number of leagues in Africa and Asia.
America’s professional sports leagues love Christmas
Christmas Day in the US has traditionally been a busy time for basketball fans, and this year is no exception.
Five NBA games are scheduled for Christmas Day: New York Knicks vs. Philadelphia 76ers, Dallas Mavericks vs. LA Lakers, Celtics vs. Milwaukee Bucks, Golden State Warriors vs. Memphis Grizzlies, and Denver Nuggets vs. Phoenix Suns.
This year, three NFL games were added to the schedule: Miami Dolphins vs. Green Bay Packers, LA Rams vs. Denver Broncos, and Arizona Cardinals vs. Tampa Bay Buccaneers.
The NFL usually only holds games on Christmas Day when it falls on a weekend.
The first time this happened was in 1971, when there were two playoff games between the Dallas Cowboys vs Minnesota Vikings and the Kansas City Chiefs vs Miami Dolphins – the latter game notarized as the longest in NFL history after going into double overtime.
The NBA has held games on Christmas Day since 1947, its second season, and has held five games a year since 2008.
They also try to make them big games featuring the defending champions or other major matchups, like when Kobe Bryant and Shaq O’Neal faced off in 2004.
The other major North American winter sports league, the NHL, does not schedule games on Christmas Day, Christmas Day or Boxing Day as part of their bargaining agreement with players.
Previously, matches were held here on Christmas Day, starting in the 1920s, and the tradition ended only in 1971.
Christmas cricket?
Christmas Day cricket is far from unheard of – for example, Bangladesh and India are playing a Test match right now – one of seven times that Christmas Day has been or is to be played on Christmas Day in Test matches.
No sport is as steeped in tradition and quirks as first-class cricket, so the fact that the matches were played on Christmas Day may come as a surprise to some.
It’s even more surprising when you consider the stoicism that isn’t traditionally planned for Sundays – I mean, it wouldn’t be cricket, would it?
This led to some surprising anomalies, such as in the second Test between Australia and England at the MCG in 1950, where the match started on Friday 22 December, had two rest days on Sunday 24 December and Monday 25, two days when Australia won 28 runs.
This was one of 29 Tests played on Christmas Day, including 10 in Australia, the first of which was against England at the SCG in 1924 and the most recent was against the same opponents at the MCG in 1994.
The first Sheffield Shield game at Christmas was played in 1926 between South Australia and Queensland at the Adelaide Oval.
By the way, that game started on Christmas Day, Saturday. The following day was Sunday, on which a day of rest was scheduled.
As a brief aside, the day of rest on the Sunday of a Test match dates back to the Sunday Observance Act of 1780, a UK law that prohibited the use of any building or room for public entertainment or debate on Sundays.
The last Test to feature a rest day in Australia was the visit of Pakistan at the Gabba in 1995, when 12 November was set aside for the players to rest.
In 1926, CricInfo reports that 13,000 people came through the gates on Christmas Day to see Test opener Arthur Richardson hit 232 runs to help South Australia finish at 6-432.
The hosts won the match by 10 wickets and started something of a tradition – the first of 29 games played on Christmas Day at Adelaide Oval between 1926 and 1969, including two Test matches.
In 1951-52, the touring West Indies side completed a six-wicket win over the Aussies on Christmas Day 1951.
Interestingly, the touring South Africans were not forced to play on Christmas Day the following year at the MCG, with a rest day scheduled instead.
However, in 1967, Australia beat India in the opening Test of their tour, a match played on Christmas Day, with Bob Simpson and Bob Cowper scoring centuries on 25 December.
Paul Sheahan and John Gleeson made their debuts in this game – unwrapping a bagged green present under the tree wouldn’t be a bad Christmas present – but we’ll spare a thought for Bill Lawrie, who endured a torrid Christmas Day by being dismissed for gold. a duck caught by Engineer Farouk off the bowling of Umesh Kulkarni.
Incidentally, Don Bradman was dismissed for a duck in a home first-class match against Victoria in 1940 on Christmas Day.
Australia also played Test cricket overseas on Christmas Day and defeated India by 77 runs in the fifth Test at the Madras Cricket Club in that match.
However, there has been no first-class or A-list cricket in Australia on Christmas Day since, although Big Bash bosses may be keeping a close eye on how the NBL game is received.
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