The history of the handball, and how it changed Australian rules football

On a warm, dry Adelaide afternoon Port Adelaide decided to put the “foot” part of football mostly to rest.

In one spectacular sequence the Power decided to move the ball down the ground by hand. Dodging and weaving through the defence, Port executed eight handballs, and just one kick prior to the goal.

The ball moved effortlessly from defensive 50 to their own arc without hitting the deck, with Sam Powell-Pepper’s punctuating bounce setting the scene for Jason Horne-Francis’s open goal.

For many this second quarter goal exemplifies what makes footy great. Dynamic movement, stellar skill and line-breaking speed.

For hours each week footballers across the league and country operate in lines, triangles and circles, honing their ability to get the ball away with speed and under pressure. The best in the game can get a handball away in a fraction of a second in almost any situation.

But for all the beauty of the handball, the codification and adoption of the skill is relatively recent when compared with the code’s 167-year history. The handball as we know it today — with one clenched fist punching the ball from the other resting hand — has been the norm for less than half the sport’s history.

The handball has radically evolved as the game has developed, now representing an essential skill for all players across all parts of the ground.

This is the story of the handball, and the brilliance of the skill today.

The first handballs

The first rules of the game in 1858 were clear about one thing — there was to be no throwing of the ball in the Australian code. But equally missing from the early rules was any mention of a handball or handpass.

It’s likely that for the first 40 or so years of football history the handball was likely not a part of the game. One of the first “instructional manuals” for football, contained within Thomas Power’s 1879 ‘The Footballer’ said that “the hand is very useful to strike back, forward or catch a ball in the air…to stop a ball…(or) to change the direction of it suddenly…but beyond this its use should not be allowed to go”.

Instead, early Australian Football often moved the ball via the “little mark” — a mark that went as little as inches to give a player a free kick.

When the distance for the kick was set at 10 yards (about 9 metres) in 1897, players were forced to find another way to get rid of the ball when unable to kick. This is where the handpass came to the fore.

The first recorded forms of the handball involved the ball being either tossed above the head and hit like a tennis serve or flicked well above the head.

The handball was first codified for the 1911 season, defined as “when the ball is clearly held in one hand and knocked with the other hand”.

This interpretation allowed room for the “flick” pass to continue — where a ball was held with one hand and pushed out with an open hand.

The flick pass was explicitly banned before the 1924 season, with only a clenched fist permitted from the 1925 season onwards.

In 1934 the rule was rolled back, stating that a handball is “knocked with the other hand”. This caused more confusion across the nation. South Australia fully re-adopted the flick pass under this rule, while Victorian officials largely insisted on closed fists. Different leagues — big and small — often had different interpretations of the word “knocked”. Interstate play was especially fraught.

In 1938 the VFA in Victoria went a step further and allowed throw passes in an effort to speed up the game, though reverted in 1949.

By the late 1940s and early 1950s many believed the flick pass was actually illegal, with the ANFC running statements reasserting that this was not the case. A more restricted flick pass re-emerged across the 1950s and continued to be legal until 1966, exemplified by players such as Ted Whitten.

Through most of this time the handball was considered a secondary weapon — only to be resorted to when the kick was not possible. Len Smith — brother of Demons great Norm — was a coaching pioneer of the use of the handball but even his coaching rules stated that a “handball does not take the place of a kick. It is a means of getting out of trouble.”

This approach continued right up until the 1980s, when the handball started to come into prominence as an attacking weapon as the game began to fully professionalise. As footballers became fitter, the need to utilise other methods than the kick and hope became necessary.

The modern handball

These days the handball isn’t a weapon of last resort — it’s a key part of any successful team’s strategy. Those endless hours of handball drills have had a clear impact on the way that the modern game is played.

The two players with the most handballs on record at the top level are currently in the league, with Lachie Neale likely to grab the third spot by the end of the year. Just one of the top 20 for handballs retired before the year 2000 (Greg Williams), with the former Brownlow Medallist likely to fall outside this elite club before the end of the season.

The exit from stoppages has moved from dump kicks to smooth overlap handballs — with these exits semi-scripted and programmed in advance. Some teams — such as Hawthorn — thrive on backfeeding from contests. Others — such as GWS — look for overlap handballs from set positions or to utilise foot speed to beat static defences.

Teams tend to handball most often in the heat of the centre of the ground, where the space to find smooth marking targets is rare. In defence there’s also a tendency to use a couple of sets of hands in order to find a good kick, rather than dumping it out under pressure and risking an intercept mark.

It’s the handballs through the middle that now open up the field of play for pinpoint kicks to be targeted inside forward 50.

Allowing the long, flowing team chains to occur has been a continual development of the techniques around the handball. Much like the tennis slap of 1909 slowly evolved into the rocket handballs of the 1980s, the handball of 2025 utilises a variety of different skills and techniques to release the ball legally.

One of the most important developments over the year relates to the “hold” arm. Instead of the ball resting on the hand like players of yesteryear, players are taught to “palm” or firmly grip the ball to increase the range of possible release angles. This allows skills like Nick Daicos’s “backwards” handball while still retaining control of the ball.

Players are also becoming increasingly adept at adjusting the position of their “hold” arm to outside of their torso and tackle cylinder. Some players like to shift the ball to their outside arm and away from their body horizontally, while others such as Tom Green raise their arms up so they can get a handball away while their body is being tackled.

The skill of getting the ball away while falling to the ground is also critical, with double Brownlow Medallist Lachie Neale one of the finest at the art. The difference between an effective falling handball and getting trapped holding the ball can often be the difference between a goal and one conceded.

As teams have become more willing to attack via the handball, opposition sides have increasingly focused on blocking handball lanes with arms and bodies. The underground handball is one of the best tools to avoid these obstacles, as Steele Sidebottom demonstrates above.

It’s not just technique that is forged in those endless handball drills, but also the connection between different players. Certain combinations crop up as common, building on well established rapport between teammates.

All Australians, Brownlow Medallists and stars of the game are littered on this list, underlining the importance of the handball to the game of the modern greats. That connection — tied with the technical and tactical advances — has helped the handball become such a useful tool.

As football continues to age, the importance of a well placed and executed handball continues to grow.