Selling the early sets without a pitch was all very well but proper pitches were needed if the game was to develop. It is quite difficult to promote accessories to add realism to the game if you are playing on an army blanket, as suggested by the company. The early sets included a stick of chalk for drawing your pitch on the blanket and this continued in to the seventies in the Popular Set.

The initial patent idea was for the shooting area to be a semi-circle from one corner to the other. Most people assume this changed to the straight line across the pitch before the game was launched but this is not correct. As a child I always regarded the straight line as a compromise, making shots from wide areas much more difficult and pushing approach play towards the centre of the pitch unecessarily. The early assembly instructions include a diagram of just the sort of curved shooting line I required as a child.



The first pitches provided by the company were unmarked cloths but by 1948 a fully marked pitch was available. Unfortunately the catalogues have no pictures of exactly what this pitch looked like. I have an early pitch on a much thicker cloth than was later used and in a darker green, with no shooting area.



You also sometimes see the thinner, lighter green pitches without shooting areas and also early company literature carries black and white photographs of no-shooting-line pitches.



We do not know if the company initially cut and supplied the unmarked pitches or who made the marked pitches and the variations. Note the lack of a shooting area and the rough cut left border on the pitch below.



The classic pitch of the flat era was the Accessory M pitch with whipped edges. Many people played the game on the floor but this led to an uneven playing surface. It became common practice to mount the pitch on a piece of hardboard either gluing or pinning it down. Modern pitch gurus recommend no glue uner the playing surface but the hardboard and glued pitch provided a near-perfect playing surface.









subbuteo archive pitches and playing cloths