Applies to Description

Blagging

 

Matching

Blurting

All players

 

All players

All players

Seizing opponent’s broom tail to slow or

hinder

Flying with intent to collide

Locking broom handles with a view to

steering opponent off course

Bumphing

Beaters only Hitting Bludger towards crowd,

necessitating a halt of the game as officials

rush to protect bystanders. Sometimes

used by unscrupulous players to prevent

an opposing Chaser scoring

Cobbing

All players

Excessive use of elbows towards

opponents

 

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Flacking

 

 

Keeper only Sticking any portion of anatomy through

goal hoop to punch Quaffle out. The

Keeper is supposed to block the goal

hoop from the front rather than the rear

Haversacking Chasers only Hand still on Quaffle as it goes through

goal hoop (Quaffle must be thrown)

Quaffle-pocking Chasers only Tampering with Quaffle, e.g.,

puncturing it so that it falls more quickly

or zigzags

Snitchnip

All players but

Seeker

Any player other than Seeker touching or

catching the Golden Snitch

Stooging

Chasers only More than one Chaser entering the

scoring area

 

Referees

Refereeing a Quidditch match was once a task for only the

bravest witches and wizards. Zacharias Mumps tells us

that a Norfolk referee called Cyprian Youdle died during a

friendly match between local wizards in 1357. The

originator of the curse was never caught but is believed to

have been a member of the crowd. While there have been

no proven referee slayings since, there have been several

incidences of broom-tampering over the centuries, the

most dangerous being the transformation of the referee’s

broom into a Portkey, so that he or she is whisked away

from the match halfway through and turns up months

later in the Sahara Desert. The Department of Magical

Games and Sports has issued strict guidelines on the

security measures relating to players’ brooms and these

 

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incidents are now, thankfully, extremely rare.

The effective Quidditch referee needs to be more than

an expert flier. He or she has to watch the antics of

fourteen players at once and the most common referee’s

injury is consequently neck strain. At professional

matches the referee is assisted by officials who stand

around the boundaries of the pitch and ensure that neither

players nor balls stray over the outer perimeter.

In Britain, Quidditch referees are selected by the

Department of Magical Games and Sports. They have to

take rigorous flying tests and an exacting written

examination on the rules of Quidditch and prove, through

a series of intensive trials, that they will not jinx or curse

offensive players even under severe pressure.

 

 

Chapter Seven

Quidditch Teams of Britain and

Ireland

T

 

he necessity for keeping the game of Quidditch

-218secret from Muggles means that the Department of

Magical Games and Sports has had to limit the number of

games played each year. While amateur games are

permitted as long as the appropriate guidelines are

followed, professional Quidditch teams have been limited

 

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in number since 1674 when the League was established.

At that time, the thirteen best Quidditch teams in Britain

and Ireland were selected to join the League and all others

were asked to disband. The thirteen teams continue to

compete each year for the League Cup.

 

Appleby Arrows

This northern English team was founded in 1612. Its

robes are pale blue, emblazoned with a silver arrow.

Arrows fans will agree that their team’s most glorious

hour was their 1932 defeat of the team who were then the

European champions, the Vratsa Vultures, in a match that

lasted sixteen days in conditions of dense fog and rain. The

club supporters’ old practice of shooting arrows into the

air from their wands every time their Chasers scored was

banned by the Department of Magical Games and Sports

in 1894, when one of these weapons pierced the referee

Nugent Potts through the nose. There is traditionally

fierce rivalry between the Arrows and the Wimbourne

Wasps (see below).

 

Ballycastle Bats

Northern Ireland’s most celebrated Quidditch team has

won the Quidditch League a total of twenty-seven times

to date, making it the second most successful in the

League’s history. The Bats wear black robes with a scarlet

 

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bat across the chest. Their famous mascot Barny the

Fruitbat is also well-known as the bat featured in

Butterbeer advertisements (Barny says: I’m just batty about

Butterbeer!).

 

 

Caerphilly Catapults

The Welsh Catapults, formed in 1402, wear vertically

striped robes of light green and scarlet. Their

distinguished club history includes eighteen League wins

and a famous triumph in the European Cup final of 1956,

when they defeated the Norwegian Karasjok Kites. The

tragic demise of their most famous player, “Dangerous”

Dai Llewellyn, who was eaten by a Chimaera while on

holiday in Mykonos, Greece, resulted in a day of national

mourning for all Welsh witches and wizards. The

Dangerous Dai Commemorative Medal is now awarded at

the end of each season to the League player who has taken

the most exciting and foolhardy risks during a game.

 

Chudley Cannons

The Chudley Cannons’ glory days may be considered by

many to be over, but their devoted fans live in hope of a

renaissance. The Cannons have won the League twenty-

one times, but the last time they did so was in 1892 and

their performance over the last century has been

lacklustre. The Chudley Cannons wear robes of bright

 

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orange emblazoned with a speeding cannon ball and a

double “C” in black. The club motto was changed in 1972

from “We shall conquer” to “Let’s all just keep our fingers

crossed and hope for the best.”

 

Falmouth Falcons

The Falcons wear dark-grey and white robes with a

falcon-head emblem across the chest. The Falcons are

known for hard play, a reputation consolidated by their

world-famous Beaters, Kevin and Karl Broadmoor, who

played for the club from 1958 to 1969 and whose antics

resulted in no fewer than fourteen suspensions from the

Department of Magical Games and Sports. Club motto:

“Let us win, but if we cannot win, let us break a few

heads.”

 

 

Holyhead Harpies

The Holyhead Harpies is a very old Welsh club (founded

1203), unique among Quidditch teams around the world

because it has only ever hired witches. Harpy robes are

dark green with a golden talon upon the chest. The

Harpies’ defeat of the Heidelberg Harriers in 1953 is

widely agreed to have been one of the finest Quidditch

games ever seen. Fought over a seven-day period, the

game was brought to an end by a spectacular Snitch

capture by the Harpy Seeker Glynnis Griffiths. The

 

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Harriers’ Captain Rudolf Brand famously dismounted

from his broom at the end of the match and proposed

marriage to his opposite number, Gwendolyn Morgan,

who concussed him with her Cleansweep Five.

 

Kenmare Kestrels

This Irish side was founded in 1291 and is popular

worldwide for the spirited displays of their leprechaun

mascots and the accomplished harp playing of their

supporters. The Kestrels wear emerald-green robes with

two yellow “K”s back to back on the chest. Darren

O’Hare, Kestrel Keeper 1947–60, captained the Irish

National Team three times and is credited with the

invention of the Chaser Hawkshead Attacking Formation

(see Chapter Ten).

 

 

Montrose Magpies

The Magpies are the most successful team in the history

of the British and Irish League, which they have won

thirty-two times. Twice European Champions, the

Magpies have fans across the globe. Their many

outstanding players include the Seeker Eunice Murray

(died 1942), who once petitioned for a “faster Snitch

because this is just too easy,” and Hamish MacFarlan

(Captain 1957–68), who followed his successful

Quidditch career with an equally illustrious period as

 

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Head of the Department of Magical Games and Sports.

The Magpies wear black and white robes with one magpie

on the chest and another on the back.

 

 

Pride of Portree

This team comes from the Isle of Skye, where it was

founded in 1292. The “Prides,” as they are known to their

fans, wear deep-purple robes with a gold star on the

chest. Their most famous Chaser, Catriona McCormack,

captained the team to two League wins in the 1960s, and

played for Scotland thirty-six times. Her daughter

Meaghan currently plays Keeper for the team. (Her son

Kirley is lead guitarist with the popular wizarding band

The Weird Sisters.)

 

 

Puddlemere United

Founded in 1163, Puddlemere United is the oldest team

in the League. Puddlemere has twenty-two League wins

and two European Cup triumphs to its credit. Its team

anthem “Beat Back Those Bludgers, Boys, and Chuck That

Quaffle Here” was recently recorded by the singing

sorceress Celestina Warbeck to raise funds for St. Mungo’s

Hospital for Magical Maladies and Injuries. Puddlemere

players wear navy-blue robes bearing the club emblem of

two crossed golden bulrushes.

 

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Tutshill Tornados

The Tornados wear sky-blue robes with a double “T” in

dark blue on the chest and back. Founded in 1520, the

Tornados enjoyed their greatest period of success in the

early twentieth century when, captained by Seeker

Roderick Plumpton, they won the League Cup five times

in a row, a British and Irish record. Roderick Plumpton played

Seeker for England twenty-two times and holds the British

record for fastest capture of a Snitch during a game (three and

a half seconds, against Caerphilly Catapults, 1921).

 

Wigtown Wanderers

This Borders club was founded in 1422 by the seven

offspring of a wizarding butcher named Walter Parkin.

The four brothers and three sisters were by all accounts a

formidable team who rarely lost a match, partly, it is said,

because of the intimidation felt by opposing teams at the

sight of Walter standing on the sidelines with a wand in

one hand and a meat cleaver in the other. A Parkin

descendant has often been found on the Wigtown team

over the centuries and in tribute to their origins, the

players wear blood-red robes with a silver meat cleaver

upon the chest.

Wimbourne Wasps

The Wimbourne Wasps wear horizontally striped robes of

yellow and black with a wasp upon their chests. Founded

 

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in 1312, the Wasps have been eighteen times League

winners and twice semifinalists in the European Cup.

They are alleged to have taken their name from a nasty

incident which occurred during a match against the

Appleby Arrows in the mid-seventeenth century, when a

Beater flying past a tree on the edge of the pitch noticed a

wasps’ nest among the branches and batted it towards the

Arrows’ Seeker, who was so badly stung that he had to

retire from the game. Wimbourne won and thereafter

adopted the wasp as their lucky emblem. Wasp fans (also

known as “Stingers”) traditionally buzz loudly to distract

opposing Chasers when they are taking penalties.

 

 

Chapter Eight

The Spread of

Quidditch Worldwide

 

Europe

Quidditch was well established in Ireland by the

fourteenth century, as proved by Zacharias Mumps’s

account of a match in 1385: “A team of Warlocks from

Cork flew over for a game in Lancashire and did offend

the locals by beating their heroes soundly. The Irishmen

knew tricks with the Quaffle that had not been seen in

Lancashire before and had to flee the village for fear of

 

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their lives when the crowd drew out their wands and gave

chase.”

Diverse sources show that the game had spread into

other parts of Europe by the early fifteenth century. We

know that Norway was an early convert to the game

(could Goodwin Kneen’s cousin Olaf have introduced

the game there?) because of the verse written by the poet

Ingolfr the Iambic in the early 1400s:

 

Oh, the thrill of the chase as I soar through the air

With the Snitch up ahead and the wind in my hair

As I draw ever closer, the crowd gives a shout

But then comes a Bludger and I am knocked out.

 

Around the same time, the French wizard Malecrit wrote

the following lines in his play Hйlas, Je me suis Transfigurй Les

Pieds (“Alas, I’ve Transfigured My Feet”):

 

GRENOUILLE: I cannot go with you to the market today,

Crapaud.

CRAPAUD: But Grenouille, I cannot carry the cow alone.

GRENOUILLE: You know, Crapaud, that I am to be Keeper

this morning. Who will stop the Quaffle if I do not?

 

The year 1473 saw the first ever Quidditch World Cup,

though the nations represented were all European. The

nonappearance of teams from more distant nations may

 

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be put down to the collapse of owls bearing letters of

invitation, the reluctance of those invited to make such a

long and perilous journey, or perhaps a simple preference

for staying at home.

The final between Transylvania and Flanders has gone

down in history as the most violent of all time and many

of the fouls then recorded had never been seen before –

for instance, the transfiguration of a Chaser into a polecat,

the attempted decapitation of a Keeper with a broadsword,

and the release, from under the robes of the Transylvanian

Captain, of a hundred blood-sucking vampire bats.

The World Cup has since been held every four years,

though it was not until the seventeenth century that non-

European teams turned up to compete. In 1652 the

European Cup was established, and it has been played

every three years since.

Of the many superb European teams, perhaps the

Bulgarian Vratsa Vultures is most renowned. Seven

times European Cup winners, the Vratsa Vultures are

undoubtedly one of the most thrilling teams in the world

to watch, pioneers of the long goal (shooting from well

outside the scoring area), and always willing to give new

players a chance to make a name for themselves.

In France the frequent League winners the Quiberon

Quafflepunchers are famed for their flamboyant play

as much as for their shocking-pink robes. In Germany we

 

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find the Heidelberg Harriers, the team that the Irish

Captain Darren O’Hare once famously said was “fiercer

than a dragon and twice as clever.” Luxembourg, always a

strong Quidditch nation, has given us the Bigonville

Bombers, celebrated for their offensive strategies and

always among the top goal-scorers. The Portuguese team

Braga Broomfleet have recently broken through into

the top levels of the sport with their groundbreaking

Beater-marking system; and the Polish Grodzisk

Goblins gave us arguably the world’s most innovative

Seeker, Josef Wronski.