Walker Birth of Football

1. Auflage 2017
ISBN: 978-1-4835-9565-8
Verlag: BookBaby
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: Adobe DRM (»Systemvoraussetzungen)

E-Book, Englisch, 200 Seiten

Who invented football? The ancient Greeks, the Italians, the Scots, a group of bored Iron Age Chinese soldiers? No, the English, and they did it in Cambridge. This is the story of how the world's most popular sport was born. It was at Cambridge University that football first became football. Every ex-public school boy who 'went up' to Cambridge took with his old school rules with him. Some allowed hacking, in many you could carry the ball, while in others the mob still prevailed. When they ran out for a game on the city's Parker's Piece, chaos ensued. Over a twenty-year period generations of students thrashed out a set of compromise rules - the 'Cambridge Rules'. These rules put skill above force, limited the movement of the football to the boot and were used as the founding principles of association football. Malcolm Walker charts the tortuous gestation and birth of association football from its primeval beginnings to the six tempestuous meetings of 1863 that saw its official foundation. This is a story of violence, religion, bizarre behaviour, feuding and a dodgy stitch-up that marked football's difficult birth.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Walker, Malcolm

Leseproben

CHAPTER 1 - ANTHROPOLOGY, THEOLOGY AND THE MOB From mysticism to mayhem “Some people believe football is a matter of life and death, I am very disappointed with that attitude. I can assure you it is much, much more important than that.” - Bill Shankly IT’S usually considered wise to start a story at the beginning. For us this means travelling back through the mists of time to the very dawn of our existence - as the simple act of kicking a ball goes back to the earliest periods of human history and turns out to have been one of the first things that marked us out from the rest of the animal kingdom. The general theory goes that shortly after humans realised their world was an unpleasant place and that practice makes perfect, we stared to play games and soon after that invented the notion of sport. In fact, our forbearers may well have devised the trap rule long before they worshipped gods and almost certainly constructed the ball before the wheel. The detailed mechanics of the evolutionary process that concluded with the curled free kick commenced back when the act of play provided the main learning tool for our young, a process through which they learnt the basic skills involved with catching dinner or stopping oneself from becoming dinner. From these humble beginnings games progressed at quite a pace, but still concerned themselves almost exclusively with the rehearsal of survival techniques and those that helped produce better hunters. A large proportion of them therefore involved weapons in the guise of spears, clubs, rocks etc., all of which required a target, preferably of the moving type. Apart from floating things in water, most targets were provided by throwing and rolling everyday objects such as fruit, rocks, animal heads etc. Unfortunately, most of these were erratic, messy and not reusable. If humankind was to continue its rise to the top of the global food-chain, then another solution was required. Happily, for the future of humanity it didn’t take too much of a Neanderthal genius to come up with the answer…… the ball, (well a bundle of rolled up animal skin). A simple invention that we clearly took to with great relish as it quickly became an essential piece of early human kit. Having been designed to improve physical agility and visual co-ordination, ball games soon took on the additional role of tribal cabaret and mutated into a multitude of dance routines. In Africa, the explorer George Stow described one such variety - the San ball game. It used balls made of hammered hippopotamus hide that were small, round and very bouncy (very unlike the animal from which they came). During san the ball was thrown at a hard flat rock so that it bounced up in the air at which point as George recalled the participants ‘commenced a series of antics, throwing themselves into all kinds of positions, imitating wild dogs, and like them making a noise “che! che! che!”.’ - Well let’s face it there wasn’t much to do in the evenings. And this could have been as far as it ever went if the embryonic concept of sport hadn’t been given new impetus from our need to practice the skills necessary for our next great evolutionary leap forward - warfare (something else we invented before the wheel). The most obvious piece of equipment for killing another human in prehistoric times was undoubtedly a pointy stick. So, pointy stick games became very popular, particularly in Africa where they came to dominate and generally involved the men of the tribe fighting pitched battles against one another while the women folk watched on from the terraces with a view to identifying good husband material. But, games that involved whacking your fellow tribe members with a lump of wood made the whole business somewhat self-defeating. If the chief wanted to field a skilful yet fully fit fighting force, he needed to find another training method. As it so happens the favoured solution turned out to be football - well not exactly football but, we have to start somewhere and if Americans can call their game football so could wondering hunter gathers. Whatever the classification of these football(ish) games, they appear to have been extremely popular and displayed amazing staying power with many still being played by indigenous peoples at the time of their discovery by “modern” men. For instance, the North American Cherokee game of anetsa that translates as ‘little brother of war’; or the Ghuru Guma people of New Guinea who played theirs until both sides had recorded an equal number of victories; community games that allowed players to bash the hell out of each other while minimising casualties; with the hope of building a bit of team spirit - the original esprit de corps. The Australian Aborigines had countless ball games including Kai, Parndo, Buroinjin, Woggabaliri, Keentan and most famously Marn Grook that reputedly still survives today in the form Australian rules football. A claim supported by this account given by a British settler in 1841, which certainly describes a kicking game in which players punted the ball to each other in much the same way as they do in the modern day Australian code: The men and boys joyfully assemble when this game is to be played. One makes a ball of possum skin, somewhat elastic, but firm and strong. The players of this game do not throw the ball as a white man might do, but drop it and at the same time kicks it with his foot. The tallest men have the best chances in this game. Some of them will leap as high as five feet from the ground to catch the ball. The person who secures the ball kicks it. This continues for hours and the natives never seem to tire of the exercise. Another well-known example of this type of game was the snappily named North American Indian game of Pasuckaukohowog, which translates as ‘they gather to play ball with the foot.’ Pasuckaukohowog typically involved whole villages in large-scale contests that bore more resemblance to minor battles than organized sport. So violent in fact, that players sometimes disguised themselves with war paint to avoid recognition during the traditional post-match dinner of roasted buffalo. Yes, the plain truth is that if one looks at the entire history of human contests involving a ball, by far the majority of it has been in as semi organised tribal punch-ups and only a very recently as organised team sports. It’s difficult to underestimate the extent to which these crude ball games became entwined with tribal ritual and their religious beliefs, in some instances they shaped the very religions themselves. The reason for this being the fact that ballgames actually pre-dated many cultures’ attempts to explain the mysteries of life, the universe and everything – It’s not beyond the bounds of possibly that Adam and Eve had been booting apples from the Tree of Knowledge around the Garden of Eden long before the serpent suggested them as a food source. European explorers encountered countless examples of ball games, ritual and religion going hand-in-hand in every part of the world. Such as the North African Berber tribes who played Koura, a game linked to fertility rights in which villages fought over the head of a sacrificed animal, the Pacific Islands where they used coconuts, pigs’ bladders and oranges as the ball. Or the Indo-Chinese tribes who kicked a scarified bull head over the bodies of dead chieftains. This association was to characterise the next stage of football’s formative years as the relationship between footy and various celestial beings would reach new heights in humanities early and classical civilisations Classical Games Many people moan about how much our society is dominated by football – they should thank their lucky stars that they weren’t born 4000 years ago as most large scale civilizations were positively obsessed with it. We will start our tour with possibly the most fanatical of them, the peoples of South and Central America circa 2000 BC. They had numerous games with many different names the Aztec’s Tlatchli, the Incas Tlaxtli or Ullamalitzli, the peoples of Sinaloa Ulama and the Mayans poc-ta-tok. Because they all shared many similarities experts lump them altogether under the title of Mesoamerican ballgames. Every level of society played them from children for fun, to kings for kingdoms with thousands of ball courts being constructed across the region. They were dangerous, exciting, contests at the very heart of the religious and cultural lives of these South American civilisations. The winners of the games became heroes, whilst the losing captain was often decapitated and his skull used as the core around which a new ball was made. The scale and grandeur of their ruins are a testament to just how popular the games were. Gambling played a very important part of the matches with Aztec records recalling that spectators often risked all they owned on the outcome of a single match including their wives, children even their own lives. The most famous instance of this relates to the wager between Axayacatl, emperor of the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlan, and Xihuitlemoc, king of Xochimilco for the entire yearly...