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| FOOTBALL |
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When the term
"foot ball" originated, it referred to a wide
variety of games in medieval
Europe, which were played on foot — that is,
by peasants
— as opposed to the games played by
horse-riding aristocrats.
Therefore the name has always implied a variety of games
played by people on foot, not just those that involved
kicking a ball. All football games involve scoring
points with a spherical
or ellipsoidal
ball (itself called a football),
by moving the ball into, onto, or over a goal
area or line defended by the opposing team. Many of
the modern games have their origins in England,
but many peoples around the world have played games
which involved kicking and/or carrying a ball since
ancient times.
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The object
of all football games is to advance the ball by
kicking, running with, or passing and catching,
either to the opponent's end of the field where
points or goals can be scored by, depending on
the game, putting the ball across the goal line
between posts and under a crossbar, putting the
ball between upright posts (and possibly over
a crossbar), or advancing the ball across the
opponent's goal line while maintaining possession
of the ball. In all football games, the winning
team is the one that has the most points or goals
when a specified length of time has elapsed. |
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Throughout
the history of mankind the urge to kick at stones and
other such objects must have inevitably led to many
early activities involving kicking and/or running with
a ball. Football-like games undoubtedly predate recorded
history in all parts of the world and the earliest forms
of football can only be guessed at. |
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Documented
evidence of what is possibly the oldest organized activity
resembling football can be found in a Chinese military
manual written during the
Han Dynasty in about 2nd century BC. It describes a practice known as tsu
chu (Traditional
Chinese:?? or ?? ; Pinyin:
cù ju) which involved kicking a leather ball
through a hole in a piece of silk cloth strung between
two 30 foot poles. It was not a game as such but more
of a spectacle for the amusement of the Emperor and
it may have been performed as long as 3000 years ago.
Another
Asian ball-kicking game, which may have been influenced
by tsu chu, is kemari.
This is known to have been played within the Japanese
imperial court in Kyoto
from about 600AD.
In kemari several individuals stand in a circle and
kick a ball to each other, trying not to let the ball
drop to the ground (much like keepie
uppie). The game survived through many years but
appears to have died out sometime before the mid 19th
century. In 1903
in a bid to restore ancient traditions the game was
revived and it can now be seen played for the benefit
of tourists at a number of festivals.
The Greeks
and Romans
are known to have played many ball games some of which
involved the use of the feet. The Roman writer Cicero
describes the case of a man who was killed whilst having
a shave when a ball was kicked into a barbers shop.
The Roman game of Harpastu is believed to have been
adapted from a team game known as "ep?s?????"
(episkyros) or pheninda that is mentioned by Greek playwright,
Antiphanes
(388-311BC) and later referred to by Clement
of Alexandria. The game appears to have vaguely
resembled rugby.
There are a number of less well-documented
references to prehistoric,
ancient
or traditional
ball games, played by indigenous
peoples all around the world. For example, William
Strachey of the Jamestown
settlement is the first to record a game played
by the Native
Americans called Pahsaheman,
in 1610.
In Victoria,
Australia, Indigenous
Australians played a game called Marn
Grook. An 1878 book by Robert
Brough-Smyth, The Aborigines of Victoria, quotes
a man called Richard Thomas as saying, in about 1841,
that he had witnessed Aboriginal people playing the
game: "Mr Thomas describes how the foremost player
will drop kick a ball made from the skin of a
possum and how other players leap into the air in
order to catch it." It is widely believed that
Marn Grook had an influence on the development of Australian
Rules Football (see below). In northern Canada
and/or
Alaska, the Inuit
(Eskimos) played a game on ice called Aqsaqtuk.
Each match began with two teams facing each other in
parallel lines, before attempting to kick the ball through
each other team's line and then at a goal. The ancient
Aztec
game of ollamalitzli
also involved kicking a ball, but it generally had more
similarities to
basketball.
These games and others may well stretch
far back into antiquity and have influenced football
over the centuries. However, the route towards the development
of modern football games appears to lie in Western Europe
and particularly England.
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The Middle
Ages saw a huge rise in popularity of annual Shrovetide
football matches throughout Europe, particularly in
England. The game played in England at this time may
have arrived with the Roman
occupation, but there is little evidence to indicate
this. Reports of a game played in Brittany,
Normandy
and Picardy,
known as Choule or Soule, suggest that some of these
football games could have arrived in England as a result
of the Norman
Conquest. These archaic forms of football would
be played between neighbouring towns and villages, involving
an unlimited number of players on opposing teams, who
would clash in a heaving mass of people struggling to
drag an inflated pig's
bladder by any means possible to markers at each end
of a town. A legend that these games in England evolved
from a more ancient and bloody ritual of kicking the
"Dane's
head" is unlikely to be true. Shrovetide games
survive in a number of English towns (see below).
The first description of football in
England was given by William FitzStephen (c. 1174-1183).
He described the activities of
London youths during the annual festival of Shrove
Tuesday.
After lunch all the youth of the city
go out into the fields to take part in a ball game.
The students of each school have their own ball; the
workers from each city craft are also carrying their
balls. Older citizens, fathers, and wealthy citizens
come on horseback to watch their juniors competing,
and to relive their own youth vicariously: you can see
their inner passions aroused as they watch the action
and get caught up in the fun being had by the carefree
adolescents.[1]
Most of the early references to the game speak simply
of "ball play" or "playing at ball".
This reinforces the idea that the games played at the
time did not necessarily involve a ball being kicked.
The first clear reference to football was not recorded
until 1409,
when King Henry
IV of England issued an edict to ban it. In 1424,
King James
I of Scotland also attempted to ban the playing
of "fute-ball". However, the first clear reference
to a ball being used did not occur until 1486.[2]
The first reference to football in
Ireland
occurs in the Statute
of Galway of 1527,
which allowed the playing of football and archery
but banned "hokie' — the hurling
of a little ball with sticks or staves" as well
as other sports. (The earliest recorded football match
in Ireland was one between Louth
and Meath,
at Slane,
in 1712.)
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In 1862,
J. C. Thring, who had been one of the driving forces
behind the original Cambridge Rules, was now a master
at Uppingham
School and he issued his own rules of what he called
"The Simplest Game" (these are also known
as the Uppingham Rules). In early October of 1863
a new revised set of Cambridge Rules rules were drawn
up by a seven man committee representing former pupils
from Harrow, Shrewsbury, Eton, Rugby, Marlborough and
Westminster. This later revised version of the Cambridge
Rules rules were to form the basis of what eventually
became the rules adopted by The
Football Association. On the evening of October
26, 1863
at the Freemason's Tavern in Great Queen Street, London,
The
Football Association (FA) met for the first time.
It was the world's first official football body. The
meeting had been called, not by public school figures,
but by members of several football clubs in the London
Metropolitan area. Charterhouse was the only school
represented at that first meeting. The aim was to produce
a single code of football that everybody could agree
to and to set up a governing body for the regulation
of the game.
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The first meeting
resulted in the issuing of a request for representatives
of the public schools to join the association. With
the exception of Thring at Uppingham, most schools declined.
Rugby, Eton and Winchester did not even reply. In total,
six meetings were held between October
and December
1863. At the close of the third meeting, a draft
set of rules were published that most of the delegates
were happy to endorse, but this agreement was not to
last. At the beginning of the fourth meeting, attention
was drawn to the fact that a number of newspapers had
recently published the Cambridge Rules of 1863. The
Cambridge rules differed from the draft FA rules in
two significant areas; namely 'running with the ball'
and 'hacking' (kicking an opponent in the shins). The
two contentious draft rules were as follows: IX.A player shall be entitled to run
with the ball towards his adversaries' goal if he makes
a fair catch, or catches the ball on the first bound;
but in case of a fair catch, if he makes his mark he
shall not run.
X.If any player shall run with the ball towards his
adversaries' goal, any player on the opposite side shall
be at liberty to charge, hold, trip or hack him, or
to wrest the ball from him, but no player shall be held
and hacked at the same time.
At the fifth meeting a motion was proposed that these
two rules be expunged from the FA rules. Most of the
delegates were favourable to this suggestion but F.
W. Campbell, the representative from Blackheath
and the first FA treasurer, objected strongly. He said,
"hacking is the true football". The motion
was carried nonetheless but at the final meeting, Campbell
withdrew his club from the FA. After the final meeting
on 8
December the FA published the "Laws
of Football", the first comprehensive set of
rules for the game later known as Association
football (or, colloquially, soccer). These first
FA rules still contained elements that are recognisable
in other games for instance, a player could make a fair
catch and claim a mark and if a player touched the ball
behind the opponents' goal line, his side was entitled
to a free kick at the goal 15 yards from the goal line.
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| Use of the word "football"
in English-speaking countries |
The word "football",
when used in reference to a specific game can mean any
one of those described above. Because of this, much
friendly controversy has occurred over the term football,
primarily because it is used in different ways in different
parts of the English-speaking
world. In most English-speaking countries,
the word "football" usually refers to Association
football, also known as soccer (soccer originally
being a slang abbreviation of Association). Of the 48
national FIFA
affiliates in which English
is an official or primary language, only five —
Canada,
the Marshall
Islands, New
Zealand, Samoa
and the United
States — use soccer in their name, while the
rest use football. However, even in the countries where
football is the official name of association football,
this name may be at odds with common usage.
In other countries or regions within
them, the word "football" may refer to American
football, Australian
rules football, Canadian
football, Gaelic
football, or one of the two codes of rugby
football: rugby
league or
rugby union.
The different codes are listed below
and are described more fully in their own articles
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