Football Fever
The English Passion
I want to talk about the football passion that drove England
crazy for a month during the Euros 2021. Even though the dream faded two weeks ago, Sunday 11th July, as Italy beat England in an edge-of-chair, nail-biting match on penalties, it was worth the fervour and undeniable excitement that the month brought with it.
And thank you England, you took our minds off other sad things, for a while, for a small moment in time. As well as help boost retail sales by 0.5% last month as fans stocked up on food and drink for Euros parties. (Associated Press)
Why the football frenzy?
The UK has not got into an important final since the FIFA win in 1966,
beating West Germany 4–2.
So, yes, it was a big moment.
Next match, Denmark v England Semi-Finals. 7 Jul 2021.
It was at fever pitch in England the day of the England-Denmark match.
I was in London. Bars, cafes and shops were festooned with flags, and by 5pm the air was electric. Literally. London let its hair down and the party began.
If England beat Denmark
they would be in the finals. Manic joy, and uncontrollable excitement as English fans looked up, hot and tipsy, into the large screens erected in Trafalgar Square.
And then kick-off!
England won! I have never seen such uncontrolled gaiety in England - ever!
And so England would meet Italy a few days later at Wembley for the final.
11th July, the day of the final. It started to rain over Wembley,
31 million viewers tuned into the BBC and ITV. It was one of the most watched moments in British television says the Guardian Newspaper.
First half, England played brilliantly, dominating, scoring in the first five minutes. England went mental.
Second half, Italy dominated and scored. Finishing 1-1.
So, it went to penalties
Even me, no expert, an armchair spectator, knows this is HELL!
The stadium groaned. I couldn’t even watch. I closed my eyes.
It rained the next day,
the English streets were empty.
The slogan of the English Euros, “It’s Coming Home,” changed to “It’s Gone to Rome!” But, for the youngest team in the game, some players only 19, they’d won …
And now, England prepares for the 2022 World Cup, I have spent the past week learning about football history. Below is an evolution in snippets.
How did the English passion for football begin?
Association football is the most popular sport in England. There are over 40,000 clubs, more than any other country in the world.
Football as we know it today was born in 1863, in Sheffield, where the first modern set of football rules was established called the Sheffield Rules. They finally become the FA rules in 1878. You can read the entire history here.
I promise you, it’s interesting.
‘Mob Ball’ - the first mediaeval football
most probably was a left over from the Romans who played numerous ball games. By mediaeval times it had become a wildly chaotic game with few rules. Entire villages would compete against other villages, racing around common land or market squares with an animal skin stuffed with hay or sawdust, sewn into a large ball or an inflated pig's bladder. Clashing, pushing and shouting, which ended in blood-bath violence. Often deaths would occur on the makeshift pitch.
Mob Ball was played anywhere, anytime, anyhow, with any amount of people; anyone could join in, where the mass of men would drag the bladder or ball through the town or village.
Other than the end-of-town marker, where the distance could be as far as two or three miles, there were no rules. You could touch the ball with hands as well as feet, and many early references mention "ball play", so mediaeval football was really rowdy, drunken Flash Netball with kicks thrown in.
Meanwhile in Italy at the same time,
A game called Calcio Fiorentino was played in Florence, a new version of the old Roman game harpastum. Nobles, counts, dukes and the genteel citizens of Florence wore dapper clothes and played to organised crowds. We can see the silk clothes, the delicate gestures and gentility, a far cry from our madcap English folk! (But, was it as much fun?)
By April 1314
Edward II had to ban Mob Ball, as the English merchants thought it was impacting trade. Apparently the workers spent any spare time kicking balls and not working enough. Trade was suffering. The penalty for playing was imprisonment.
"...there is great noise in the city caused by hustling over large balls from which many evils may arise which God forbid; we command and forbid, on behalf of the King, on pain of imprisonment, such game to be used in the city in the future." (Orejan, Jaime (2011). Football/Soccer: History and Tactics.)
1337–1453 Football seemed more important than war
Edward III, Richard II, Henry IV and Henry V all thought that football was a huge distraction, as it was taking men away from practising archery. Archers were needed to fight the French during the Hundred Years War. So these English kings tried to ban football. But it was impossible to suppress it totally.
Shakespeare quotes football
1606: By Shakespeare’s time Mob Ball had evolved to Killer Ball. It had become deadly with a terrible reputation.
Statistics show that more people died playing Mob Ball than either sword fighting or wrestling, making football back then the second most lethal sport after archery…To the Tudors, it’s this more ‘base’, rough-and-tumble game that Shakespeare seems to be referring to in his two plays. ( https://www.shakespeare.org.uk)
In Shakespeare’s King Lear the character Kent taunts Goneril’s servant, Oswald: "Nor tripped neither, you base football player".
In A Comedy of Errors, the servant, Dromio of Syracuse complains of his treatment by his masters:
“Am I so round with you as you with me,
That like a football you do spurn me thus?
You spurn me hence, and he will spurn me hither:
If I last in this service, you must case me in leather.”*to spurn means to KICK.
There was a change of mind by 1618
King James I wrote a Book of Sports in which he instructed all Christians to play sports, including a watered down version of Mob Ball, every Sunday afternoon after church. The King felt that spare time needed to be supervised. He ordered the clergy to instruct from the pulpit which games could be played. Only bear and bull-baiting were by law prohibited.
The Puritans tried to overrule his decision, because they were fearful of the fun and violence evoked by mass sporting meetings, the lure of drink, and the intermingling of genders. The Puritans won for a while. However, after the Restoration of King Charles II in 1660, football became even more popular - it was unstoppable. No one impeded the men running wild from one end of town to the other. It was a common sight all over England.
Mob Ball continued through the years, till it started to be used, not so much to control the masses, but rather in their protests.
1740s: The Enclosure Acts and riots
They hang the man, and flog the woman,
That steals the goose from off the common;
But let the greater villain loose,
That steals the common from the goose.
The law demands that we atone
When we take things we do not own
But leaves the lords and ladies fine
Who take things that are yours and mine
The poor and wretched don't escape
If they conspire the law to break
This must be so but they endure
Those who conspire to make the law
The law locks up the man or woman
Who steals the goose from off the common
And geese will still a common lack
Till they go and steal it back
[Eighteenth-century protest against enclosures]
In the 1740s the English common land
which was used for grazing was sold off to ownership, managed farm plots and agriculture. Local councils throughout the land erected fences around the newly appropriated lands - trespasses out!
Locals were no longer allowed to use the land as before for grazing purposes, for leisure or for football. So football quickly became a form of protest; and often the protests turned to riots.
In 1764 a game of football was advertised in a local newspaper. After kick-off, the mob literally destroyed the land and fencing and everything on it. The damage was huge. This kind of incident occurred over again, up to the Industrial Revolution.
It was the Industrial Revolution that many historians say was the final making of football. The railways which ferried people around England for the first time, and the Factory Act of 1850 which gave some leisure time, led to teams being able to meet up and play against each other; naturally the idea of a national league was born.
Football could not be fenced in
As the century moved forwards into the Victorian era, small football clubs sprung up, and from 1800 onwards the wild and impromptu football games with no referees, fighting, no protection for players and fans alike, gradually subsided as the Victorians created a more controlled society.
The workers, football and the Factory Act.
Life for the workers was arduous and relentless. The Factory Act of 1850 brought the hours down to 60 a week, with Saturday afternoons free from 2pm. Because there was suddenly free time, which was dangerous - as drink was becoming a huge problem in Victorian England - something was needed to fill this void. Football replaced the ‘Demon Drink", and working men rallied to support their local teams.
It would be hard to say why historians have not rated the effect of strong drink as the significant factor in nineteenth-century history that it undoubtedly was . . . The cause of its prevalence was no doubt an unfortunate historical tendency made much worse by intolerable living conditions. In many cases indeed the terms on which life was offered is a complete explanation of any drunkenness. — J. Kitson Clark, The Making of Victorian England.
The Church started the first football clubs
With the turning football tide, for the first time rules were discussed. Factory owners were encouraged to form football groups along with the church and the army. Schools and universities started to adopt the game.
By 1845, the pupils at Rugby felt it necessary for the first time to write down the rules of football at their school to establish exactly what constituted fair play. In the Rugby version, handling the ball was allowed, but, in 1849, pupils at Eton created a rival game. It may well have been an attempt to outdo the 'upstarts' at Rugby, but football Eton-style greatly restricted the use of the hands. (From the archived BBC - British Victorian Sport)
They, (the sons of Victorian aristocrats) also played extremely rough forms of mob football where brute force and strength were the prime requisites of success. This unsupervised play, in which bullying and other acts of physical cruelty not infrequently took place, was but one aspect of the upper-class boarding schools that was in urgent need of reform. (John R. Mallea - The Victorian Sporting Legacy.)
The mill towns, the working class and the making of the Football League in 1888
Five of the 12 founder members of the Football League were clubs from the working northern mill towns of England. From this point, on clubs were created up and down England, and the Football League was created in 1888. There were league titles, competitions and professional teams as well as amateur.
The sports writer David Goldblatt writes:
as football completed its mutation from an idiosyncratic aristocratic pastime (Eton and Rugby) to the most significant popular cultural practice of working-class life, it came to embody, in its sporting, cultural and commercial norms, the changing class balance and political compromises of the age.
And so, Mob Ball became the football we know today
The rest is HISTORY!
On 8 March 1873, England's 4–2 win over Scotland at Kennington Oval was the first-ever victory in international football.
During the war, competitive football was suspended. However, an unofficial "Wartime Football League" was played from 1915–16 to 1918–19.
Wembley Stadium in London was opened in 1923.
The REAL culmination for English football was when England won the 1966 FIFA World Cup after beating West Germany 4–2 after extra time. The ONLY time the national team has won the trophy.
FULL CIRCLE
Thank you so much for reading, for sharing and commenting.
I am trying to get to France next week, to my home, as China is still out of bounds, so I will write about the epic trip. And epic it shall be, as any trip undertaken today will be laden with stories.
If you want to read more about Li Wake, go to my website at SCATTERFLIX.COM
Wake just wrote to me:
Hello my dear friend,
The art magazine you recommended to me has already published some of my works online.
Here I extend my high respect and sincere thanks to you. This is also a good encouragement to my lonely creative process. I don't know how your itinerary is going to China? I hope you will strengthen epidemic prevention measures and protect yourself.
You can view his article here:
https://www.artrevealmagazine.com/60th/ and https://issuu.com/artrevealmagazine/docs/60
Be well, have a great next few weeks.
Jeanne