The growth of football world over

by A. C. de Silva

FOOTBALL: The Game of football is played throughout the world and here in Sri Lanka it is very popular both among the clubs and in the schools arena. There are many tournaments, both for clubs and schools and it is a crowd-puller.

But, though the game is very popular here, not many will know how the game came into being the world over. Most popular finding a pebble or a stone in front of their feet are tempted to give it a good kick. So, even if there were no records, it wold have been safe to assume that some kind of football was played even in man's primitive days!

A gruesome tradition has it that in historical times, some races used their enemies' severed heads as footballs. An early record from Bristain relates how the head of a captured Danish invader was thus used.

Classical and Greek literature obtains explicit reference to the sport: in one description, players tried to carry a small ball across a line defended by the other side.

A game very much like it was played Rome where there was plenty of 'tackling', running and throwing of the ball. This was confirmed by Galen - a second- century physician from Rome.

He pointed out how the various functions of the players increased stamina and contributed to their health. It is said that the Romans in fact fostered football as a part of their military training, and they are reported to have brought the game into Britain.

It has been told that the Chinese in the second century used both their feet and bodies to propel the ball, but never handled it. In an aristocratic version, played before the ruler's palace, teams vied with one another to score goals by kicking the ball through an opening in a silken net.

The British Museum has balls once owned and used by the Pharaohs. The balls were made of soft leather or fine linen, they were stuffed with cut reeds or straw.

The early footballs

Other similar balls, made during earlier civilizations, had two hemispherically shaped skins sewn together, and filled with earth, grain, plant fibres, corn husk or even pieces of metal.

At first, the term 'football' was used to convey that the ball was played on foot; and not on horses, as games like polo were played. The first document in which football appears dates only from 1486 in the England. Until then, the game was referred to as 'a ball play' or 'playing at ball'.

Football also belongs to the category of primitive fertility rites, the ball representing the sun. It was used in magic ceremonies to enrich the soil and all growing things.

Tribes divided themselves into teams and engaged in a contest which they believed would have cosmic consequences. They even played "ball" in the east-to-west direction that the sun was known to move.

Obvious traces of this fertility rite survived for more than a thousand years. In Devon, England, peasants who had planted potatoes on Good Friday ceremoniously kicked the ball across the fields. This was the season when the sun was most needed. Indians in Oklahoma played a football game to celebrate the gathering of their crop.

Another theory is that modern football did not evolve out of a replica if the sun, but the head of an animal that had been sacrificed. Players of rival teams anxiously tried to get hold of it to bury it in their own ground and hence to promote growth of their crops. The game thus represented a vital combat with the fertility of the winning team's field as the coveted prize.

Some authorities believe that it was not the Romans, but the Normans who introduced the game to the British Isles.

Their opinion is supported by the fact that reliable references to football occur only after the Norman Conquest in 1066.

The first extensive description of English football goes back to London of 1175. William Fitzstephen recounts vividly how on a day the youth of the city spent part of the day cockfighting. After dinner, they went to a local piece of ground just outside the city for the 'famous game of ball". There was much vigorous exercise by the 'unrestrained youth'.

Danger to security

Some authorities came to view the game as a nuisance; and, as in the case of some other sports, a danger to national security on the grounds that it interfered with the country's defence. There were other grounds on which authorities based their opposition to football. Games had become very rough, often ending in brawls.

It was the lack of a code which often caused the game to degenerate into a riotus, pitched battle. It came to be known as 'mob football'.

Small wonder, then, that the result included innumerable broken windows, fractured legs and bloodied noses; and at times, even deaths. So monarchs began to condemn the sport on this count as well.

Thus it was that in 1314, King Edward II issued an edict forbidding football.Yet it seems on occasion that not even clerics could resist the game. This apparently necessitated an order that 'if any minister ir deacon shall go into the field to play football, he shall forthwith be banished from the Universities.'

But all efforts to ban the game or obstruct it were fruitless, though for some years, it went onto decline. This went on until 1603 when, on the coronation of king James I, football was once again publicly recognised, and people were even encouraged to take it up.