Archive for the ‘Football’ Category
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Rugby football
Saturday, April 23rd, 2011
A rugby scrum in 1871. In Britain, by 1870, there were about 75 clubs playing variations of the Rugby school game, including Blackheath (founded in 1858 and arguably the world’s oldest surviving, non-university rugby club). There were also “rugby” clubs in Ireland, Australia, Canada and New Zealand. However, there was no generally accepted set of [...]
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The Football Association
Friday, April 15th, 2011
The first football international, Scotland versus England. Once kept by the Rugby Football Union as an early example of rugby football. During the early 1860s, there were increasing attempts in England to unify and reconcile the various public school games. In 1862, J. C. Thring, who had been one of the driving forces behind the [...]
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Australian rules football
Tuesday, November 2nd, 2010
Catching (called marking in the game) an oval shaped football in the air is another important skill Tom Wills began to develop Australian football in Melbourne during 1858. Wills had been educated in England, at Rugby School and had played cricket for Cambridge University. The extent to which Wills was directly influenced by British and [...]
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The Cambridge Rules in football
Wednesday, April 21st, 2010
In 1848 at Cambridge University, Mr. H. de Winton and Mr. J.C. Thring, who were both formerly at Shrewsbury School, called a meeting at Trinity College, Cambridge with 12 other representatives from Eton, Harrow, Rugby, Winchester and Shrewsbury. An eight-hour meeting produced what amounted to the first set of modern rules, known as the Cambridge [...]
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Establishment of modern codes of football – English public schools
Wednesday, January 6th, 2010
Statue at the Melbourne Cricket Ground, Australia commemorating the earliest known football match between Scotch College and Melbourne Grammar. Tom Wills umpires as two schoolboy players contesting the ball. The earliest evidence that games resembling football were being played at English public schools — mainly attended by boys from the upper, upper-middle and professional classes [...]
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Official disapproval and attempts to ban football
Monday, August 17th, 2009
Numerous attempts have been made to ban football games, particularly the most rowdy and disruptive forms. This was especially the case in England and in other parts of Europe, during the Middle Ages and early modern period. Between 1324 and 1667, football was banned in England alone by more than 30 royal and local laws. [...]
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Mediæval football – Calcio Fiorentino
Friday, April 3rd, 2009
An illustration of so-called “mob football”. 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, [...]
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Ancient football games
Sunday, March 15th, 2009
A revived version of Kemari being played at the Tanzan Shrine. 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 cuju (Traditional Chinese: 蹴鞠; Simplified Chinese: 蹴踘; Pinyin: [...]
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Football
Tuesday, February 17th, 2009
Football is the name given to a number of different, but related, team sports. By far the most popular of these worldwide is Association football, which also goes by the name of soccer. The English language word football is also applied to Rugby football (Rugby union and Rugby league), North American football (American and Canadian), [...]