SPORTING ASPECTS
Football History
By JOHN ARLOTT THE issue of a large and fifty-shilling volume, The History of the Football Association (Naldrett. 50s.) coincides with the ninetieth anniversary of the organisa- tion which controls the body of football in England and, in the eyes of the authorities of the game in other countries, has a standing that neither parochialism nor nationalism can discredit.
The volume may well have been planned to mark that anniversary and also, in conjunction with the FA's recent art exhibition, as part of their attempt to foster a genuine cultural reflection of the game which has sent its roots so deep into the life of modern England. Certainly, Mr. Geoffrey Green, Association Football correspondent of The Times newspaper, has written this book unexceptionably.
It could hardly have been foreseen, however, as appearing at a time when a team from the Continent had at last defeated the English national eleven on English ground.
The growth of football in England has, to the outward eye, been more or less spontaneous. The separation from Rugby football, the adoption of professionalism side-by-side with amateurism, the growth and accession to power of league foot- ball all seem, within the pattern of the game as we know it, natural developments..
In fact, however, as deeper consideration and this History show, the story is one—at least in its earlier years—of farsighted secretarial diplomacy leading the more reactionary legislators to accept inevitable changes short of major rifts.
It seems odd—and to none, surely, odder than to the Rugby footballers of today—that the two games should have divided on the question of the desirability or otherwise of ' hacking ' —i.e. shin-kicking—as a legal ingredient of the game of foot- ball. For, despite William Webb Ellis's ' fine disregard,' early Association Football included some degree of handling.
The two games have grown strangely apart, with Welsh Rugby and the Northern Union—thirteen-a-side—game to dis- credit the suggestion of a major class-distinction between the two. Indeed, the comment of the nineteenth-century Cambridge don—" it seems to me that one is a game for gentlemen played by hooligans and the other a game for hooligans played by gentlemen "—seems to. have contained the essence of the similarity between the two, for all its detached superiority.
Overseas, the game had largely been played by nations characteristically robust but lacking the finesse to challenge the English game in the realm of skill or, more impressively, by masters of the skills of the game who shrank from the physical clash which has always been an essential aspect of the game as it was bred in the British Isles.
Now we have seen the Hungarians. Physically they could both absorb and mete out the stern challenge of the powerful tackle, and combine it with that more subtle ' strategic standing ', the irritation of which no ' obstruction' legislation seems able to remove.
Their skill with the ball—including power and control in Leading it, in which so many overseas sides have fallen short —was certainly first instilled by English coaches. Indeed, one of these coaches, James Hogan, was paroled from a civilian prisoner-of-war camp during the first World War in order to continue his coaching of Hungarian players. Remarkably— perhaps even salutarily—however, no British players of today have such mastery of the ball as these men. When the Hungarian inside-left, a Hungarian People's Army officer by the name of Puskas, deliberately kicked downwards and beside a ' dead ' ball to send it curving across the grass of Wembley Stadium in the arc of a stabbed billiard ball, so that it passed round an English defender to the Hungarian outside-left standing behind him, he exerted a power of which no British player of today is deliberately capable. In that match—a match which struck terrifyingly to the English football-follower, not because his side were beaten but because they were beaten by a side playing football on a level the Englishmen never reached—England faced a game of a type our players have never truly desired. In the Olympic Games of the early part of this century, a number of the events were won by British contestants who brought to the contest, little more than general fitness and considerable aptitude. Soon, however, especially in the eques- trian events, they were faced by teams—notably from Hungary, Spain and the Latin-American countries—of Army officers who, amateurs in name and by normal interpretation, nevertheless devoted their entire service lives to preparation for the Olympic Games. So it soon became in other games, with American athletes granted scholarships to Universities where they were occupied almost solely in athletic training. The History of the Football Association shows that that body, in its broad-mindedness, and while retaining control of the general welfare of, the game, handed de facto control of the players it might select to play for England to the Football League. Thus, while elsewhere the international match is of prime importance, in England, town and village rivalries, Manchester United versus Manchester City, Sheffield United versus Sheffield Wednesday, are the games that matter.
Almost a million footballers in England come under the registration of the Football Association: ninety-nine per cent. of them are amateurs. Meanwhile, the game which Englishmen long played for fun has become the subject of international competition which, so we are assured, involves national pres- tige. Our football is based on the former fact: if it is to turn to the latter, a new chapter must be written to the History which shows the growth of the FA until 1953.
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