Amazing & Extraordinary Facts - Football
By Anton Rippon
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About this ebook
Amazing & Extraordinary Facts: Football explores some of the most bizarre football events throughout history, from its birth during the Industrial Revolution, to the major tournaments of the Beautiful Game in the 21st century. From the player sold for £10 and a box of kippers, to unusual injuries on the pitch, this book gathers some of the most curious moments of footballing history, a game that continues to be both an amazing entertainment spectacle and extraordinarily accessible to people everywhere.
Brief, accessible and entertaining pieces on a wide variety of subjects makes it the perfect book to dip in to. The amazing and extraordinary facts series presents interesting, surprising and little-known facts and stories about a wide range of topics which are guaranteed to inform, absorb and entertain in equal measure.
Anton Rippon
ANTON RIPPON is an award-winning newspaper columnist, journalist and author of over 30 books including Gas Masks for Goalposts: Football in Britain During the Second World War; Hitler’s Olympics: The Story of the 1936 Nazi Games; and Gunther Plüschow: Airmen, Escaper and Explorer. Rippon was named Newspaper Columnist of the Year in the 2017 Midlands Media Awards.
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Amazing & Extraordinary Facts - Football - Anton Rippon
AMAZING & EXTRAORDINARY FACTS
FOOTBALL
ANTON RIPPON
David and Charles logoCONTENTS
Title Page
Introduction
Ashbourne vs Ashbourne: late result
Who invented football?
‘I’m going to play soccer’
The man who championed the amateur game
‘A fixity of fixtures’
The formation of the leagues
Paid to play football? You must be joking…
Amateurism vs professionalism
Penalty, ref!
Gentleman prefer to miss
The cricket club that turned up by mistake
36–0 – and they think it’s all an over
A game of three halves
Electing to start again soon backfired
Four months to complete a match
Roll on floodlights…
No goals please
Burnley and Stoke cheat the system
Poxy Boro stage a secret semi-final
Plenty of sea air the solution
The only Romany to play for England?
Rabbi Howell’s career overshadowed by controversy
The enigmatic Nettie Honeyball
Just don’t call her ‘ornamental and useless’
Women’s football’s long march
From factory to football field
First Ibrox Park disaster
‘This football maddened crowd’
Chelsea and the Aberdeen Terrier
Canine ankle-biter creates a new club
Heatwave at Hyde Road
Manchester City’s players find it all too much
The election campaign scandal
Chairman wants seat in Parliament as well as director’s box
Il Padre di Calcio Italiano
Unsung in his own country but a legend abroad
‘Unpatriotic and unproductive’?
Football stands accused of hindering the war effort
Footballers come under the hammer
The great Leeds City auction
All at sea
The Scottish club that found themselves foundering
A different kind of shot on target
Murdered by an angry neighbour
One ground, one day, two matches - twice
Cuckoos in the nest
It’s raining goals
One-word change to the laws brings defensive chaos
Dixie Dean - Goal Machine
The origins of the prolific scorer’s nickname
Ten-goal Joe Payne
It’s always the quiet ones
Stoley and the Argonauts’ fruitless quest
Club that never played a game
‘Back to square one’
Arsenal – in the vanguard of new media
The Football League’s sabotage plan
But censoring fixture lists failed to drain the pools
Thinking outside the box entirely
Football’s unconventional managers
Missionary adopts a principled position
Betting on yourself is not always a good idea
Passions run high at Hitler’s Olympics
Peruvians pack their bags and head home in a huff
‘Heil Hitler!’
England told to salute the Nazi bigwig but Aston Villa refuse to obey
The penalties of war
When football waited for the all-clear
Vic’s Italian job
Living at the stadium with enemy POWs
What do you get if you cross a palm with silver?
The end of a barren run of 62 years, that’s what
Those mysterious Russkis
Incorruptible workers against corrupt capitalists?
Thirteen goals - unlucky for some
Record score achieved three times
Flying Doctor, Irish style
The double international who made sporting history
The Burnden Park disaster
Safety lessons go unheeded for decades
The oldest player in the Football League
Emergency goalie sets record at the age of 51
Forced out of existence by sectarian violence
The tragedy of Belfast Celtic
For the want of a boot
Remembering Indian football’s barefoot generation
The goal that echoed around the world
The biggest shock in World Cup history – thanks to a Haitian immigrant
Injured goalkeeper locked out
Heroics in a 6–5 thriller
In off the ref
Baily’s goal should not have stood
Deadly strikes of the lightning variety
Footballers killed playing the game they loved
The cruellest way to be KO’d in the Cup?
Blindfolded Roman boy controls football fates
Six old boys hit six
Rejects return to shock former club
Cycling in the dark
How England stars used to fall foul of the law
The child star whose career was on hold for seven years
Manchester United wanted him – before he broke his leg
The greatest comeback?
5–1 down and yet they still win
‘Is he the type to captain England?’
The corridors of moral power
Lincoln City’s mighty reprieve
The Imps win six in a row to avoid relegation
Double hat-tricks - not good enough
The highest scoring losers in FA Cup history
No train, but one plane and several automobiles
One long journey for one very short career
Pulled muscle or playing badly? Bring on the sub
But injury-faking footballers prompt a rule change
The football war
When El Salvador and Honduras went into battle for real
Don’t mention the World Cup ball
Tracked down after 30 years
True double sportsman
First-class football and cricket on the same day
Grounds of appeal
Football and cricket generally good neighbours
Whistle down the win
Fulham’s missing 78 seconds
Hang on while we look for a bomb
The IRA not keen on football
From salad cream to stray dogs
Football’s freak injuries
‘Bambi on ice’
How the wool was pulled over Graeme Souness’s eyes
The Gold Chain Derby
It’s a good thing Mr T doesn’t play football
Teams that wanted to score against themselves
Crazy rule that saw football become farce
When team-mates come to blows
Charlton’s pair of strikers took it literally
Flying chicken wings
Italian love affair ruined by a plate of food
No petrol money, no players
The team that went on strike over travelling expenses
Only one team in Tallinn - and they’re Scottish
Long way to go for three seconds
The green parrot given a red card
Me-Tu’s touchline ban
Referees who red card themselves
When match officials lose it
A few of football’s marked men
Naughty boys who played with electronic tags
Going to the Match - it’s expensive these days
Lowry’s painting finds a home
When Socrates played for Garforth
The Brazilian superstar who lit up (in) a small Yorkshire town
Long hair and earrings - banned!
They like their football strictly manly in Argentina and Nigeria
The great hijab debate
Olympic dreams shattered by head-covering ban
Why you should never leave before the end
Parents miss their son’s moment of history
Club Chairman sees a UFO
But fails to spot the false messiah trying to take over his club
The Battle of Bramall Lane
Injuries, red cards and accusations fly
The FA Cup tie that wouldn’t die
Chesterfield and Droylsden just couldn’t bear to say bye
Manager for just ten minutes
Manages to see the funny side
‘One of the craziest goals in history’
Liverpool beaten by a beach ball
A woman running the line?
Whatever next?
Cold comfort for Oldham supporters
Sub-zero wait for tickets rewarded only by heavy defeat
Handcuffed to a goalpost
The Liverpool fan with an axe to grin
Picture Credits
Copyright
More Amazing Titles
INTRODUCTION
Exactly where and when the first ‘football’ was kicked is a mystery shrouded in the mists of time. The origins of the sport, an offshoot of which would one day become a multi-billion pound part of the global entertainment industry, are too disparate and distant to pinpoint.
What is certain is that the form of the game we know today was spawned during the Industrial Revolution in Britain, when the working classes found themselves enduring long hours down the mines and in the dark satanic mills of England’s North and Midlands, often in the most oppressive conditions. They had little leisure time to indulge in the hurly-burly of the old ‘mob football’ that had been enjoyed across fields and down streets in more bucolic times.
Ironically, the game’s salvation lay with those who, hitherto, had had little to do with a rough, essentially plebeian game. Hunting, shooting and fishing were expensive pastimes for the sons of the new middle classes but it was they who, through public schools and universities, began to regulate and codify football. Suddenly a game of peasants and artisans required much greater discipline, teamwork and athleticism. By acquiring rules it assumed respectability. It seemed that the ‘people’s game’ no longer belonged to the ‘people’.
But when football clubs, born out of this process of codification and standardisation, realised that the more successful they were, the bigger attendances they attracted – and therefore the greater revenue at the gate – they began to look outside their immediate localities for better players, players who only through the promise of money could be tempted to move. Thus professional football – and the professional footballer to play it – was born, the ‘people’ took back their game and as a sport it has never looked back.
After the First World War (1914–1918) there was a significant shift in the game’s position within society. During a series of economic depressions football was often the only bit of colour in an otherwise grey and cheerless world.
For thousands of unemployed men the prospect of a Saturday afternoon of escapism at a football ground held them together for the remainder of the week.
As J. B. Priestley put it in 1929’s The Good Companions: ‘… not only had you escaped from the clanking machinery of this lesser life, from work, wages, dole, sick pay, insurance cards, nagging wives, ailing children, bad bosses… you had escaped with most of your mates, and your neighbours, and half the town… cheering together, thumping one another on the shoulders… having pushed your way through a turnstile into an altogether more splendid kind of life, hurtling with Conflict and yet passionate and beautiful in its Art.’
The 1920s and 1930s saw new football ‘industries’ springing up: boys’ comics included pictures of star players, tobacco companies offered similar picture cards in cigarette packets, while an increase in gambling gave birth to the football pools. More and more money was being generated by professional soccer, although until well after the end of the Second World War (1939–1945) much of it did not remain within the game.
In the 21st century, however, thanks mainly to the tens of millions of pounds pumped into it by television companies – most notably Rupert Murdoch’s Sky TV – football is a vastly rich industry in its own right. Many aspects of the game are unrecognisable from those of only a few years ago. Where star players once travelled to matches on the same public buses as the fans, and lived in the same terraced streets, now even the most modest professional footballer is likely to drive an expensive car and live in the ‘stockbroker belt’. Players’ salaries are now so large that it would take most supporters two years and more to earn even one week’s wages of a top performer.
Yet still people flock to football, a game that continues to be both an amazing entertainment spectacle and extraordinarily accessible to people everywhere.
Ashbourne vs Ashbourne: late result
Who invented football?
No one knows who ‘invented’ football. Like the wheel, it must have been discovered in lots of different places. Just as no one person would have single-handedly realised that boiled eggs taste better than raw ones, surely no one group of people would have been alone in discovering the delights of kicking – or throwing – around a spherical object and eventually developing that into an organised game.
The earliest example was most likely tsu chu (or zu qiu, roughly equating to ‘kick ball’) which was played in China at least from around 2,000 BC and possibly as early as 5,000 BC. The ball was made from animal hair or fur stitched inside leather panels. The goal was a net measuring 12–15in (30–40cm) in diameter, strung approximately 30ft (9m) up between two bamboo poles. This was clearly