Apr 30 2007
Crimson Shrovetide
You wanna know where football really comes from? Here, let me show you…
800 years ago, football was not an orderly battle between two teams of 11 people on a precisely measured pitch. No, football was a city-wide brawl. You had 1,000 guys on one team and 1,000 more on the other, and everyone played, and the playing field was the entire town.
What’s that? An offside rule? Please. You wanna know what a foul was in this football game? Manslaughter. Headbutting a guy in the chest was nothing. You could punch a guy in the head, kick him in the knee, knee him in the nuts, whatever. Is he still breathing? Yes? Play on!
Oh, and no cars or grocery bags. It’s football, dumbass. If you can’t carry a ball by your own power, there’s no use for you.
Yes, the only thing that mattered in this football game was that you got that ball to your opponent’s goal at the edge of town, and you used any means necessary to do it, whether it be kicking the ball or kicking that schmo in the shins. And when the game was over, everyone patched up their wounds, shook hands and said, “Let’s do it again next year.”
That’s where all your modern football games come from, kids, and that’s just how it was right up until the Industrial Revolution. In some places, it’s still like that. After all, why ruin a good tradition?
Yeah. Try playing that kind of football, JaMarcus Russell. Then we’ll find out how glad you really are to be in Oakland.
RSS Feed
That’s not the only “folk football”; there are quite a few towns that still carry on games like this, or rather, similiar to this. All they have in common is either a lack of rules or a lack of rules in common. Wiki has a pretty good writeup.
Here we go:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medieval_football
The best football shirt website with many major club and national teams.