At first glance, Michael Turner’s new nickname might have far more to do with certain forms of public transportation than Brazilian women’s football. Perhaps John Abraham is on to something here, though. After all, both Marta and MARTA are top talents who, on their best days, can become pure forces of nature. One cutback, and Turner is off. One sidestep, and Marta is pushing forward. Both leave defenders in their wake as they add another score to their stats and lead their teams to victory.

Some days, though, these forces of nature run into people with the rare ability and determination to control the weather…

Yes, it actually was proven in Beijing that you can prevent a downpour. It was proven in Charlotte, too. Ha.

Rugby viewers in New Zealand last weekend got a little surprise with their sport — four minutes of hardcore porn. It seems a scheduling screw-up caused Prime TV to switch off from the game and over to Desperate Black Wives 2. As opposed to Desperate All-Black Wives, I suppose…

The mother in this news report — which, sadly, does not show the slip-up — seems strangely aghast and bemused at the same time. Or is that just the normal reaction to porn down in New Zealand?

(Spotted on Deadspin. Video spotted on FanHouse.)

That’s what the loonies at SUNY Oneonta organized this week with their “World’s Largest Soccer Game.” Their goal was to get 1,000 people on the pitch at once to play a game. This would be Cristiano Ronaldo’s worst nightmare, because there would be no room for him to fall over at the slightest contact.

Of course, the “World’s Largest Soccer Game” isn’t exactly a new idea. In fact, it borrows from one of the oldest American football games ever created.

Old Division Football was first played at Dartmouth College in the 1820s. The idea behind that game was to pit all the upperclassmen against all the underclassmen — and yes, I do mean “all” — in game where they had to kick a ball to the opponent’s end of a huge 375-yard field. The game itself faded out in the 1880s, though some version of it was played at Dartmouth until 1948.

There’s a research paper about Old Division Football that you can find here. Maybe after this stunt at Oneonta, Dartmouth will consider making their old game new again. It’s a piece of American football history that’s gotten awfully dusty.

(Thanks to reader Another Joe for the tip.)

After all, trying to follow every football code on the planet is hard. Posting a load of links to other sites makes it a little easier:

• The genius of basketball and the genius of soccer. [The Run of Play]
• Ten things you should know about non-league football in England. [Pitch Invasion]
• NFL games in England could be here to stay. [Reuters]
• Speaking of Reuters, when did there bloggers morph into hookers from Leeds? [Reuters Soccer Blog (twice)]
• Could St. Louis beat Philadelphia to win the 16th MLS franchise? [Goal]
• Are Australian punters more mentally stable than the American ones? [UWire via Deadspin]
• Aussie-style kicking is definitely helping NFL punters. [World Footy News]
• Speaking of Australia, it just dropped domestic rugby union. [Scrumbag]
• One Super 14 club is using Aussie Rules for training. [World Footy News]
• Gary Ablett would be great at rugby league. [Fox Sports Australia]
• Watching soccer is different when you play it… [SoccerLens]
• …and more fun when you’re drinking. [Center Holds It]
• Medieval mob football isn’t dead yet. [Washington Post]
• An open letter to the NFL from a frustrated fan. [Joe Sports Fan]
• Tecmo Bowl predicts this Sunday’s conference championships. [ArmchairGM]
• Would computers ever replace NFL coaches? [NFL FanHouse]
• The scandal of African player trafficking in soccer. [Guardian]
• Your African Cup of Nations preview. [That's On Point]

In addition to the African Cup of Nations kicking off this weekend, the two participants in Super Bowl XLII will be determined on Sunday, the Pool Stage of the Heineken Cup finishes up, and on Monday, we’ll find out if Liverpool still has what it takes to remain in the Top 4 when they head to Birmingham to face Aston Villa.

Enjoy your football, everyone!

Case in point: the Harrow School in London has its own football game that it’s been playing for the better part of two centuries. It was officially codified in 1865, though it was played for decades before then and continues to be played now. It’s a relic from the days when every English boys school had its own rules for football and had to agree on compromise rules before intra-school matches.

So what’s Harrow Football like? Start with soccer, and make these changes:

• Play on the muddiest, nastiest muck of a pitch you can find.
• Use a leather ball that’s bigger than a soccer ball by a couple inches in diameter, “approximately spherical” in shape, and capable of soaking up as much mud as possible to get really, really heavy.
• Replace the goal with two goal posts and no crossbar, similar to the center posts in Aussie Rules. Kicking the ball between those two posts is a “base.” Whoever finishes the game with the most bases wins.
• In addition to traditional soccer tackling, allow shoulder-charging, but not from behind.
• Don’t allow handling — except to let players catch the ball when kicked from a teammate from a position ahead of them. The catcher then gets “yards,” which is basically a free running drop kick from up to three paces past the point of the catch. (Apparently, because of the size and weight of the ball, scoring bases from yards isn’t so easy.)

That pretty much sums it up. According to the Harrow School’s web site:

With so many Old Harrovians now playing the Association game (or soccer, as it was to be universally known), the School had a brief flirtation with the idea of converting to it in 1864. Harrow Football might have died then and there but the decision was made to stick to it owing to the state of the grounds.

Yes, Harrow Football only survives today because their playing area made Heinz Field look like the greens at Pebble Beach. Now that the school has better-quality fields, it appears the boys play rugby more than anything else — which is kind of ironic, given how many of soccer’s earliest laws were derived from Harrow Football.

Nevertheless, a few die-hards continue to shepherd the old Harrow Football code, because someone has to. It’s a bloody thankless job, being a historian and all.

Dr. Michael Green, the head of Indigenous cultures at the museum, says he came across the picture by accident.

“I was looking at the image with my colleagues for different reasons entirely, and it suddenly struck me that those kids are playing footy,” he said. “It looks like the games of kick-to-kick we used to play in the school yard.”

Click on the snippet of the image here to see the entire sketch, which was part of an 1850s expedition by Victorian scientist William Blandowski. Notes included with the sketch say that the point of the game was to “never let the ball touch the ground.” It is reportedly the oldest image of footy yet discovered in Australia.

Granted, it’s probably still not quite as old as some Cuju artwork out there, but still, anything that lasts 150 years must be pretty good.

(Thanks, Sean!)

Commenter JRR thinks Thierry Henry has a point when he said he can’t understand why American football is called “football.” Here are a few lines from his comments under that post:

i hope you can prove me wrong with your history lesson as i am very interested to know how your take on football relates to the technical use of your feet with acheiving the desired objective of scoring a point, try, TD etc what ever you want to call it.

Let’s see. Are you playing the game on foot? Are you playing with a ball? Does the game involve kicking the ball through a goal or reaching a goal on your opponent’s end of the field? Sounds like football to me.

the issue then relates to which game came first – because if the rules for football were developed based on the round ball then where is the relevance with other codes using the same name for their sport.

Well, if you’re going to talk about which game game first, then Australian Football wins. The first official Aussie Rules were written in 1858, a full seven years before the Football Association was formed…

Oh, wait. The Aussie Rules were based on the Cambridge Rules, which were published in England in 1848. In fact, the Cambridge Rules had elements from both Association football and Australian football. So let’s go back and play that, since it came before everything…

Except it didn’t. They were playing ballown back in New Jersey in the 1820s. That came before the Cambridge Rules, so perhaps that should be the one true football…

Until you consider that there were football games in England and Italy centuries before then. The creators of Calcio Fiorentino published the rules of that game in 1580. Perhaps that is the one true football. Let’s convert all our pitches into sand pits and let everyone have it out…

Oh, wait. There’s a football that predates that — mob football, which was played during Shrovetide celebrations in medieval England. 1,000 guys from one side of town vs. 1,000 guys from the other side of town, all in a big struggling mob trying to get the ball to their opponent’s bell tower. That must be first, right? Let’s throw out every other football code and start from there…

Except football didn’t start there. You still had Cuju, Kemari and Harpastum before that, and Cuju probably took even more forms than modern football does today. 1,000 years ago, you probably had whole rooms full of Chinese Cuju fans arguing over which game was “the real Cuju.”

Do you see the problem here? You simply can’t call any one game “football” and leave it at that. All these games we call football evolved over time, but they are all come from the same source, and they all share a common concept — playing on a field, on foot, with a ball, attempting to score a goal. In fact, every modern football game involves kicking the ball through a goal in some way.

Whether you run with the ball or kick the ball, it’s all football. That’s the point that both you and Thierry Henry are missing by a mile. You’ll never see Henry bounce a penalty kick off the corner flag quite like this.

personally i feel what ever you want to call your game needs to reflect what happens in that sport (or atleast differentiate it from other sports) for this reason, “soccer is football” and other codes using the name are harming their global popularity.

Give me one example of how any other code of football is harming its worldwide popularity by calling itself football. How fast did Wembley Stadium sell out for that Giants-Dolphins game? Likewise, I only see soccer getting bigger in places where other football codes dominate, and different types of football are coming into vogue every year. Football adapts and evolves all the time. I can’t be the only one that sees this.

as far as “soccer” goes, we are a country that plays “football” – if you are a historian then you will remember we officially changed the national games name from soccer to football – hence FFA aligning oursleves to the rest of the world.

You’re joking, right? Dude, you even know where the word “soccer” comes from? The answer is right here on this blog. Click here and learn something.

Seriously, they should teach this shit in college or something. “Football Evolution 101″ might start out as a running joke as “another typical class for dumb jocks,” but once people realized what was being taught and the conversations and arguments that came out of it, it would become the most popular elective on campus within two years.

I want tenure, bitches.

(An aside: as I finished typing this, my MP3 player started playing the latest episode of Coverville. First song — Prince’s cover of “What if God Was One of Us?”. I don’t know why, but that seems strangely appropriate right now…)

The good folks at The Offside found this video reenacting the traditional Japanese football game of Kemari, which I wrote about a couple of months ago.

I’m sure it was a simpler time 1,000 years ago, but man, if I were a kid visiting Japan, and this was what the fam stopped to watch, I’d be tugging on my dad’s pantleg and saying, “Whennawe gonna ride Steel Dragon? Whennawe gonna ride Steel Dragon? Huh? Huh?”

On the other hand, if we stopped to watch this… well, things would be very different, wouldn’t they?

…just your typical montage of quirky stuff that happens in the game of Association football, like scoring goals off your face and taking a curtain call in front of a whole bunch of empty bleachers.

This particular sequence in the middle of the montage, though, got my attention…

It’s funny because it shows a guy punching the ball into the goal — which, of course, you can’t do in soccer, because using your hands makes you a wanker.

But what if it didn’t make you a wanker? What if the laws of the game allowed this?

Consider, if you will, the old American game of ballown, which first became popular at the College of New Jersey in the 1820s. This was essentially a full-contact football game in which you couldn’t catch the ball, but you could either kick it or beat it with your fists. You could also physically block other players from approaching the ball-handler — yet another twist Walter Camp & his generation added to rugby to turn it into American football. (Blocking in rugby is called “obstruction,” and it’s a penalty. Seriously.)

In fact, this early game of ballown may have been the basis for the first intercollegiate football game in 1869 between Princeton and Rutgers. It was a completely different game than modern college football, and if some Canadians hadn’t introduced rugby to Harvard footballers five years later, American football might look very different today.

The idea of using your hands may have been frowned upon at the early Football Association meetings, but many American fans — especially American football fans — still scoff at soccer for disallowing use of hands. After all, Americans have a rich history of working with their hands. Everybody loves a “handyman” in this country. Home Depot and Lowe’s have been making billions off that concept for years now.

So what happens if we take that old ballown rule of striking the ball with your fist and add it to the modern Association football game? What does the game become then? Wouldn’t it be interesting to find out?

Now this is real Italian football. You don’t see any Calcio Fiorentino players flopping to the ground like dead fish. No, these are men of the renaissance, men of nobility, men who dress up in the colors of their town, jump into a sand pit with two goals and a ball and beat the living crap out of each other. Forza!

Calcio Fiorentino (which is now called Calcio Storico, or “Historic Football”) was once the primary football game of Italy. It might have been a direct descendant of Harpastum, though it probably evolved into something else after so many centuries. Sometimes the Pope would jump in and start kicking ass and taking names. Presumably, anyone who tackled the Pope would be forgiven for it later.

The first written rules were published in 1580, though the game itself was played for centuries before then. In fact, the most famous Calcio Fiorentino match was played on February 17, 1530, when the city of Florence was under siege by the Spanish army. Playing a Calcio match in full view of enemy soldiers was the ultimate message of defiance, and that message was, “You can take our homes, you can take our land, you can take our women, and you can even take our dignity, but you will never take our football! So there! Eat it!”

Calcio died out by 1739, but it was resurrected in the 1930s by Benito Mussolini to celebrate Italian pride. They still play it in Florence today. It’s mostly an excuse for the locals to punch out those bastards who nailed their girlfriends — which is probably just how it was back then, too. Settling scores has always been a big part of football, after all.

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.

Seriously, doesn’t that look like one of those drawings from those Children’s Bible Stories books you used to see in your local dentist’s office when you were a kid? You know, the ones that tried to convince you that every character in the Bible was a.) pretty, and b.) Caucasian?

No, the Roman Empire wasn’t pretty, but it was effective, and Harpastum proved to be effective as both training for soldiers and entertainment for spectators — at least, until they got a taste for gladiator bloodshed. Harpastum was a rugby-like game which could best be described as a combination of “Keep Away” and “Smear the Queer.” Teams battled to keep the ball on their side of the pitch for as long as possible, while opponents tried to steal the ball and move it over to their side. Only the ball handler could be tackled, so teams had to master more tricky passes than a run-and-shoot offense.

How they kept score remains a mystery. For all I know, they had an official with a sundial and an hourglass, and every time the ball moved from one side of the field to the other, the ref turned the hourglass over. By the end of the hour, whichever team had the most sand on its side of the hourglass won the match. There was no Harpastum on cloudy days — unless they had two hourglasses, and you had to have some really rich refs for that.

Of course, that concept breaks down completely when you realize that hourglasses weren’t popular until the 14th century or so. (Damn that Wikipedia.) So maybe scores were based on completed passes or kicks, which made holding the ball on your side of the pitch stupid. I don’t know, and I don’t think anyone else does, either.

What we do know, though, is that Romans swiped a lot of concepts from the Greeks, and football was no exception. The Greeks had their own football game that was called either Episkyros or Phaininda, depending on which city you came from, and as with all their athletic contests, the Greeks played naked.

If any modern day footballers tried to recreate that scene today, charges would probably be filed. It was a different time, two millennia ago.

Oh, and there was one other story about a bunch of kids playing Harpastum in the streets, when one of them kicked the ball into a barber shop and killed a guy getting a shave. That story probably fueled the crowd’s desire to see more blades in the Coliseum…

Some also suggest that the Roman Army, which blew off steam playing Harpastum in base camp, carried the game with them to the British Isles, and that’s when the Brits first went nuts over football. Hard to tell if that’s true or not, but hey, apart from the sanitation, medicine, education, wine, public order, irrigation, roads, the fresh water system and public health, just what have the Romans ever done for us?

Dirty hippies. Standing in a circle. Playing with their hacky sack.

And while you just barely resisted the urge to walk past them and shout, “Get a job!”, little did you know that those dirty hippies were actually playing the Japanese sport of kings. We’re talking about the old, old game of Kemari.

The origins of Kemari stretch back to about 600 A.D. or so, when a Chinese Cuju team on a goodwill tour visited the land of the rising sun and demonstrated their sport to the emperor. Much to their surprise, though, the emperor didn’t give a crap about the actual contest. What got his attention was the skills the players used to keep the ball in the air.

So the emperor — much like Walter Camp 12 centuries later — decided to change the rules. He got rid of the goal-scoring and all, and he decreed that the object of the game is simply to keep the ball in the air with your feet. Kemari balls were made of deerskin and stuffed with barley grains to make them round. Unlike your average footbag, though, the grains were removed once the deerskin had its shape.

Kemari became grand performance in the royal court. Mariashis — yep, that’s what they called the players — would get all dressed up like the Mikado and show off their kicking skills to the royal audience. There was no defense, no tackling, no attempt to knock a player off his game. Everyone shared the ball and cooperated to keep it off the ground. Yet nobody thought of mariashis as dirty hippies — probably because they all cleaned up for the audience. And because sometimes the emperor played with them. Clearly, it was a different time.

It was grand ceremony, too, screaming “Ariyaaaaaa!” as they kicked the ball back and forth, trying hard to keep it in the air as long as possible with as much awesomeness as possible. An awesome mariashi made the emperor smile, and you know what a smiling emperor means, kid — smokin’ hot concubines for everyone.

Some things never change.

We might make snide jokes about this guy now, but if he had lived in Japan 10 centuries ago, he would have gotten more tail than a shrimp boat…

As with all football games of the time, Kemari spread from the royal courts to the masses, and the game was immensely popular between the 10th and 16th centuries, inspiring poets and storytellers, and spreading legends of the great mariashis that kept the ball in the air for 1,000 kicks. In some cases, the emperor coated a ball in silver and gave it a high court rank to commemorate a great game. We have a building in Canton, Ohio, for that now. Those footballs must feel so cheated.

The great Kemari craze died down about four centuries ago, but if you go to Japan today, you’ll still see demonstrations of the game by Kemari preservation societies, who attract tourists just as much the original mariashis attracted the hotties. Everyone else just goes to J-League and X-League games. (Do they go to X-League games? Anyone in Japan want to let me know about that?)

Case in point: Cuju, a form of football that began its life in China roughly 2,500 years ago. Cu is Chinese for “kicking the ball with feet” and ju translates as “a stuffed ball made of hide.” Clearly, the Chinese are much more efficient with language than we are.

Cuju started as a military training sport. If you could keep a stuffed ball in the air without using your hands while still dealing with ferocious tiger-style attacks from your opponent, killing your enemies on a battlefield was cake by comparison.

As with all fun games, though, word got it, and Cuju quickly spread from the military to the aristocracy. During the Han Dynasty — roughly 2491 (Horse) – 2917 (Rat) — the emperor and all his rich friends organized 12-on-12 matches at the Imperial Palaces. Cuju rules were first codified durign this period, and early Cuju teams had to defend six goals. Whichever team scored on all six goals first won the game and was showered with concubines. Tom Brady’s sperm had nothing on the seed of the best Cuju players.

As those Cuju stars began procreating at an alarming rate, the sport became even more popular, and during the Tang Dynasty — about 3315 (Tiger) – 3604 (Rabbit) — the game became a national obsession. The rules had changed a bit between dynasties, though. Gone were the hair-and-feather-stuffed balls, replaced by some of the earliest air-filled sphere technology. The six-goals were also gone. Two options took their place — tall goal posts with nets between them on either side of the playing field (Zhu Qiu Cuju), or one set of goal posts with an opening between them in the center of the field. (Bai Da Cuju)

It was the Bai Da game that became popular among the general public during the Song Dynasty — 3657 (Monkey) – 3976 (Rabbit) — because it de-emphasized goal scoring in favor of kicking technique. Teams started with a certain number of points, and they lost points for letting the ball touch the ground, kicking it too low, laying hands on the ball, and other nitpicky little things that probably turned pro Cuju players into crybaby prima donnas. Whoever ended up with the most points won the match.

Sometime during the Ming Dynasty, everyone got sick and tired of all the whining, and Cuju died a slow, painful death about 4 or 5 centuries ago. 14 centuries is a pretty good run for any football game, really. If any of our current football games survive that long, it’ll be a miracle.

By the way, legend has it that a 17-year-old girl kicked the collective ass of a whole team of army soldiers in a Cuju match. That this legend never became a Zhang Ziyi film is a supreme tragedy. However, you can expect announcers to beat that story to death during the 2007 FIFA Women’s World Cup, which will be held in China in September, just to remind the world how long women have been playing football.