hydrarchist writes
Here's a nice article from the UK based direct action eco-journal 'Do Or Die'. The mag is also notable for its creative critique of recent political effort coming from a perspective that appears part Reclaim the Streets, part Earth Firts and part Bakhtino-Situationist.
It's All Kicking Off!
The Radical History of Football
There are some questions
about football that may remain forever obscured by the murky, swirling mists of
Years Gone By. Like who exactly decided that Bob Wilson was a natural TV
presenter. Or how it ever came to pass that Chris Sutton thought he was too good
for the England B team. Or how much exactly Man. United have to pay the referee
for every minute of Mystery Stoppage Time. Oh yeah, and there's a few other bits
and bobs as well. Like why did football ever happen in the first place, how did
it end up like it is today and what has any of it got to do with Doing or Dying
for the global resistance movement?
An appealingly simple answer to the question of why we play and watch
football is that it's enjoyable. Desmond 'Naked Ape' Morris suggests that
football emerged as a replacement for the fun of pack hunting that was an
important part of earlier human life. He writes: "Viewed in this way, a game of
football becomes a reciprocal hunt. Each team of players, or 'hunting pack',
tries to score a goal by aiming a ball, or 'weapon' at a defended goal-mouth, or
'prey'... The essence of the ancient hunting pattern was that it involved a
great deal of physical exercise combined with risk and excitement. It involved a
long sequence with a build-up, with strategy and planning, with skill and daring
and ultimately with a grand climax and a moment of triumph. This description
fits well the activities of a sportsman such as a footballer, but is a far cry
from the life-style of a worker at a factory-bench or a clerk in an
office."[1]
Others have stuck their necks out with the theory that the first ball was a
dead opponent's head on the battlefield, and there is a holy implausible
suggestion in the 12-volume Book of Football, published in 1905, that the
game began when Cain and Abel kicked an apple around the Garden of Eden in 5000
BC.[2] But one notion that certainly cannot be ruled offside is that football
developed out of pagan religious rites. This evidence is not confined to Britain
(which provides the focus for most of this article, simply because of
availability of information), but has the kind of universal nature that suggests
origins very early on in human history.
For instance, in China in 500 BC, people were playing a football game called
"tsu chu".[3] Six hundred years later, the Chinese writer Li Yu (50-130 AD)
penned this eulogy to the local game, designed to be hung on the goal posts:
"A round ball and a square goal
Suggest the shape of the Yin and the Yang.
The ball is like the full moon
And the two teams stand opposed."[4]
Elsewhere, the ancient Greeks had episkyros and the Romans harpastum; both
ball games played with two teams.[5]
A Game of Two Halves
The first footie in Britain was played by huge
numbers of people on vast 'pitches' with very few rules. Villages were divided
into two sides, often based on where they lived. The games were usually linked
to special dates in the calendar and some of these traditions have survived
today. For instance, on January 1 in Kirkwall, Orkney, street football breaks
out at 10.00am each year. There is a Hocktide (first Sunday after Easter) game
at Workington, Cumbria, and July sees 'Reivers Week' at Duns, Borders, where the
'ba' game' is between the married and single men of the town. But the biggest
day of the year for folk football in Britain is Shrove Tuesday. Some 50 such
local traditions are recorded, although only six survive today.[6]
One of these is at Sedgefield, County Durham, where at 1.00pm, a ball is
passed through a small ring, known as the Bull Ring, on the village green. It is
then thrown to a baying pack of anything up to 1,000 players. The 500-yard pitch
stretches between the two goals - an old duck pond and a stream - and the big
match comes complete with its own traditional chant:
"When the pancakes are sated,
Come to the ring and you'll be
mated,
There this ball will be upcast,
May this game be better than the
last."
Another famous game is at Ashbourne, Derbyshire. The Up'ards, born one side
of river Henmore, take on the Down'ards, born on the other. The goals are three
miles apart, with several streams in between, making it rather tricky to score
quickly on the break.
There are further contests at Atherstone in Warwickshire, Alnwick in
Northumberland, Corfe Castle in Dorset and St. Columb in Cornwall. Although
strictly speaking the latter is more a hurling game than a football match
proper, it is worth a mention for having the most blatantly pagan matchday
ritual. A silver ball is dipped into jugs of beer to make 'silver beer' in what
sounds very much like a lunar ceremony... (We was over the moon, Brian.)
So why specifically Shrove Tuesday for football? Now only an excuse for
pancake-gorging, this was originally an important pre-Christian spring festival,
tied into the vernal equinox (Easter) and the last day of Carnival (Mardi Gras).
The football element certainly fits into the general anarchy of the occasion -
in the West Country, the night before was known as Nickanan Night, when mischief
and vandalism abounded. Rather more of a long shot is that the shape of the ball
could be tied into the theme of eggs and fertility that underlies these
springtime rites.
Janet and Colin Bord argue that folk football is linked into weird hippy
stuff like leylines and energy production: "We have already suggested that the
many customs involving dancing (for example, Morris dancing, May Day dancing,
dancing around bonfires) and skipping may have been intended to raise energy and
this idea can be extended to the rowdy and boisterous games which are also such
a feature of Britain's traditions." They quote Mircea Eliade, in Patterns of
Comparative Religion, as stating: "The contest and fights which take place
in so many places in the spring or at harvest time undoubtedly spring from the
primitive notion that blows, contests, rough games between the sexes and so on,
all stir up and increase the energies of the whole universe." And the Bords add:
"The customs may become clearer if we instead describe them as magical rites
performed to raise energy, which is then directed to the desired goal, which is
usually the fructification of crops, cattle, people and the well-being of the
land itself. When these magical rites are performed at prehistoric sites which
themselves may already produce or store energy, then the rites are adding to the
energies present at the site and available for use." They argue that there are
strong links between these ancient special sites - the 'sacred turf' - and leys
or energy networks: "Jeremy Harte has already noted that the Alnwick Shrove
Tuesday football game takes place along the main street, the A1068, which aligns
with a church, an abbey and Eglingham church, while part of the A351 road in
Corfe Castle, Dorset, again where Shrovetide football is played, aligns with the
castle and a tumulus."[7]
It could be added that at another of our surviving Shrove Tuesday fixtures,
at Atherstone, the main road also forms an important part of the pitch.[8]
Readers may like to revive the tradition along their local leyline/dual
carriageway, not forgetting to bring some tripods. Ancient sites or not, the
same energising effect was evident in the version of football that continued the
tradition in towns and cities in the Middle Ages. Between 1170 and 1183, William
Fitz Stephen, biographer of Thomas a Becket, wrote of London: "After dinner all
the youth of the City goes out into the fields for the very popular game of
ball." He said the elders came to watch and "there seems to be aroused in these
elders a stirring of natural heat by viewing so much activity and by
participation in the joys of unrestrained youth."[9]
But energy was not necessarily a good thing in a society where passivity,
conformity and obedience to authority were increasingly required as urbanisation
took a hold. Writes football historian James Walwin: "Quite apart from the
injuries to players, medieval observers were more alarmed by the wider social
unrest caused by football. The game was simply an ill-defined contest between
indeterminate crowds of youths, often played in riotous fashion, in tightly
restricted city streets, producing uproar and damage to property... It was, in
brief, a game which at times came perilously close to testing to the limits the
social control of local and national governments."[10]
Bringing the Game into Disrepute
Urban disorder, defiance of the law, panicking
authorities - it all sounds like the stuff of potential revolution. But was
there any real undercurrent of radicalism in the footballing tradition?
Certainly, not all radicals have thought so over the years. For instance,
striking trade unionists in Derby in 1833-34 saw the local game as "barbarous
recklessness and supreme folly", promoted by the local elite in a display of
de-radicalising paternalism.[27] But on the other hand, as James Walwin points
out: "Football, with its wild teams and its violence, like many other apparently
non-political and innocent phenomena, could easily become the spark for a wider
disturbance."[28] The historian adds: "The game appealed primarily to young,
healthy men whose vigour and collective boisterousness could not easily be
contained by a society which lacked effective police forces or similar agents of
social control. In London, for example, the apprentices - traditionally radical
groupings, always willing to test the resilience of national and local
governments - were often the chief cause of footballing incidents." These
apprentices "posed a constant threat of unruliness and often of radical
agitation", says Walwin.
Indeed, on several occasions in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth centuries
football is known to have been part of definitely political happenings. In 1638
in Lilleport and Ely, a football match was organised deliberately to attract a
crowd and pull down the banks designed to drain local fens. In 1647, in
opposition to miserable Puritanism and the increasing centralisation of
authority, a Canterbury crowd closed down all the shops that had obeyed the
order to open for Christmas. They then proceeded to serve free drinks for all,
pelt the Presbyterian minister with shit and open the city gaol. When the mayor
was vanquished and his officers seen off, the crowd produced footballs and some
billeted republican soldiers deserted and joined in the fun.
In 1740 "A Match of Futtball was cried at Kettering of five Hundred Men of a
side, but the design was to Pull Down Lady Betey Jesmaine's Mills." In 1764 at
West Haddon, Northants, 2,000 acres of land was enclosed. Locals made the usual
formal objections, but these were ignored. So they decided to play football on
the enclosed land. "Within moments of kick-off, the football match degenerated
into an overtly political mob which tore up and burned the enclosure fences.
Dragoons, specially drafted from Northampton, could do nothing in the face of
such resistance and the damage amounted to some £1,500."[29]
In 1768 an enclosure at Holland Fen, Lincolnshire, triggered off no fewer
than three political 'football' matches in just one month. "July 1st, the
insurgents, consisting of about two hundred men, threw up a football in the fen
and played for about two hours, when a troop of dragoons, some gentlemen from
Boston and four constables, having seized four or five of the rioters, committed
them to Spalding gaol. Dr Shaw, of Wyberton, set three women rioters at liberty
and the men were admitted to bail. On the 15th another ball was thrown up and no
person opposed them... On the 29th another ball was thrown up without
opposition."[30]
The Reverie's a Bastard
The most interesting thing about these examples is
the way that a traditional game was being used to reclaim traditional rights.
And it is at this interface between custom and protest that the true political
relevance of football can probably be found. Although the various efforts to
suppress football have had superficially practical reasons - such as
re-directing the populace to the militarily useful sport of archery or stopping
windows being smashed - there were deeper forces at work here. One of these was
the ruling elite's constant fear of the energy and potential power of the mass
of ordinary people, no matter whether it was harnessed to 'political' ends or
not. An English gentleman is quoted as having complained in 1892: "The lower
middle and the working classes may be divided into two sets; Fabians and
Footballers, and 'pon my word, it's difficult to say which is the greater
nuisance to the other members of society."[31] Walwin comments: "Throughout
these centuries, football was the game of the common people; the game reflects
the lives of those who played it. Similarly the hostile reactions of the upper
classes reflect their attitudes towards the commoners."[32] In this context, it
is not surprising that football was not the only popular tradition to meet with
hostility from the ruling classes. By the Nineteenth century nearly every other
custom from wood-gathering and gleaning to bonfires and Maypoles was under
threat. Folklore researcher Bob Bushaway writes: "Suppression of the vulgar and
offensive elements of custom was seen as improving and as necessary if the
sanctity of power and property was to be safeguarded. The purging and
remodelling of popular customs during the Victorian period was the central
feature of this image."[33] He adds that "denial of access to customary
locations and venues" was a key part of this suppression, in particular through
enclosure. At the heart of the conflict was the difference between custom and
law and the efforts of authority to replace the first with the second. This was
hardly a new phenomenon even then - radical bishop and reformer John of Antioch
was declaring back in the fourth century that "The enslaved are the fittest to
be governed by laws and free men by custom."[34]
Oliver Goldsmith also defended custom over law in the Eighteenth century, as
did John Stuart Mill in 1848. Wrote the latter: "The farther we look back into
history, the more we see all transactions and engagements under the influence of
fixed customs. The reason is evident. Custom is the most powerful protector of
the weak against the strong; their sole protector where there are no laws of
governments adequate to the purpose."[35] Bushaway notes: "A language of custom
was understood by the community, which indicated action which was tolerated,
censured action which was not and acted as a vehicle for enforcing the
collective will." And these customs simply could not be accepted by the law,
resulting in "the redefinition of custom as crime."[36]
E.P. Thompson produced some fascinating evidence of the way in which custom
is tied in with popular working class culture.[37] And radical historian
Christopher Hill asks, while considering the changes brought in with land
enclosure from 1641 to the early 1900s: "Why should the lower classes respect
laws which asserted property rights AGAINST traditional popular customs in the
villages?"[38] And he links the defence of popular tradition and custom with "an
ideology of freedom... which looks back to Robin Hood and his outlaws." The
concept of a custom-led, self-governing traditional society is also central to
some versions of anarchist theory, particularly that of German-Jewish
anarcho-socialist Gustav Landauer (1870-1919). He used the word 'Geist' to
describe a kind of community spirit that was the cement within a custom-based
society, one built from the bottom upwards. Argued Landauer: "The state, with
its police and all its law and its contrivances for property rights, exists for
the people as a miserable replacement for Geist and for organisations with
specific purposes; and now the people are supposed to exist for the sake of the
state, which pretends to be some sort of ideal structure and a purpose in
itself, to be Geist... There exists a community alongside the state, not just a
sum of isolated individual atoms, but an organic solidarity, consisting of
highly differentiated groups... We still know nothing or very little about this
supraindividual structure that is pregnant with Geist, but one day it will be
known that socialism is not the invention of something new, but the discovery of
something that has been present and has grown in society."[39]
Landauer saw this Geist as representing freedom. Since we do not have freedom
in current society, that makes Geist, or community spirit, an automatically
revolutionary force. This was surely a conclusion shared by those who went to
such lengths to kill off football and the other customs threatening their system
from below.
We was Robbed
Of course, outright suppression was not the only
method used to wipe out allegiance to a folk-law that was holding up the onward
march of Progress. Writes Bushaway: "In late Hanoverian and Victorian England,
the propertied class attempted to annex popular custom and the customary rights
of the poor, partly by suppression and partly by acquisition and
transformation."[40] In the same way that bawdy and pagan Morris Men were
transformed into stockbrokers waving white hankies around on a Sunday afternoon
and nursery rhymes had all the words changed for polite Victorian society, so
was football re-invented for the modern era. You could argue that its absorption
into the status quo started as far back as 1615 when James I attended a football
match in Wiltshire or 1681 when Charles II attended a fixture between members of
Royal Household and Duke of Albermarle's servants.[41]
Fan Power: April 1996, Brighton and Hove Albion fans occupy the Goldstone
ground. When dodgy director Bill Archer sold off the Seagulls' old historic
ground for a song his schemes left the club homeless and fans took things into
their own hands, starting a protest movement to kick out Archer and save their
club. Saturday April 27 was due to be the last match ever played at the
Goldstone. But just 15 minutes into the game against York thousands of fans
invaded the pitch, the York and Brighton fans swapping shirts and uniting in
chants of 'Sack the Board'.
But today's association football was truly born of the 'muscular
Christianity' of Victorian Britain, where city missions and big public schools
"saw football as a healthy means of channelling aggression and teaching the
important lessons of team spirit and competition."[42] Of course, oral custom
had to be replaced by written laws and in 1848 the Cambridge Rules were drawn up
at Cambridge University by old boys from Eton, Harrow, Shrewsbury and
Winchester. In 1862 a set of ten rules was drafted by J.C. Thring of Uppingham
College, and in 1888 a professional Football League was set up.[43] From then
on, it was all downhill. The plebs were turned from participants into passive
spectators and the final whistle was blown on the threat posed to the
establishment by football. Right? Well, not quite. Football was one popular
custom whose spirit refused to lie down straight away and the participation did
not so much die out as transfer to the terraces. It is something of a myth that
football crowds were all well-behaved gatherings of dapper middle-aged men in
hats until the 1960s. For instance, the term 'hooligan' was invented in 1898.
And researchers at Leicester University say more than 4,000 incidents of
hooliganism occurred at football matches between 1894 and 1914, particularly
from 1894 to 1900 and 1908 to 1914. They suggest a link between outbreaks of
football violence and the presence in the crowd of members of youth gangs, the
so-called 'scuttlers' or 'peaky blinders'.[44] But it was not just the odd pitch
invasion or outbreak of fisticuffs that made the act of watching football a
natural continuation of playing folk football. The upper classes knew this too.
This was why, right from the start, they condemned the uncivilised cult of
'spectatorism'.
Writes sports historian Richard Holt: "It was perfectly acceptable for keen
players to watch others playing for the love of it, but it was quite another for
thousands of working-class youths and men to shout and swear, roaring their team
on to victory by fair means or foul. Far from being 'rational', this was no more
than mindless fanaticism, obstinate and arbitrary partisanship devoid of sense,
morality or self-restraint. Little different in fact from the mobs that had
baited bulls or carried the bladder of a pig from one end of the town to
another. Was it for this that the old games had been revised and refined in the
best schools in the land?"[45]
However, despite this continuity of spirit, changes in the world outside
meant that the political implications of football's fanaticism changed during
the course of the Twentieth Century. Passionate loyalty to locality remained,
but the locality was the nearest city with which urban or suburban supporters
identified, rather than the community in which they lived. Says Holt: "These
inhabitants of big cities needed a cultural expression of their urbanism which
went beyond the immediate ties of kin and locality. A need for rootedness as
well as excitement is what seems most evident in the behaviour of football
crowds."[46] And what better extension of this industrialised ersatz-identity
than chauvinistic patriotism, encouraged by the growth of flag-waving
international matches? The obstinacy and bloody-mindedness that was once
directed to defending local traditions and local autonomies was now diverted
into an emotional attachment with large authoritarian organisations - the clubs
- and with national states. Not much radical potential in that, and it is not
surprising in these circumstances that the terraces provided useful recruiting
grounds in the 1970s for the likes of the National Front. There was more to this
than just the dynamics of football crowds - the alienation of a stagnating left
from much of the working class was also a contributing factor.
Perhaps it was the over-representation of liberal, politically correct and
middle class values on what passed for the political 'left' (today's New Labour
faithful?) that led them to join the centuries-old condemnation of football as
thuggish, boorish, worthless etc. etc. For behind all the moral outrage about
violence, pitch invasions and obscene chanting, it was clear that their real
objection to football crowds was that they were predominantly working-class and
didn't obey the laws as laid down by their betters. Writes Holt: "Middle-class
ideals of 'playing the game' have always been alien to rough working-class
culture. Deracinated urban youths have built upon this uncompromisingly physical
attitude to games and turned it into a different, more aggressive and organized
subculture."
Recounting an anecdote about fans placing shit in a rival supporter's shoes,
Holt links this aspect into the ancient tradition of misrule in football.
"Antics of this kind had been the stuff of carnival throughout Western Europe
for centuries. In Nineteenth century Paris young revellers would melt down
chocolate and smear horrified passers-by with what they took to be
excrement."[47] In the 1980s, particularly after the tragedy at Heysel in
1985,[48] it looked as if Mrs. Thatcher was going to simply ban this horrible
working class activity and get the Americans to bomb Wembley. But instead,
capitalist common sense prevailed and the industrialised version of football was
absorbed into late Twentieth century consumerism. The Hillsborough disaster of
1989,[49] which should have been a searing indictment of the way fans were
treated by police and clubs, was instead used as an excuse to try and kill off
fan culture with compulsory all-seater stadiums in the top division. At the same
time football found a whole lot more shit falling out of the Sky as
money-grabbing City fans queued up at the metaphorical turnstiles to cash in on
the ultimate brand loyalty of supporting a football team. British Sky
Broadcasting now owns stakes in Man. United, Chelsea, Leeds, Man. City and
Sunderland. Granada owns a stake in Liverpool and New York cable company NTL
owns shares in Aston Villa and Newcastle.[50]
They think it's all over...
The game lives on, obviously, and is even more
popular than ever. But every season the fans are becoming more like consumers of
any other contemporary leisure product. You can't always afford to go any more.
You can't stand up. You can't sit with the crowd you want to, because your
pre-booked plastic seat is numbered. It's not as bad outside the Premiership,
but then smaller clubs left out of the cash bonanza could well be going to the
wall in large numbers in years to come. So is this the end of the football
spirit in this country? What can be done to save the game from the grasps of
global capitalism? There have been plenty of attempts at fomenting real
rebellion in the football grounds. Fan power, harnessed to the independent
fanzine movement, has kept the flag of dissent flying and the influence of the
far right has been successfully challenged by anti-fascist groups. But it seems
to be a losing battle. Even the anarchist mag Animal wasn't very
optimistic in its football special in 1998, sighing: "Is the best supporters can
hope for to join together in the independent supporters associations, build
their arguments and then hit the money men when the opportunities present
themselves?"[51]
Perhaps the answer is to forget the capitalist citadels of modern
professional football and go back to football's roots for inspiration.
Seven-a-side footie tournaments are already a regular feature of radical
gatherings like May Day 2000, the Easton Cowboys from Bristol forged
international revolutionary links by travelling to Chiapas to play football with
the Zapatistas and Reclaim the Streets-style mass street football matches have
also taken place. Alongside this we would also do well to look at the way that
football, and customs as a whole, can motivate and empower communities.
There's only Wahn Gustav Landauer
Whatever you think of leylines, the idea put forward
by the Bords that football creates energy has a lot going for it. Energy. This
is surely what we need in order to foment and encourage a real rebellion against
the forces of industrial darkness, not more arid analyses and half-cocked
compromises. We need to find the catalyst to release the ancient, raw energy of
the people, the kind of spine-tingling collective power that can still, despite
everything, be experienced at football matches. This was what Landauer was
talking about with the dynamic extension of his Geist, or community spirit, into
what he termed Wahn. He wrote: "Wahn is not only every goal, every ideal, every
belief in a sense and purpose of life and the world: Wahn is every banner
followed by mankind, every drumbeat leading mankind into danger; every alliance
that unites mankind and creates from a sum of individuals a new structure, an
organism. Wahn is the greatest thing mankind has; there is always something of
love in it: love is Geist and Geist is love: and love and Geist are Wahn."[52]
And when we have energised our Wahn and defeated Property, Progress and
Profit United, we will perhaps once again have enough space and time for a nice
relaxing game of footie..
Notes
1) Desmond Morris - Manwatching: A Field Guide to
Human Behaviour (Triad/Granada, London, 1978)
2) Jonathan Rice - Curiosities of Football (Pavilion, London, 1996)
3) Op. Cit. 2.
4) James Walwin - The People's Game: The Social History of British
Football (Allen Lane, London, 1975)
5) Op. Cit. 2.
6) Quentin Cooper and Paul Sullivan - Maypoles, Martyrs and Mayhem: 366
Days of British Customs, Myths and Eccentricities (Bloomsbury, London, 1994)
7) Janet and Colin Bord - Earth Rites: Fertility Practices in
Pre-Industrial Britain (Granada, London, 1982)
8) Op. Cit. 6.
9) Op. Cit. 4.
10) Ibid.
11) Op. Cit. 2.
12) Ibid.
13) Ibid.
14) Ibid.
15) Op. Cit. 4.
16) Op. Cit. 2.
17) Op. Cit. 4.
18) Ibid.
19) Ibid.
20) Ibid.
21) Op. Cit. 2.
22) Op. Cit. 4.
23) Ibid.
24) Ibid.
25) (Quoted in) Ibid.
26) Bob Bushaway - By Rite: Custom, Ceremony and Community in England
1700-1880 (Junction, London, 1982) 27) Dave Russell - Football and the
English: A Social History of Association Football in England, 1863-1995
(Carnegie, Preston, 1997)
28) Op. Cit. 4.
29) Ibid.
30) Ibid.
31) Ibid.
32) Ibid.
33) Op. Cit. 26.
34) Ibid.
35) John Stuart Mill - Principles of Political Economy (Toronto, 1965)
36) Op. Cit. 26.
37) Notably in Customs in Common (Merlin, 1991)
38) Christopher Hill - Liberty Against the Law: Some Seventeen Century
Controversies (Allen Lane, London, 1996)
39) Aufruf zum Sozialismus (Berlin, 1919), quoted by Charles B Maurer
in Call to Revolution: The Mystical Anarchism of Gustav Landauer (Wayne
State University Press, Detroit, 1971)
40) Op. Cit. 26.
41) Op. Cit. 2.
42) Ibid.
43) Ibid.
44) Op. Cit. 27.
45) Richard Holt - Sport and the British: A Modern History (Clarendon,
Oxford, 1989)
46) Ibid.
47) Ibid.
48) Thirty-nine people died on May 29 1985 during the European Champions Cup
Final match between Liverpool and the Italian club Juventus at Heysel in
Belgium. Liverpool fans tried to attack the Juventus fans and panic set in among
the Italians. In their alarm they caused a wall to collapse trapping and killing
people underneath.
49) In 1989 a semi-final match between Liverpool and Nottingham Forest at the
Hillsborough stadium took the lives of 96 Liverpool fans in a crush in the crowd
caused by incompetent policing.
50) The Guardian, March 4, 2000.
51) Issue 2. PO Box 467, London E8 3QX, UK.
52) Beginnen: Aufsaetze uber Sozialismus, edited by Martin Buber
(Cologne, 1924), Op. Cit. 39.
(Box) 600 Glorious Years of Beastlie Furie and Extreme Violence
From medieval times right through to the Nineteenth
century, football battled against various attempts to suppress it. Highlights
include:
1287: Synod of Exeter bans "unseemly sports" from churchyards.[11]
1314: Edward II's ministers issue a proclamation stating that
"forasmuch as there is a great noise in the city caused by Hustling over large
balls, from which many evils may arise, which God forbid, we command and forbid,
on behalf of the King, on pain of imprisonment, such game to be used in the city
in future."[12]
1349: Edward III repeats the prohibition, describing football as one
of many "foolish games which are of no use". Further decrees against football
follow in 1389 and 1401.[13]
1531: Sir Thomas Elyot writes in his treatise The Boke Named The
Governour that football is "nothing but beastlie furie and extreme
violence".[14]
1555: Football is banned at Oxford University.[15]
1572: Elizabeth I passes a decree that "No football play to be used or
suffered within the City of London".[16]
1576: A group of artisans in Ruislip "with unknown malefactors to the
number of a hundred, assembled themselves unlawfully and played a certain
unlawful game, called football, by reason of which unlawful game there arose
amongst them great affray, likely to result in homicides and serious
accidents."[17]
1608-9: Reports in Manchester of "a companye of lewde and disordered
persons using that unlawful exercise of playinge with the footbale in ye streets
of the a said towne breakinge many men's windows and glasse..."[18]
1615: Football is said to be causing "greate disorders and tumults" in
the City of London.[19]
1600s: "In many respects Puritanism in that period became a greater
enemy of sport, especially of the popular, bloody variety, than medieval
monasticism had been, and the history of sport in Puritan England could be
written largely in terms of the regular enactments against it."[20] The Puritan
pamphleteer Philip Stubbes writes that football is more "a bloody murthering
practice than a fellowly sport or pastime".[21]
1660: It is alleged of an undergraduate at Cambridge University that
"he was in a companie that did in a Riotous manner throw clotts or stones at the
deputy proctor and Masters of Arts who came to prevent scholars from playing at
football, and other disorderly meetings there."[22]
1796: After the death of a man in Derby's Shrove Tuesday game,
football is condemned as "disgraceful to humanity and civilisation, subversive
of good order and Government and destructive of the Morals, Properties and very
lives of our Inhabitants."[23]
1830s: "The days had gone when authorities stood by helplessly while
their subjects took the law into their own hands with impunity; in the capital
for instance bands of footballers ceased to be able to create mayhem at will.
Street football in the old cities was one of the victims of effective law
enforcement."[24]
1838: "Football seems to have almost gone out of use with the
inclosure of wastes and commons, requiring a wide space for its
exercise."[25]
1881: Evard Home Coleman reports: "The ancient custom of playing at
football in the public streets was observed at Nuneaton on the afternoon of
March 1st. During the morning a number of labourers canvassed the town for
subscriptions and between one and two o'clock the ball was started, hundreds of
roughs assembling and kicking it through the streets. The police attempted to
stop the game, but were somewhat roughly handled."[26]
(Box) An Introduction To Three-Sided Football
It appears that the first person to come up with the
idea of 3-sided football was Asger Jorn, who saw it as a means of conveying his
notion of trialectics - a trinitarian supercession of the binary structure of
dialectics. We are still trying to discover if there were any actual games
organised by him. Before the London Psychogeographic Association organised its
first game at the Glasgow Anarchist Summer School in 1993, there is little
evidence of any games being played.
There is, of course, the rumour that Luther Blissett organised an informal
league of youth clubs which played 3-sided football during his stint at Watford
in the early Eighties. Unfortunately, our research has found no evidence to
support this. Nevertheless, Blissett's name will probably remain firmly linked
to the 3-sided version of the game, even if in an apocryphal fashion.
The key to the game is that it does not foster aggression or competitiveness.
Unlike two-sided football, no team keeps a record of the number of goals they
score. However they do keep a tally of the goals they concede, and the winner is
determined as the team which concedes least goals. The game deconstructs the
mythic bi-polar structure of conventional football, where an us-and-them
struggle mediated by the referee mimics the way the media and the state pose
themselves as 'neutral' elements in the class struggle. Likewise, it is no
psycho-sexual drama of the fuckers and fucked - the possibilities are greatly
expanded!
The pitch is hexagonal; each team being assigned two opposite sides for
bureaucratic purposes should the ball be kicked out of the play. The blank side
is called the frontside. The side containing the orifice is called the backside,
and the orifice is called a goal. Should the ball be thrust through a team's
orifice, the team is deemed to have conceded a goal - so in an emblematic
fashion this perpetuates the anal-retentive homophobic techniques of
conventional football whereby homo-erotic tension is built up, only to be
sublimated and repressed.
However the trialectic appropriation of this technique dissolves the
homo-erotic/homo-phobic bipolarity as a successful attack will generally imply
co-operation with the third team. This should overcome the prominent resistance
to women taking their full part in football.
Meanwhile the penetration of the defence by two opposing teams imposes upon
the defence the task of counterbalancing their disadvantage through sowing the
seeds of discord in an alliance which can only be temporary. This will be
achieved through exhortation, body language, and an ability to manoeuvre the
ball and players into such a position that one opposing team will realise that
its interests are better served by breaking off the attack and allying
themselves with the defending team.
Bearing in mind that such a decision will not necessarily be immediate, a
team may well find itself split between two alliances. Such a situation opens
them up to the possibility of their enemies uniting, making maximum use of this
confusion. 3-sided football is a game of skill, persuasion and psychogeography.
The semicircle around the goal functions as a penalty area and it may be
necessary to use it for some sort of offside rule which has yet to be
developed.
by the Association of Autonomous Astronauts (East London Branch), Box 15, 138
Kingsland High Street, London E8 2NS, UK.
Email: aaa@unpopular.demon.co.uk
(Box) Football to the Footballers!
In the insurgent Paris of May 1968 when millions of
workers were on strike, the students had occupied the universities, the
president had fled the country and France seemed on the verge of revolution, the
footballers were not to be left out. Footballers occupied the headquarters of
the French Football Federation and issued a communiqué:
"We footballers belonging to the various clubs in the Paris region have today decided to occupy the
headquarters of the French Football Federation. Just like the workers are
occupying their factories, and the students occupying their faculties.
Why? IN ORDER TO GIVE BACK TO THE 600,000 FRENCH FOOTBALLERS AND TO THEIR
THOUSANDS OF FRIENDS WHAT BELONGS TO THEM: FOOTBALL. WHICH THE PONTIFFS OF THE
FEDERATION HAVE EXPROPRIATED FROM THEM IN ORDER TO SERVE THEIR EGOTISTICAL
INTERESTS AS SPORTS PROFITEERS...
...Now it's up to you: footballers, trainers, managers of small clubs,
countless friends and fans of football, students and workers - to preserve the
quality of your sport by joining us to...
...DEMAND THE IMMEDIATE DISMISSAL (by means of a referendum of the 600,000
footballers, controlled by themselves) of the profiteers of football and the
insulters of the footballers.
FREE FOOTBALL FROM THE TUTELAGE OF THE MONEY OF THE PATHETIC PRETEND-PATRONS
who are at the root of the decay of football. And demand from the state
the SUBSIDIES that it accords to all other sports, and which the pontiffs of the
Federation have never claimed.
So that football may remain yours, we call on you to MAKE YOUR WAY WITHOUT
DELAY to the headquarters of the Federation which has again become YOUR HOUSE,
at 60 Avenue d'Iena, Paris.
United, we will make football once again what it ought never to have ceased
to be - the sport of joy, the sport of the world of tomorrow which all the
workers have started building. EVERYONE TO 60 AVENUE D'IENA!"
- Footballer's Action Committee
From: Enragés and Situationists in the Occupations Movement, May '68
by René Viénet (Autonomedia/Rebel Press, 1992)
Do or Die DTP/web team: doordtp@yahoo.co.uk "
