AND ANOTHER THING
Football hooligans rush in where Sir Walter Scott genteelly trod
PAUL JOHNSON
D. I care if the Germans beat us in war? A great deal, obviously. If they beat us in diplomacy, over the EU? Yes again. In cul- ture? Well, they've already done that, haven't they? Think of music, theology, philosophy. So it can't matter all that much. Then what if they beat us at football? Personally, I could not care less. Herbert Spencer used to say, `To play billiards well is a sign of an ill-spent youth.' To which I add, 'Enthusiasm for foot- ball is primary evidence of arrested develop- ment.' Intellectuals who write learnedly about this beastly game, politicians who suck up to electors by pretending they support their local team, financiers who buy clubs to divert attention from their defalcations — all are humbugs who arouse my contempt. Of the institutions we exported to the world in the days of our imperial glory, football is the least defensible. It is now the scourge of the earth, responsible for more violence than Hollywood and TV together. And its reign of thuggery, by my computation, is only just beginning, as more and more nations adopt the game, air flights become cheaper, the media whip up the frenzy, and those who have hitherto held aloof join the scrimmage. It is only a matter of time before the United States scraps its own elitist form of football and submits to plebeian soccer, and by that stage two billion Chinese and Indians will have caught the plague.
I blame the British for smearing a pseudo- veneer of gentility over what is naturally a brutal game, and in particular I blame Sir Walter Scott. All the early records of foot- ball from prehistoric times to the 19th centu- ry testify to its savagery. They played it in ancient Greece, as we know from Homer, who has a lost ball wake the sleeping Odysseus. The Chinese played it long before Christ; so did the Japanese. Balls were inflated bladders or leather stuffed with hair. It was known in pre-Renaissance Florence as calcio or kick. All games produced fight- ing. All governments tried to stamp it out. The first occasion I can find on which the English authorities introduced anti-footer legislation occurred under Richard II, a finicky king responsible for bringing in the pocket-handkerchief and the three-pronged fork. He found football abhorrent, but maybe his campaign against it helps to explain why he was eventually dethroned and murdered in Pontefract Castle, a dismal Yorkshire hole in what is now the heart of soccer country. English governments prohibited the game by decrees in council up to and including the reign of Charles II, who loathed this grubby sport reeking of misog- yny and exclusively male pleasures. But he seems to have given up in despair. For a time the game had support from the ultra- Protestant clergy, as an alternative to the Catholic-style carnivals at Shrovetide. Every town had its own rules about how many could play, but in many there was no numbers limit. Derby, which made a fuss about Shrovetide football, had 500-a-side games regularly, and sometimes more than 1,000, even as late as 1820. Games began with what was termed 'civil play', but at a certain stage 'rough play' was declared and then the fighting started. Almost the earli- est account, by Joseph Strutt, which dates from 1801, notes that in some places the game 'hots up', as he puts it; then 'the play- ers kick each other's shins without the least ceremony'. The Norfolk variation of this two-style playing was known as 'camping', the game starting with 'kicking camp' (fair play), and ending in 'savage camp', no more than a free-for-all fight. Vast quantities of ale or cider were consumed during play and eventually detonated the savagery (a criti- cal moment known to Aussie cricket crowds as 'when the beer begins to talk'). By this date the clergy, especially the Methodists and Evangelicals, had turned against footer, and particularly the holiday `wakes weeks' in summer, when the game was paramount. The Primitive Methodists, in the Midlands and the North, organised prayerful 'camp meetings' to coincide with and wreck the sport, a typical one being held at Preston in 1823 to spoil the tradi- tionally bloody match between the town and a grim place called Heden. Matches were the only occasion, apart from contest- ed elections, when the mob could riot with- out much chance of being charged by the yeomen cavalry. Indeed, they were similar events. An observer of the Derby match wrote, 'I have known a football hero chaired through the streets like a successful Member, although his utmost element of character was no more than a butcher's apprentice.' He added, 'It is a coarse sport.' In the old days, the game ranged over miles of common land, the object being to cap- ture the ball and return it triumphantly to the winning town or village. The enclosure movement made that impossible, so that games began to be played on regular pitch- es, especially in towns. That made the vio- lence increasingly serious.
Hence the intervention of Sir Walter Scott. He hoped to civilise the game by gen- trification, in which the squirearchy imposed uniform rules and ensured they were kept, as in racing and cricket. He seems to have organised, and celebrated, the first modern football match at Carterhaugh in the Ettrick Forest, of which he was keeper. It took place on 5 December 1815 before a crowd of 2,000. The rival teams were Selkirk, for which Scott made himself responsible, and Yarrow, for which the Earl of Home stood surety. Selkirk wore 'slips of fir' and Yarrow `sprigs of heath' while the supporters of both sides carried banners. The Duke of Buc- cleuch, the top local grandee, kicked off. James Hogg wrote the ballad for the yarrow team, but more important is the song Scott penned for Selkirk, for it was the first expres- sion of the new-born sporting ideology, gw-_, ing it moral authority and making organised games the auxiliary religion of the public schools and universities. Four lines in partic- ular are worth quoting:
Then strip, lads, and to it, though sharp be the weather.
And if by mischance you should happen to fall, There are worse things in life than a tumble on heather And life itself is but a game of football.
As we are now painfully aware,. this attempt by Scott to give the game cluvalrY has finally failed. It is no longer a sport bet an industry, played for money, power, Pres- tige, more money, national vaingloriousness and ethnic or racial pride. It attracts exactly the kind of young men who were recruited by the Nazi and Communist parties to fight for mastery of the streets of Germany in ,.1.1'e 1920s — indeed, recent photos of Engush„ and Turkish fans scrapping in Copenhage, are indistinguishable from black-and-wh° stills of Berlin scenes from that dismal tone..1 Attempts to discipline these thugs will They are inseparable from the game, as 1,, long and horrible history shows. If I bad tilt power I would abolish it, or try to. But sure attempts in the past have got nowhere. one might just as well propose to abolish TV, ,,we other scourge of civilisation. Football, .fla-rit war, is part of the human predicament. ph one does not have to love it, or care 'will' set of hooligans are currently on top.
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