CHAPTER 1 - ANTHROPOLOGY, THEOLOGY AND THE MOB

From mysticism to mayhem

“Some people believe football is a matter of life and death, I am very disappointed with that attitude. I can assure you it is much, much more important than that.” - BillShankly

IT’S usually considered wise to start a story at the beginning.

For us this means travelling back through the mists of time to the very dawn of our existence - as the simple act of kicking a ball goes back to the earliest periods of human history and turns out to have been one of the first things that marked us out from the rest of the animal kingdom.

The general theory goes that shortly after humans realised their world was an unpleasant place and thatpractice makes perfect, we stared to play games and soon after that invented the notion of sport. In fact, our forbearers may well have devised the trap rule long before they worshipped gods and almost certainly constructed the ball before the wheel.

The detailed mechanics of the evolutionary process that concluded with the curled free kick commenced back when the act of play provided the main learning tool for our young, a process through which they learnt the basic skills involved with catching dinner or stopping oneself from becoming dinner.

From these humble beginnings games progressed at quite a pace,but still concerned themselves almost exclusively with the rehearsal of survival techniques and those that helped produce better hunters. A large proportion of them therefore involved weapons in the guise of spears, clubs, rocks etc., all of which required a target, preferably of the moving type. Apart from floating things in water, most targets were provided by throwing and rolling everyday objects such as fruit, rocks, animal heads etc. Unfortunately, most of these were erratic, messy and not reusable. If humankind was to continue its rise to the top of the global food-chain, then another solution wasrequired.

Happily, for the future of humanityit didn’t take too much of a Neanderthal genius to come up with the answer…… the ball, (well a bundle of rolled up animal skin). A simple invention that we clearly took to with great relish as it quickly became an essential piece of early humankit.

Having been designed to improve physical agility and visual co-ordination, ball games soon took on the additional role of tribal cabaret and mutated into a multitude of dance routines. In Africa, the explorer George Stow described one such variety - theSan ball game. It used balls made of hammered hippopotamus hide that were small, round and very bouncy (very unlike the animal from which they came). Duringsan the ball was thrown at a hard flat rock so that it bounced up in the air at which point as George recalled the participants‘commenced a series of antics, throwing themselves into all kinds of positions, imitating wild dogs, and like them making a noise “che! che! che!”.’- Well let’s face it there