| Flash
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| 276589. Wed Feb 13, 2008 6:14 am |
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Something I know nothing about.
This guy sounds interesting, though:
Bernhard "Bert" Trautmann was a paratrooper in the German army who was held in Britain as a POW during the war, and used to play as goalkeeper in inter-camp matches (it's quite interesting that they even had inter-camp matches, in my book). He stayed in the UK after the war and was signed by Manchester City, which infuriated City fans - 20,000 of them demonstrated against the signing. However, he turned out to be a genius (regarded by some as the best goalie in the world at the time) so the protests didn't last for long and he became a fixture, playing 545 matches for City between 1949 and 1964.
His great claim to fame is that he played the last 15 minutes of the 1956 FA Cup Final with a broken neck:
| Quote: | | In the 75th minute Man City led 3:1 and Trautmann, diving at an incoming ball, was knocked out in a collision with Birmingham's Peter Murphy when he was hit in the neck. For the remaining 15 minutes he defended his net, because at the time there were no substitutions possible. Manchester City held on for the victory, and the hero of the final was Bert Trautmann, due to his spectacular saves in the last minutes of the match. Three days later, an x-ray revealed he had a broken vertebra in his neck. |
wiki
The BBC has film of the incident at http://www.bbcmotiongallery.com/Customer/SearchResults.aspx?searchText=trautmann&type=Simple |
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| Flash
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| 276607. Wed Feb 13, 2008 6:37 am |
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Other football stuff that could be developed:
The myth of the invention of rugby by William Webb Ellis (Mat has details).
Aussie rules and Gaelic football players don't have any international competition so they have created a hybrid game called International Rules and play each other.
The Spanish National Anthem has no words, and apparently FIFA has asked them to create some so they can sing them before matches. I dare say that this is a distortion of the facts, but I like the idea that a country is being required to create a National Anthem on the instructions of a footballing organisation.
suze tells us that the Peruvian club Deportivo Wanka (named after the indigenous people of the area, as is the City of Huancayo) tried to escape relegation from the Premiership in the 2004 season by moving their pitch to the top of a mountain, so that the Estadio Municipal Pasco in Cerro de Pasco is now the highest professional football pitch in the world at 4,380 meters / 13,973 feet. The idea was that their opponents would be unable to play at that altitude, but it didn't work: the Wankas were relegated and are now in the third division.
When referring to suze I am always torn between respecting her wish to be e.e.cummings / k.d.lang-style lowercase throughout and competing stylistic imperatives such as capitalising the first letter of a sentence. This is neither here nor, indeed, there, but I thought I'd get it off my chest. |
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| dr.bob
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| 276770. Wed Feb 13, 2008 10:56 am |
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There's also the various unusual forms of football played around the country (for some reason, most often on Shrove Tuesday).
In Alnwick they play the game called "Scoring the Hales" which consists of teams of 150 men on either side and goal posts 400 yards apart.
In Atherstone they play the "Shrovetide Ball Game". Played between 3pm and 5pm, it is apparently legal to deflate and hide the ball after 4:30. There are no teams and no goals, and the aim is to be in possession of the ball at the end.
In Kirkwall they play "The Ba' game" where the entire male population of the town divides into two teams, the Uppies and the Doonies, traditionally based on place of birth, although these days familial loyalties are a strong influence. The aim of the game is to score one goal. The Uppies score a goal by touching the Ba' against a wall in the south end of town. The Doonies score theirs by getting the Ba' into the water of Kirkwall Bay, to the north.
In Florence they play Florentine Football (Calcio Fiorentino) in a giant sand pit constructed in Piazza Santa Croce. The teams number 27 on each side and can use both hands and feet.
There was also, according to wikipedia, a version of football popular in Norfolk in medieval times with the delightful name of Camping. Apparently the original "camping land" where the game was played can still be found behind the market place in Swaffham. Isn't that near to the residence of a certain Mr S. Fry?
More types of "traditional" football listed on Wikipedia
| Flash wrote: | | When referring to suze I am always torn between respecting her wish to be e.e.cummings / k.d.lang-style lowercase throughout |
Thanks for that. Having never seen a photo of suze, I shall now find it impossible not to picture her as k.d.lang.
Mind you, I guess it could've been worse :) |
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| suze
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| 276860. Wed Feb 13, 2008 12:58 pm |
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You may picture me as kathy dawn if you wish! As it happens, she attended the college in Alberta where I taught immediately before moving to England - though she's seven years older than me, so we weren't there at the same time.
Actually, there's no real reason for my lower case nomenclature - that's just how I typed it when I signed up for the forums, and since then I've gotten rather attached to the small s.
It's crept into my real writing in the last year or so though - I now seem to write my name suze when communicating with friends, or Suzanne when communicating on a more formal level! |
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| Flash
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| 282165. Thu Feb 21, 2008 7:28 pm |
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Here's an article after my own heart.
You often hear it said that the expression "back to square one" refers to the grids used by radio commentators to explain football matches. Is this something that "everybody knows"? Even if they do, I doubt it'd make a Gen Ig question or justify a forfeit because we don't really know that it's wrong. Good for the notes, though.
| Quote: | Back to square one
The most widely reported suggestions for the origin of this phrase are BBC sports commentaries, board games like snakes and ladders and playground games like hopscotch.
BBC Commentaries:
In order that listeners could follow the progress of the game in radio commentaries the pitch was divided into eight notional squares. Commentators described the play by saying which square the ball was in. The Radio Times, which was and is the BBC's listings guide, refers to the practice in an issue from January 1927.
These commentaries certainly happened and prints of the pitch diagrams still exist. Recordings of early commentaries also exist, including the very first broadcast sports commentary (of a rugby match). That commentary, and many others that followed, referred listeners to the printed maps and a second commentator called out the numbers as the ball moved from square to square. However, at no point in any existing commentary do they use the phrase 'back to square one'.
Despite this, the BBC issued a piece in a January 2007 issue of The Radio Times which celebrated 80 years of BBC football commentary. In this the football commentator John Murray stated with confidence that "Radio Times' grids gave us the phrase 'back to square one'" and that "the grid system ... was dropped in the 1930s (not before the phrase 'back to square one' had entered everyday vocabulary)".
This confidence is despite the fact that, although it could be true, is it nothing but conjecture. What is a fact is that the BBC broadcast a popular etymology series Balderdash and Piffle in collaboration with the OED 2006. This questioned the claim that the BBC commentaries were the source and the claim that the phrase was in circulation in the 1930s.
It's not the first time that BBC commentators have talked balderdash and piffle and I doubt it will be the last. Private Eye made something of a cottage industry out of printing examples of such in their Colemanballs columns and books. (see over the moon).
Board Games:
Many people report that the phrase refers to snakes and ladders or similar board games. The earliest citation of the phrase in print is currently 1952, from the Economic Journal:
"He has the problem of maintaining the interest of the reader who is always being sent back to square one in a sort of intellectual game of snakes and ladders."
It isn't a feature of snakes and ladders that players are sent back to square one. Few examples of boards that have a snake in the first square exist. For the phrase to have come from that source people must have had occasion to use it, and that appears not to be the case with snakes and ladders.
Hopscotch:
This playground game is played on a grid of numbered squares. The precise rules of the game vary from place to place but usually involves players hopping from square to square, missing out the square containing their thrown stone. They go from one to (usually) eight or ten and then back to square one.
All of the above are plausible enough to gain supporters. As is usual with phrases of uncertain origin, most people are happy to believe the first explanation they hear. There's no real evidence to put the origin beyond reasonable doubt, and so that remains uncertain.
Whatever the source, 1952 is surprisingly late as the earliest printing for a phrase that was certainly in the spoken language much earlier than that. There are many believable hearsay examples from at least thirty years earlier. Perhaps a printed source from before 1952 will yield the truth? |
http://www.phrases.org.uk/meanings/back%20to%20square%20one.html |
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| Flash
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| 282167. Thu Feb 21, 2008 7:33 pm |
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This site simply asserts the popular story in a way that's manifestly wrong: when a game "restarts after a break" it doesn't do so in the corner of the pitch.
| Quote: | Back To Square One
Meaning back to the beginning this idiom was first heard on football radio commentaries during games.Football isn't easy to commentate on on the radio so they had the idea of splitting up the field into notional numbered squares so that listeners could be told where the ball was. Whenever the game restarted after a break it was 'back to square one'. |
http://www.idiomsite.com/backtosquare.htm |
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| Flash
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| 282172. Thu Feb 21, 2008 7:40 pm |
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Might be fun to have a show which is formatted like a game of Snakes & Ladders: if they say something interesting they go up a tiny ladder and if they incur a forfeit they go down a huge snake.
Needs work. |
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| MatC
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| 287249. Fri Feb 29, 2008 7:05 am |
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I’m always a bit suspicious of these kind of figures, but ...
| Quote: | | On 9th July 2006, 5% of the human beings that have ever lived watched the World Cup final on television. |
S: Know The Score Books publisher's catalogue. |
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| Flash
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| 287283. Fri Feb 29, 2008 7:31 am |
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| Quote: | Estimates of the number of human beings who have ever lived on Earth constitute an extremely large range, with low estimates around 45 billion, and the highest estimates topping out around 125 billion. Many of the more robust estimates fall into the range of 90 to 110 billion humans. ...
According to one set of calculations based on 2002 data:
* The number who have ever been born is around 106,000,000,000
* The world population in mid-2002 was approximately 6,215,000,000
* The percentage of those ever born who were living in 2002 was approximately 5.8%
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_population#Number_of_humans_that_have_ever_lived
... which would imply that about 80% of the population of the World was watching the World Cup Final. |
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| MatC
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| 287286. Fri Feb 29, 2008 7:32 am |
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Yes, now I come to think of it, I've done a Mythcon on that ...!
(Mind you, if Wicki says it, I tend to assume it's wrong ..) |
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| WB
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| 287561. Fri Feb 29, 2008 10:36 am |
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Re: Back to Square One.
The BBC have already broadcast something about this on a show called Balderdash & Piffle. I'm fairly certain that they rejected the 'radio commentary' etymology as it was in common parlance before radios were used for commentaries. Can't remember what they came up with though. |
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| MatC
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| 290635. Wed Mar 05, 2008 5:52 am |
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The Vichy government in France banned rugby league, because it was considered a Communist sport.
S: letter to Morning Star, 22 Oct 07
Links: France. |
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| MatC
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| 292008. Fri Mar 07, 2008 8:52 am |
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| Quote: | | Bon Accord, the football team that suffered the worst defeat in any British senior football match, losing 36-0 to Arbroath in 1885 in the Scottish Cup, were in fact a cricket team who were mistakenly invited to enter the Cup instead of Orion FC. |
S: The Wisden Cricketer magazine April 07 |
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| suze
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| 292020. Fri Mar 07, 2008 9:05 am |
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The club I always feel a little sorry for there is Dundee Harp (it is no more, although it was more or less the predecessor of Dundee United).
On 12 September 1885, Dundee Harp played a Scottish Cup first round match against Aberdeen Rovers and won 35-0. The Harp guys must have been sick as a actual parrot on discovering that it wasn't even the highest score in the competition that day.
http://scottishfootballarchive.co.uk/scottishcups/1885-86 |
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| Flash
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| 292024. Fri Mar 07, 2008 9:07 am |
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| That's wonderful. |
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