As part of his guest editing of this morning's Today programme, Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O'Connor explored to what extent rugby was still "a thug's game played by gentlemen" rather than, like football, "a gentlemen's game played by thugs".
I have always been baffled that the FA considers it at least impractical, if not actually undesirable, to prohibit the use of foul language on the field of play. It works perfectly well in rugby. And I mean both codes, so this isn't about class or what have you. So why wouldn't it work in football?
Meanwhile, why does the Welsh working class so love the game of those who gave it its martyrs at Tonypandy? Other than cricket (arguably), rugby is quite the least likely game for such implacable foes of the ruling class of yesteryear.
For that matter, why do the Boers, of all people, love rugby, of all sports? Mind you, the Tories managed to love the Boers and their anti-British revenge republic, which was just as improbable.
I understand that rugby was, and to an extent still is, a way of expressing a Basque or Catalan identity in south-western France, distinct from the football-loving French.
In Argentina and Chile, it is a way of expressing longstanding ties with Britain (there were far more British subjects living in Argentina than on the Falkland Islands at the time of the Falklands War, for example), and in Portugal of expressing very longstanding ties with England specifically, although it is a small minority pursuit in those countries. In Australia and New Zealand, the link is obvious. In Italy, I just don't know, although I'd be fascinated to find out.
But in Wales, in South Africa, in the Scottish Borders - isn't it just a bit English, and posh English at that, for them? So what's the story?
But then, look at the cricket-playing (and the Episcopalianism) in the Scottish North East, in no sense an Anglicised area, but rather one where the SNP does well electorally. For that matter, look at the popularity (real or otherwise) of football among the English middle classes since 1990, even though England has not won an international football tournament since 1966 (at home), when football was pretty much a working-class peculiarity.
There's a book in here somewhere.
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I think the last-named phenomenon is simply an example of the cultural proletarianisation of the middle class (something which, by a devilish paradox, has gone hand in hand with the imposition of "right-wing" economic ideas on the working class).
ReplyDeleteThere is indeed much to be written about the sociology of sport ...
You are right, of course. Football and New Labour (in all parties) are very closely linked on all sorts of levels.
ReplyDeleteAttlee, by contrast, only ever attended one football match in his life. And football is now notable for having priced out working-class fans while becoming notorious for how badly the lowlier staff are treated.
Meanwhile, I have since been told that the Italians play rugby because it was taken there by Welsh miners who went to Italy to find work.
I don't know if you ever saw the 1991 Channel 4 series 'Class by Class', but it has footage of a student from a very well-off background watching a match in the 1990 World Cup (which was the turning point), and that one image always sticks in my mind as the precise moment the last two decades in Britain began.
ReplyDeleteAnother interesting example is horse racing, which has brought together the working class and the upper class in a way I imagine you'd approve of, while being disliked by much of the middle class, especially the liberal middle class (the Guardian originally ignored racing mainly because of C.P. Scott's anti-gambling stance, but to this day it gives the sport significantly less coverage than, say, the Telegraph, which is a reflection of the general attitudes of the liberal middle class which keeps it going) and also by that part of the working class which has defined its identity entirely in class-war terms (it was once described by a prominent figure in the Communist Party of Great Britain as the one thing which had prevented a revolution here).
And he might very well have been right.
ReplyDeleteYes, the 1990 tournament was the turning point. But remember that football was first introduced to working-class areas by curates who had played it at public school, in order to give the youths something to do.
Football was introduced to the Iberian world by the seminaries in exile in Spain and Portugal, and especially by the English one a Valodolid. I am also told that Catholics played a pivotal role in the development of cricket, but I do not know the details.
I'm well aware that football started among the social elite - in the 1870s and 1880s, when it was an amateur sport, the FA Cup was often won by public school old boys' teams and by the Oxford University team.
ReplyDeleteOne thing sticks in my mind. What would have happened if Hull City had held on to their half-time lead against Liverpool in the FA Cup fifth round twenty years ago on 18th February (hence no Hillsborough disaster, hence no imperative for the English game to reform) and if Poland had scored in the last minute twenty years ago on 11th October (which they very nearly did) to prevent England from qualifying for the 1990 World Cup? Had those two matches gone differently, I can genuinely envisage football becoming a minority sport in England, supported by a dying working-class tribe in the same way that old pub games now are, and American Football becoming a dominant sport in this country (it was *very* popular among children in the 1980s for whom football was their parents' sport). The political ramifications of that could have been quite serious, and might even have gone so far as to force the UK out of the EU (which in turn might have weakened or even destroyed the Union because Scotland and Wales would probably have wanted to stay in).
Jason Cowley of the New Statesman has a book on a lot of this stuff ('The Last Game: Love, Death and Football at the End of the Eighties') out in May.
I look forward to it.
ReplyDeleteYes, I remember the popularity of American football, although I think that you are overstating its political potential in this country; they play a lot of baseball in Cuba.
American football was one of those sports from other countries that Channel Four turned into cults among British teenagers, especially boys, for a while.
My Old Etonian housemate at university once told me that football was much more popular than rugby at Eton. Perhaps they just regarded rugby as a touch below the salt because it came from Rugby?
You're probably right that I'm exaggerating re. American football, mainly because I like alternative histories and also because I think the Union will break up before too long, probably with England leaving the EU but Scotland and Wales staying in, so I'm interested in whether that could have already happened had historically gone differently. But, yes, baseball rather than football is the dominant sport in, of all places, Venezuela (the only place in South America where football is not dominant).
ReplyDeleteQuite a few public schools in fact play football more than or even rather than rugby - Eton, Winchester (which I know for a fact doesn't play rugby at all), Shrewsbury, Westminster, Charterhouse. The last three have produced disproportionately high numbers of people who've made an impact in pop music and pop culture generally compared to other public schools, but I suspect that's a coincidence.