Class conflict ed the origins e beautiful game
Ownton creator’s new show reveals that football as born of privilege, poverty and punishing tackles
owes. “Suddenly the workers had weekly excitement of following ir favourite team and going to ch them play. It was a completely w dynamic in lives that were being d at a fairly low key.
The English Game is the story of w these working-class teams ally prised control of the sport m the public school boys.”
FELLOWES is not a football fan but says he became intrigued by its history, taking piration for the new six-part ma, when he took his son to see nchester United play West Ham. He said: “It was extraordinary to see something done so superbly, such a masterful demonstration of the craft.”
When he researched it, Fellowes found the incredible story of some of its pioneers, including Kinnaird and Suter.
A talented sportsman, who was also a tennis, swimming and fives champion, Kinnaird still retains the record for playing in the most FA Cup finals – nine in total.
Football was his passion and he joined the FA committee, set up to agree football’s laws between the elite public schools, aged 21 and was its president for 33 years.
He played in every position, from goalkeeper to forward. He is also said to have scored the first significant own goal in history and was famous as a tackler, being especially fond of “hacking” or deliberately kicking his opponents in the shin.
In the series he starts off being dismissive of his working-class rivals and shocked at the idea of professionalism being brought into the game. But when, in his capacity as a banker involved with the cotton mills many of them worked for, he learns more about their lives, he helps change the way football is played and ushers in the age of the paid footballer.
“Football could never have remained just a hobby for privileged people,” says Edward Holcroft, the Wolf Hall and Kingsman actor who plays Kinnaird.
“It was an amazing game that you could not stop people playing. It gave people freedom; it gave working-class people the chance to be paid – a chance they never got before.”
Suter, played in the series by Kevin Guthrie, who is best known for Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald, had made a name for himself in Scottish football which had already started practising a very different type of football.
The English public school boys were playing it as a foot version of rugby, surrounding the ball in a scrum. Because the toffs tended to be taller and more well-built, the Scottish players, who couldn’t match them for power or strength, started to use passing of the ball and spread out, rather than bunching together, more like the game we love today.
The series tracks Suter and his close friend, James Love, as they moved from Glasgow to would have
VICTORIAN PIONEERS: Old Etonian Arthur Kinnaird, above left, could not have been more different than working-class Fergus Suter, right
play for Darwen FC, owned by a Lancashire cotton mill factory boss, ahead of their FA Cup quarter-final against Old Etonians in 1879.
It was the first time a working-class team had reached that stage of the competition and showed the public school boys that their rivals were playing differently and were also willing to pay for the best talent.
Suter was then snapped up by Darwen’s big rivals Blackburn Rovers and the series tracks how the team finally got to lift the FA Cup.
The Eton-era of football, with its style of play, soon became extinct.
THE ACTORS playing the Victorian footballers had to learn a new set of skills – and forget everything they knew about football. They trained for three months at Manchester United’s Carrington training ground.
Football historian Andy Mitchell, and “football choreographer” Mike Delaney, a former professional player, took them through their paces as they learned how to play in the Old Etonian style of one-one-eight.
“We basically had to learn to play a relaxed version of rugby,” says Guthrie. “Forget everything you know about football, this was just smashing people.
“The hardest thing was dumbing down our skills, to make passing the ball look difficult. It was a real challenge to make the game look less than what it is today. Even today they play a version of what Suter introduced to the game.”
While Fellowes has played around slightly with facts – Suter didn’t actually play for the first working men’s club to reach the FA Cup Final, but their bitter rivals – it’s a largely true story.
“It’s about two men,” adds Guthrie. “It’s about rivalry, class and separation. It is about the fight, but it is ultimately about the similarities they share in extremely different
worlds.”