Transformation of football

“I recently came across a series on Netflix called The English Game,” emails Alex Orr of Edinburgh, “which focuses on two footballers in the late 1800s – Arthur Kinnaird, a player for the Old Etonians, the son of a Scot, and Fergus Suter, a Scot who played for Darwen/Blackburn, played a major role in the transformation of football from gentleman’s pastime to professionalism.

“However, it is surprising to note that this series is called The English Game, when it should, of course, be called The Scottish Game. It was the Scots who truly devised the modern version of the game as we know it. Without Scotland’s civilising intervention, what England might have given the world

was just another version of rugby. When the so-called Football Association’ was formed at the instigation of a young solicitor from Hull, Ebenezer Morley, what he proposed would be seen now as a basis for rugby with extra violence.

“Morley’s draft laws provided that a player could not only run with the ball in his hands but that opponents could stop him by charging, holding, tripping or hacking. A more civilised code did emerge but the English game was still mainly a question of head-down dribbling.

“It was the Scots who had the notion of artfully distributing the ball among the players. It started with young men, from Perthshire and the Highlands mainly, who gathered at Queen’s Park in Glasgow in 1867. They obtained a copy of the FA laws and amended them to conform with an almost scientific blend of dribbling and passing.

“When they invented passing, these men had invented football. Far from being an English game, it was one that was conceived to confound the English because the Scots, being generally smaller than their opponents in football’s oldest international rivalry, could hardly afford to take them on physically.”

“I photographed this lovely dandelion clock in Crail and thought your readers might like to make a wish,” says Lindsay Ellis of Broughty Ferry.