English Game Research Articles

New Labour, racism and ‘new’ football in England

ABSTRACT Bradbury and Williams begin by examining aspects of the genealogy of incidents of fan racism at the Spain v. England international football match in Madrid on 17 November 2004, and the public outcry in Britain that followed. They raise questions about the possible ‘strategic mobilization’ by Spanish fans of apparently racist epithets as a response to the use, by the English football authorities before the match, of prominent anti-racism symbolism. The main body of the article then considers the British public response to Madrid within the context of the Blairite New Labour policy on football racism in England from the late 1990s. It argues that Labour's Football Task Force from 1997 constituted an entirely new direction for sport and government policy in Britain. However, by drawing on the comments of some of the key figures involved, Bradbury and Williams further contend that, both structurally and ideologically, the Task Force was preset to limit its own investigations on the nature and effects of racism, specifically in the English game. Although the Task Force's report, Eliminating Racism in Football, has had some positive effects—for example, on Football Association policy or in stimulating local anti-racist initiatives—its narrow focus and its relatively underdeveloped understanding of the racism problem in professional sport led its members to de-emphasize the significance of forms of institutionalized racism within English football. Research and commentaries on racism in the English game since that report was published in 1998 suggest that problems of racialized exclusion in football remain. Bradbury and Williams conclude that the public outrage in Britain about the incidents in Madrid reflect an over-concentration on silencing public expressions of racism—combating overt, collective fan outbreaks—at the expense of addressing the racialized structures of power that continue to shape access, opportunities and acceptance of ethnic minorities within professional football in England.

Review Essay on Les Back, Tim Crabbe and John Solomos, The Changing Face of Football: Racism, Identity and Multiculture in the English Game. Oxford: Berg, 2001

The line between British and English was clearly drawn in a colonial setting, but it was undoubtedly one of the several contexts in which a British identity seemed to separate itself from other sor...

‘Protect Me From What I Want’: Football Fandom, Celebrity Cultures and ‘New’ Football in England

This essay reconsiders aspects of the cultural and commercial ‘reinvention’ of English football since the late 1980s. It examines cultural readings of the sport, changes in fandom and in the regulation of fans, both internationally and in domestic contexts, and also the rise of ‘new’ football in the guise, since 1992, of the television‐funded FA Premier League. It also looks at ways in which late‐modern football and ‘celebrity’ culture have become inextricably entwined in England in recent years. The essay then moves on to consider critically a number of alleged ‘new’ crises in the English game, which revolve around the emergence of new inequalities, a connected relative demise in uncertainty of outcome in football in the wake of a strong new European club market for the sport, and challenges to ‘traditional’ modernist sporting ties of place and kinship. The essay concludes by examining issues of English football and social exclusion and new ways of framing aspects of the current ‘crises’.

Baseball before we knew it: a search for the roots of the game

It may be America's game, but no one seems to know how or when baseball really started. Theories abound, myths proliferate, but reliable information has been in short supply-until now, when Baseball before We Knew It brings fresh new evidence of baseball's origins into play. David Block looks into the early history of the game and of the 150-year-old debate about its beginnings. He tackles one stubborn misconception after another, debunking the enduring belief that baseball descended from the English game of rounders and revealing a surprising new explanation for the most notorious myth of all-the Abner Doubleday-Cooperstown story. Block's book takes readers on an exhilarating journey through the centuries in search of clues to the evolution of our modern National Pastime. Among his startling discoveries is a set of long-forgotten baseball rules from the 1700s. Block evaluates the originality and historical significance of the Knickerbocker rules of 1845, revisits European studies on the ancestry of baseball which indicate that the game dates back hundreds, if not thousands of years, and assembles a detailed history of games and pastimes from the Middle Ages onward that contributed to baseball's development. In its thoroughness and reach, and its extensive descriptive bibliography of early baseball sources, this book is a unique and invaluable resource-a comprehensive, reliable, and readable account of baseball before it was America's game.

‘Bats and Bayonets’: Cricket and the Anglo-Boer War, 1899–1902

Cricket is perhaps the quintessential English game, evoking images of green fields and dreaming spires. ‘No other game’, writes Hughes, ‘captures the peace and tranquillity of an English summer afternoon quite like cricket.’ 1 Just as cricket speaks of England at peace, so too, perhaps because of Newbolt's much-quoted ‘Vitai Lampada’, was it bound up with England and the way she saw herself at war. Inevitably when war descended upon England and her colonies, cricketers rallied and were rallied to the ranks. And wherever the fight took them, cricket went too. The Duke of Wellington watched his guards playing cricket at Enghien a few days before Waterloo and on the day after the battle of Chernaya in the Crimea a match was played between the Guards division and the ‘Leg of Mutton Club’, a team of officers from other regiments.2 The Anglo-Boer War of 1899–1902 was no different. Former teammates were forced onto opposing sides and some fine cricketers were killed. Yet on more than one occasion it was the game of cricket that crossed the conventional boundaries of politics and warfare. It is no surprise, then, that with the conflict coming at a time when cricket had already established itself within the colonies of Southern Africa, cricket and war should become inexorably linked.

Black Urban Leisure Pursuits and Cultural Identity in Eighteenth-Century South Carolina and Georgia

On the eve of revolution Josiah Quincy Jr., both on the advice of his doctor and in order to satisfy his own curiosity, departed Massachusetts and for several months integrated himself amongst South Carolina's ruling elite. Rubbing elbows in the spring of 1773 with the wealthiest gentry in North America, the visiting Bostonian was struck that 'in grandeur, splendour. . .in almost everything, [Charleston] far surpasses all I ever saw, or expected to see, in America' . Quincy also left with the opinion that this opulent world governed by 'lordly planters' was a haven where 'cards, dice, the bottle and horses engross prodigious portions of time and attention', and whose 'gentlemen ... are mostly men of the turf and gamesters'. Indeed, the enormous fiscal prosperity and notorious leisured excesses of the lowcountry's elite rarely escaped the commentary of contemporary visitors and inhabitants alike. Nor have the subjects suffered a lack of scholarship by modem historians. However, it was Quincy's observations of a great number of blacks playing English games of chance in Charleston and that Sundays were generally a day of 'license, pastime and frolic for the negroes' which warrants closer attention. While the urban leisure habits of blacks may very well have come as a mild shock to the visiting northerner, they had been in reality a long-standing facet of everyday life in Carolina.I

Playing "Theayter": Dramatic Performance in the Late-Victorian Fictional Slum

Playing "Theavter": Dramatic Performance in the LateVictorian Fictional Slum Mary FJ/en Kappler An odd performance is taking place in an Hast rind graveyard. It is 1899, and although the nearby streets and courts are far too cramped and narrow for recreation, a group of ragged slum children gather together in the "buryin' ground," where there is room enough for both boisterous romping and the somewhat more ceremonious, though still lively, "old English games" the children have recently learned from the ladies at the Settlement house. But the favourite pastime here is not Ring-o'-Roses or "rude rough horse-play" - it is "theavter," a game that allows full scope for the energy and imagination of the youthful assembly. The broad church steps provide an excellent acting area with room for a large cast and a varied programme ranging from "step dances, and well-worn music hall sketches," to improvised dramas concocted from a wide range of available material: "[t]he latest play-bill, the Salvation Army meetings, the School Board, the election folk, the penny dreadfuls, and, above all, the police news reports, all made excellent material to 'work up' into original performances" (Kimmins 17-18). This game of "theavter" takes place in Polly of Parker's Rents, a now all but forgotten novel by G. T Kimmins ("Sister Grace"), a Settlement worker in Bermondsev. Kimmins' story of Polly Ryan, an imaginative and audaciously energetic slum girl is just one of a surprisingly large number of late-Victorian fictions that deal with the life of the slums. While the enormous quantity of contemporary documentary writing about the urban poor is well known, the almost equally large body of fiction about the slums, written during the same period, is somewhat Victorian Review (2003) M. Kappler less familiar. George Gissing's and Arthur Morrison's works are still well-known, but few of the other "slum novelists" of the 1880's and 90's are now read. Walter Besant, L.T. Meade, Margaret Harkness ("John Law"), and Israel Zangwill are likely the most still-recognisable writers to have produced novels set in the slums, while Arthur St. John Adcock, David Christie Murray, M. E. Winchester, and many others, including G. T. Kimmins, are probably no longer remembered. For late-Victorian readers, however, "slum novels" formed a distinct and recognisable sub-genre of fiction: Jane Findlater, for example, writing in 1900, offers a taxonomy of five distinct "divisions" within the body of recent and contemporary slum fiction. The prevalence of these narratives suggests something of the powerful influence that the slum exerted on the Victorian imagination. In these novels the slum frequently represents a telling inversion of the more normative tropes of nineteenth-century fiction: the familiar domestic locus takes on a number of diverse and sometimes surprising alternate identities. The fictional slum is variously depicted as labyrinth, sanctuary, tourist destination, arena, prison, playground and erogenous zone. Such representations offer deconstructive readings of nineteenth-century domestic ideology while at die same time suggesting the existence of a new sort of fictional space: the fictional slum provided late-Victorian writers and readers with the possibility of re-configuring or re-imagining some of the most seminal tropes of their social narrative. One of the most striking features of many of these "slum novels" is the extent to which slum life is viewed in essentially performative terms. Kimmins' image of a group of slum children playing "theayter " in a "buryin' ground" is particularly apt: if real Victorian slums were frequently depicted in terms that emphasised fatality and hopelessness , fictional slum-dwellers counter the image — in novel after novel — by transforming their blighted and pestilential neighbourhood into a theatre, the site of exuberant dramatic performance. In a number of novels the slum becomes a place where high spirits abound and where vigorous hi-jinks of all sorts can be enacted. The slum locus serves to dissolve normative notions of decorum and volume 29 number 2 Playing "Theatyer" propriety, allowing a theatrical and rather carnival-like atmosphere to prevail. Somerset Maugham's U%a of Lambeth (1897), for example, opens with an impromptu street dance, which begins sedately enough but which the gorgeously attired Liza Kemp...

An Analysis of Change in an Organizational Field: The Professionalization of English Rugby Union

Since 1995, the organizational field that constitutes English rugby union has undergone considerable transformation. Utilizing ideas about changes in actors, changes in exchange processes and interorganizational linkages, changes in the legitimized forms of capital in the field, and changes in regulatory structures, this paper explores the nature of this transformation in English rugby union. Data from 43 interviews with key individuals in the English game form the main data source for the study. The results show that changes in the communities of actors composing the field hastened change in other areas. Powerful new actors with strong ties to business environments brought with them professionally oriented values and a new institutional logic. Having made significant financial investments in the field, these actors collectively took measures to protect their economic interests. These measures took the form of political activity and coalition building, which, ultimately, reconfigured the field's regulatory structure. The new emphasis on economic capital prompted significant shifts in key actors' exchange relationships, in that clubs' strategies and structures were reoriented in order to gain access to this important network resource.

Rain stops play: cricketing climates

Introduction - the need for a geography of cricket the geographical boundaries of cricket the growth of English cricket - a development stage model the diffusion of cricket - a geographical explanation a locational analysis of the county grounds of England and Wales locational changes to county cricket, 1901-1951 the location of county cricket in the commercial age, 1951-1991 rain stops play - a meteorological analysis the raining county champions sunspot activity and golden summers cricket in the cities - a microclimatic view global warnings and global warming greenhouse cricket - the English game in a warmer world redrawing the boundaries epilogue - the future geography of English cricket.

The Changing Face of Football: Racism, Identity and Multiculture in the English Game

The Changing Face of Football: Racism, Identity and Multiculture in the English Game

Les Back, Tim Crabbe and John Solomos: The Changing Face of Football. Racism, Identity and Multiculturc in the English Game. Oxford: Berg, 2001

Les Back, Tim Crabbe and John Solomos: The Changing Face of Football. Racism, Identity and Multiculturc in the English Game. Oxford: Berg, 2001

‘It’s not Cricket’: Colonial Legacies and Contemporary Inequalities

Cricket has been historically significant in defining notions of English national identity and continues to feature in debates over the inclusion/exclusion of immigrants in British society. British‐African‐Caribbean players are well represented in the English game but participation appears mediated by ethnic group membership. This contemporary pattern can only be understood when contextualized within the historical development of cricket in the Caribbean and, in particular, the struggles between whites and blacks and between the white elites. Over‐representation in certain cricketing roles has been an ever‐present feature of this negotiation; contemporary inequality is, therefore, largely a consequence of the legacy of British Imperialism.

Relations of some sociocultural variables and attitudes and motivations of young Arab students learning English as a second language.

This paper examined a number of variables pertaining to the sociocultural outlooks of 412 young Arab students learning English as a foreign language and the relation of their attitudes and motivations prior to their learning of the language. Analysis indicated clearly that certain variables appeared to be correlated with their attitudes and motivations more than others. Most of the students had maids in their homes, and the presence of a maid was associated with most of the psycholinguistic variables tested. Their previous learning experience of the language was positively correlated as was their knowledge of English stories. Having some sort of English games had the highest correlations (.25 to .41). Potential pedagogical implications of these results were discussed.

CONTESTATION IN MODERN ENGLISH PROFESSIONAL FOOTBALL

This article analyses the fandom of supporters from four professional English football clubs organized into Independent Supporters Associations (ISAs), and the extent to which these groups contest the rapidly changing culture of modern football. Broadly linking schools of fandom to class, it argues that ISAs combine certain `traditional' working class values with agenda developed by the Football Supporters Association, and contest some key dominant principles of modern commercial football. It concludes that, ironically, the new political economy of the modern English game can offer greater opportunities for fans of smaller clubs to contribute to decision-making processes.

Strain differences in aggressiveness of male domestic fowl in response to a male model

The objective of this experiment was to determine if the unusually high levels of aggression shown by male broiler breeder domestic fowl towards females is due to a higher overall level of aggressiveness in this strain. We compared the aggressive behaviour of broiler breeder (BR) males with that of males of an Old English Game strain (GA) which had been bred for fighting. Also, by rearing males of a commercial laying strain (LR) under the same level of feed restriction recommended for broiler breeder males, we examined the effects of feed restriction during rearing on aggressive behaviour at maturity. Full-fed commercial laying strain (LA) males were used as a control. The behaviour of individual males, nine from each treatment group, towards a model of a male conspecific was recorded for 15 min. The test was repeated 4 weeks later, after the males had received some limited sexual experience. Game strain males reacted most aggressively to the model, waltzing ( P<0.001) and crowing ( P<0.05) more than males from the other treatment groups which did not differ significantly from each other. Waltzing and crowing also increased significantly from the first to the second test in GA males ( P<0.005), but not in males from the other treatment groups. Frequency and duration of ground pecking was significantly less in BR males than in GA or LA males ( P<0.005) and significantly less in GA and LA males than in LR males ( P<0.05). Frequency of wing flapping was significantly greater in BR and LR males than in GA or LA males ( P<0.005). In conclusion, broiler breeder males did not behave aggressively towards a male model relative to game strain males. Whereas feed restriction during the rearing phase did affect behaviour of adult males, aggressiveness towards a male model did not increase.

Mystery of mysteries: is evolution a social construction?

With the Sokal hoax - the publication of a prominent physicist's pseudo-article in a leading journal of cultural studies - the status of science moved sharply from debate to dispute. Is science objective, a disinterested reflection of reality, as Karl Popper and his followers believed? Or is it subjective, a social construction, as Thomas Kuhn and his students maintained? This text adds to the argument, using evolutionary theory as a case study. Michael Ruse begins with such luminaries as Erasmus Darwin (grandfather of Charles) and Julian Huxley (brother of Aldous, grandson of T.S. Huxley), and ends with the work of the English game theorist Geoffrey Parker - a microevolutionist who made his mark studying the mating strategies of dung flies - and the American paleontologist Jack Sepkoski, whose computer-generated models reconstruct mass extinctions and other macro events in life's history. Ruse also considers two great popularizers of evolution, richard Dawkins and Stephen Jay Gould, as well as two leaders in the field of evolutionary studies, Richard Lewontin and Edward O. Wilson, paying close attention to these figures' cultural commitments: Gould's transplanted Germanic idealism, Dawkins's male-dominated Oxbridge circle, Lewontin's Jewish background, and Wilson's southern childhood. Ruse explicates the role of metaphor and metavalues in evolutionary thought and draws significant conclusions about the cultural impregnation of science.

Enough is Enough: Race, Cricket and Protest in the UK

This piece considers ethnicity in sport from the perspective of grass roots efforts to confront racism within the quintessentially English game of cricket. Cricket has a long history of discrimination, originally predicated on the basis of class, although recent events have very publicly raised issues of race and national identity. This piece explores how and why cricket became a positive focal point for successful protest against the apartheid regime of South Africa and proceeds to trace the current expression of racism within English cricket. By contrasting the anti-racist campaigns of the late 1960s and early 1970s with a currently emerging movement, we will show that legislative change in the UK has radically altered the ability to effectively demonstrate and campaign on such causes.

Oh to be in England? Mythology and Identity in English Cricket

This piece looks at the 'outsider' in English cricket and in particular focuses on the position of the overseas player in the amateur game. It draws upon a survey of amateur cricket leagues in England and Wales and interviews with players and officials within these leagues. Central to the analysis are issues of inclusion/exclusion, identity and belonging; notions that are explored in depth within the context of national and local identity in the quintessential English game.

Elusive Prophet: Ahad Haam and the Origins of Zionism (review)

Book Reviews 111 Elusive Prophet: Ahad Haam and the Origins of Zionism, by Steven J. Zipperstein. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993. 386 pp. $35.00. Ahad Haam's Cultural Zionism has usually been overshadowed by the Political Zionism of Herzl, the Practical Zionism of Weizmann and Ben Gurion, or the Revisionist Zionism of Jabotinsky. Ahad Haam had impressive followers, among them Gershon Sholem, Chaim Nahman Bialik and Martin Buber, but to many he seemed a luftmensch-bookish, highminded , and cautious-a prophet to be honored rather than heeded. He seemed to exemplify the DiasporaJew's intoxication with the word rather than· Zionism's intoxication with the deed. His rivals appealed to the imagination. Herzl negotiated with crumbling empires, A. D. Gordon called for renewal through labor, Jabotinsky formed clandestine armies. Ahad Haam responded to all of these adventures with scorn. His battles were over the editorship of Hebrew journals, his power struggles over the leadership of obscure study groups in Odessa. His works, like Marx's Capital, could be evoked to demonstrate the theoretical depth ofZionism, but they did not send youthful idealists to clear the swamps and make the desert bloom. Steven Zipperstein's brilliant biography, though still focusing on the thinker and intellectual controversialist, restores the real Ahad Haam as a gadfly with a sting. Though the most important material in the volume remains Ahad Haam's series of articles, Zipperstein provides a number of skillful sketches that reveal the man. There are the paragraphs describing his icy response to his father's death, or his outrage against his daughter Rachel's marriage to a gentile. The pages on Ahad Haam's world, Jewish Odessa at the turn of the century, are especially graphic. As he describes it, it was an anarchist's dream, a free-for-all of contending Hassidic rebbes, religious and secular, "a natural setting for experimentation," eternally subverting established authority. One thinks of the world-quarrelling Russian Socialist exile in Switzerland. Ahad Haam's austerity, singlemindedness , and impatience with adversaries reminds one of the young Lenin. like Lenin, Ahad Haam created a vanguard to guide and transform the masses, though this vanguard, called B'nei Moshe, seemed more like the Freemasons than the Bolsheviks. The volume is primarily an intellectual history. Zipperstein presents the unfolding of Ahad Haam's thought article by article. He begins with Ahad Haam's critique of the Haskala and takes us slowly through the entire series: his critique of the fledgling Jewish settlement in Palestine, his scheme for a revival of Hebrew culture, his notorious review of Herzl's 112 SHOFAR Spring 1995 Vol. 13, No.3 Alteneueland as well as his dismissal of the early romanticism concerning Hebrew labor. Ahad Haam called for a Zionism of the tortoise, a cultural revolution, a Jewish state, but one that would ripen slowly. He abhorred adventurism. He emerges as a paradox, a messiah wary of messianism, a nationalist wary of nationalism. like the other Zionists he too was a prophet, but his prophecies, like those of old, contain a legacy of warnings. Ahad Haam's nay-saying was so relentless and unsparing that he could have been called the Zionist curmudgeon. As editor of the Hebrew journal Ha-Sbiloacb he did not suffer inferior prose. He was critical of the Rothschild enterprises in Jewish Palestine as "inimical to the growth of a self-respecting, pioneering elite"; he scandalized the Zionist movement by ridiculing Herzl's Alteneueland as "inferior" for envisaging a non-Jewish Jewish state with "English games, German or French Theatre, and continental conviviality" and dismissed one of the great Zionist icons, A.D. Gordon, and his call for "Hebrew labour" as "misguided." But Zipperstein also gives a persuasive account of Ahad Haam as a constructive builder of Zion. His cultural revolution was solid and enduring. The revival of the Hebrew language, the establishment of Haifa Technion, the Hebrew University, and Herzliya all gave the Jewish state a strong educational infrastructure. These achievements were more than cultural. At least one Arab writer credits Israel's scientific culture with its military and economic edge. As well, Ahad Haam's vision of a Jewish state as a spiritual rallying point for...

Not the least of cricket's glories

Cricket, the English national summer game, has a story going back at least to 1550. But the game is far from limited to its mother country's shores, being popular throughout the British Commonwealth as well as in such ‘exotic’ places (from a Commonwealth cricketer's point of view) as the Netherlands, the United States and – in a Sunday moming women's variant – New Caledonia. Spanning history and continents, cricket could not but have a museum.