By Keith Dewhurst
'Fancy! loads of operating chaps beating loads of gentlemen!'
1879, the 3rd around of the FA Cup. A soccer workforce from the common-or-garden Lancashire cotton city of Darwen tackle Remnants - a Berkshire membership of the moneyed and well-connected - and beat them. it's football's first ever giantkilling.
Their gift is a quarter-final with the robust previous Etonians. It pitches rulers opposed to governed, wealthy opposed to negative, champions opposed to underdogs, outdated strategies opposed to new, the inventors of the sport opposed to the upstarts. it truly is an come upon that's visible as symbolic. And, hidden on the center of the come across, lies the bitterest controversy.
Underdogs is a desirable tale that covers the very delivery of soccer and its improvement in the direction of the sport we realize this present day. Storyteller, soccer gourmand and historian, Keith Dewhurst, indicates how a hundred thirty years in the past, at its starting, soccer was once already reflecting the trendy online game heavily - funds talks, dishonest abounds, and victory is secured regardless of the expense.
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Additional resources for Underdogs: The Unlikely Story of Football’s First FA Cup Heroes
Example text
All the contestants have to do is run, jump, throw and swim ever faster, ever further! Athletes’ bodies in consequence are increasingly subjected to a regime of permanent training, of early specialization, of the extreme visualization of bodies deformed by sustained effort in a restricted range. ’ This principle lies at the heart of Olympic ideology. It aspires to place Olympism on the level of the other human rights recognized by sovereign nations. In the case of competitive sport, this is absolute nonsense.
At that already remote time, the very idea of objecting to the increasingly globalized reality of sport, or suggesting a critical understanding of it, seemed outrageous to many, for sport was a social phenomenon that did not permit reflection, let alone thought, and aroused absolutely no opposition. For although in the post-May ’68 period most of the main institutions (school, army, family, art, justice) had been subjected to uncompromising criticism, sport seemed to have escaped opprobrium and was regarded as above suspicion, despite the participation of a few sportsmen in, for example, the occupation of the French Football Federation (FFF) headquarters.
The new sporting order Obviously, sport is not quite ‘as old as the world’. It was born in England, the ‘classical’ place of origin (according to Marx) of the capitalist mode of production, now planetary in scope. Originally a class practice, sport developed during the nineteenth century in tandem with the consolidation of imperialism. The different sports (rugby, cricket, soccer, athletics) spread to other countries and took root in new territories often colonized through military conquest. Competitive sport owes its rapid development to reduced working hours, the rapid expansion of cities, the establishment of good transport networks and latterly the deployment of an immense media infrastructure.