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It is interesting how many of today`s sports games originated in Britain
– football, rugby, tennis, boxing, rowing and horse racing among them. Of course,
horse racing was popular with the Greeks and Arabs long before the British began to
put them into practice; and people had been playing football in one form or another for
thousands of years all over the world. But it was the British who created special rules
for these sports and sports games.
Football is a good example. In the Middle Ages people in Europe, Japan and
Asia all played some forms of the game. A sort of football was also very popular in
England, especially as a contest between villages. But at that time there were very few
rules. When the students of English schools started to play football, rules then became
necessary. They were changed several times and by the middle of the 19th century
football had become very much the game that we know and like today. By the way, the
first serious football rules were written at Cambridge University.
A similar story can be told about some other sports. Why did this happen in
Britain before other countries? There are some possible explanations: after the Norman
invasion of 1066, Britain was quite a peaceful country. As a result people had time to
develop sports. Later, after Britain’s industrial revolution, English factories were based
on highly organized work and strict time keeping. The same discipline was applied to
sport. So uniforms, referees and punishments were introduced to football and other
games. British authorities thought that team games were good training for future
military and industrial careers.
Every country has its own list of favourite sports. What is the British list? There
are lots of games apart from football. Schoolgirls, for example, play a game which
seems a lot like basketball. It is called netball. Netball is different from basketball in
many details: for example, the ball is lighter, the court is bigger and netball has seven
players in each team (not five). There is something very strange about netball – it is
never played by boys. There is no biological reason for this, it is simply a tradition. It
is popular throughout the English-speaking world, and the Australians and New
Zealanders usually win the competitions.
But the most famous and popular British sport is cricket. Cricket is an important
part of English summer life. You can watch it all day on TV or even listen to it on the
radio. News programmes keep you up-to-date with the score. Men, when they meet,
always exchange a few words about the state of the game.
One of cricket’s distinguishing features is that the games are very long. In an
ordinary game at a boys’ school it takes up to a whole afternoon. But the big
international games are up to five days long.