Sports in England

SPORTS IN ENGLAND

In the last century many sports have been developed in England. Some of them are football, tennis, rugby, basketball and many others which have been very famous all over the world.

One of our favourite sports is tennis. Tennis which, originated in England has become popular in many parts of the world. It is played by two players in a tennis court which is divided in two parts by a low net. Its history began in the eleventh century. Since then people began to throw balls over a net. In the sixteenth century people started to use wooden frames with stretched strings in their midst, a construction which was the ancestor of modern rackets. On 26^th July 1874 Walter Cutters Winfield, who was a British Army Major, got a patent in tennis. The rules of the game were established in 1877 and were applied for the first time during the prestigious Wimbledon ‘’tournament.” Each match consists of two or three ‘’sets’’ and each "set" of six “games.” Today tennis has evolved into a professional sport. Borg and Berg are two of the most famous tennis players.

Rugby Union, often referred to simply as rugby, is a full contact team sport which originated in England in the early nineteenth century. One of the two codes of the rugby football is that it is based on running with the ball in hand. In its most common form, a game is between two teams of 15 players, using an oval-shaped ball on a field with H-shaped goalposts on each goal line. The origin of the rugby football is reputed to be an incident during a game at a Rugby School in 1823 when William Webb-Ellis is said to have picked up the ball and ran with it. The first Rugby football international game took place on 27 March 1871, between England and Scotland. The Rugby union was included in the Olympic Games four times during the early 1900s. Each team starts the match with 15 players on the field and seven substitutes. Players are divided into eight forwards and seven backs. The most basic items of equipment for a game of rugby union are the ball itself, a rugby shirt or ‘’jersey’’ rugby shorts, socks and boots. Also, rugby union is played between two teams and the one that scores more points wins the game. Games are divided into 40-minute halves, with a break in the middle. The Rugby World Cup, first held in 1987, takes place every four years with the winner of the tournament receiving the Webb Ellis Cup. The six Nations Championship in Europe and the Rugby Championship in the Southern Hemisphere are the major international competitions which are held annually.

The globally popular game of football, in its modern form, first appeared in 1863 in London. The aim of this initiative was to unify English public school and university football games. The world’s oldest competition, the FA Cup which was founded in 1871 and the first ever football league (1888) were founded in England. In England nearly all first accounts of features of football originated. In 1280 the first account of kicking a ball game appreared, in which a player was killed as a result of running against an opposing player’s dagger. This confirms that by the thirteenth century kicking ball games were being played in England. At the end of the fifteenth century appears the earliest description of a football game. In 1660 comes the first objective study of football, given in Francis Willughby’s Book of Sports, written in about 1660. This account is particularly noteworthy as it refers to football by its correct name and is the first to describe the following  features of football: goals and pitch (‘’a close that has a gate at either end. The gates are called goals’’), tactics (‘’ leaving some of their best players to guard the goal’’), scoring (“they that can strike the ball through their opponents goal first win’’) and the way teams were selected (“the players being equally divided according to their strength and nimbleness’’). The FA cup was the first nationally organized competition. A knockout cup, it began 1871, with the first winners being the Wanderers. England was home to the first ever international football match on 5 March 1870. The first official (i.e. currently recognized by FIFA) international match would take place between Scotland and England on 30 November 1872. This match was played under the football Association rules. In 1891 Liverpool engineer John Alexander Brodie invented the football net. In 1892 a new Division Two was added, raking in more clubs around the country; Woolwick Arsenal became the first league club in London in 1893; they were also joined by Liverpool the same year. The best league in the world was premier league which is operated as a corporation and is owned by a 20 member club. The clubs elect a chairman, chief executive and board of directors to oversee the daily operation of the league. There are totally 38 games in a normal season.

Basketball, although was invented in the United States, has a very long history in England, having been introduced there by YMCA almost immediately after it was created. Basketball was first introduced in England between March 1892 and January 1893 by the president of the Birkenhead YMCA, C.J. Proctor, who had observed the game during a business trip to Canada. The American rules had been introduced, but the teams in Birmingham found them to be too complicated so they compiled a more practical set of rules for their own use. In the World War I, a basketball demonstration game was included at the Paris Olympic Games. Great Britain was successfully represented in this Tournament by a team from the London Central YMCA who won all their games. Basketball continued to spread in England until it became popular worldwide. Prior to 1936, basketball had been included in the Far Eastern Olympic held in Japan each year. In October 1938, a composite England international basketball tournament took place at the sports palace in Berlin.