Footballer

“ It is pleasing to note that the two governing bodies of football have never come into collision since their respective foundations. We venture to express a hope that the footballers of either game will ever continue to look upon skill in the other and rival game with admiration, and not with envy. ”

“ A football eleven composed of work-girls from a Lancashire factory recently journeyed to Paris to play a team of French female footballers. With women forcing an entry into the ranks of minor professions, such as the Law and Politics, it is doubtful if even the sacred precincts of professional football can now be considered safe, and Mr. ”

“ The students always play the association game, and it used to be the ambition of every youth to get the ball, and carry it down the field all by himself, while the audience cheered, "Bravo, bravo!" So the faculty arranged matches with the crews of visiting British warships, and from sad experience the college learned the value of side plays and frequent passes, and began to see dimly that good football is played, not with the legs and mouth alone, but with the head, and that hard team-work is better than grand stand exploits. ”

“ What did they care about the ball being fifty yards off? Not a straw, so long as they tackled and kept each other away from it. "That's not football," says one, "it is horse play." "Never mind about football in a Cup Tie," says another, "let the heaviest team win; go into the fellow." "Oh! gentlemen, gentlemen, fie, fie, Association Football is an amateur game, and as long as I play it," said the captain, "there shall be no cruelty done on either side."
Little did the spectators know the real cause of the inordinate tackling done by Bob and Charlie, but the secret soon came out. ”

“ My dear sir, a battle would look much the same to you, except that the boys would be men, and the balls iron; but a battle would be worth your looking at for all that, and so is a football match. You can't be expected to appreciate the delicate strokes of play, the turns by which a game is lost and won—it takes an old player to do that; but the broad philosophy of football you can understand if you will. Come along with me a little nearer, and let us consider it together.
The ball has just fallen again where the two sides are thickest, and they close rapidly around it in a scrummage. ”

“ He remembered the day when Mark had been coaching the football team and had told them that they must not stop for anything when they were in action. If they thought their legs were broken, or they were mortally wounded and dying, they must not even think of it. Football was the one thing, and they were to forget they were dead and go ahead with every whiff of punch there was in them, blind or lame, or dead even, because when they were playing, football was the only thing that counted. ”

“ Their achievements are a distinguished part of the university's history—a part of our lives as university men—and we are ever ready now to burn incense in their honor, as we were in the old days to burn bonfires, in celebration of their deeds.
It is well now that we recall some of the men who have stood in the front line of football; in the making and preservation of the great game. Many of them have not lived to see the results of their service to the sport which they deemed to be manly and worth while. ”

“ But before we proceed to give a few extracts of their views, we must premise that football was always looked upon as a vulgar game, a game for clod-hoppers, Irish kernes, and ’prentice lads, which a gentleman of quality should shun, lest perchance his eye be blackened or his skin be raised in lumps by a wight of low degree. Hence we can only expect the writers of gentle birth of the age of Elizabeth and James I., and indeed of all the later ages up to the present generation, to look upon so rough a game as unfitting for a man of refinement. ”

“ But as long as guards-back and tackle-back formations are allowed it's got to be played. It was a mistake in ever allowing more than four men behind the line. The natural formation of a football team consists of seven players in the line, and when you begin to take one or two of those players back you're increasing the element of physical force and lessening the element of science. More than that, you're playing into the hands of the anti-football people, and giving them further grounds for their charge of brutality.
"Football's the noblest game that's played, but it's got to be played right. ”

“ A player, to reach a position of any prominence, must be of good constitution and, withal, have plenty of stamina to enable him to hold his own in face of the extreme pace of a game from start to finish as it is nowadays. What I am trying to point out, though, is that tactical skill has more to do, in the present-day arrangement, with the attainment of success than of old.
Football culture, in fact, now requires perhaps a higher combination of talents; and the scientific tactics of an Association eleven of to-day are only the natural development of thought and experience. ”

“ The formation of an eleven in the early days of Association football was a premium on forward play, and the backs were for a long time, to all intents and purposes, ignored. To be a good dribbler, as well as a safe, short passer, was the perfection of art when the game was in its infancy. It is hardly to be wondered at that this should have been the highest possible development of football at the time, for the bulk of the players were merely carrying out a system which had been inculcated at the public schools. ”

“ Be loyal to your club and clubmates, and do not forget that enthusiasm is the great thing that will carry you to the front in football as well as in other spheres in life. Unselfishness is also another great point. Should your captain or committee choose another man as your superior, do not grumble, but turn out for the second eleven, and play with all your heart and soul, and if you have the merit you will soon regain your old position in the first team. Above all, play the game fairly and squarely, and you will succeed either as a professional, senior, junior, or amateur. ”

“ The land you used to plough.
"Is football playing
Along the river shore,
With lads to chase the leather,
Now I stand up no more?"
Ay, the ball is flying,
The lads play heart and soul;
The goal stands up, the keeper
Stands up to keep the goal. ”

“ Say, but it’s great, learning football under a good coach. It’s the finest training a man can get anywhere on this old globule. Football is only the smallest thing you learn. You learn how to be patient when what you want to do is to chew somebody up and spit him into the gutter. You learn to control your temper when it is on the high speed, with the throttle jerked wide open and buzzing like a hornet convention. ”

“ If the practice is not interesting enough to burn an indelible impression of every rudiment of football into the player's working knowledge, it is wasted. The coach can best instruct his men by putting on his football suit and illustrating exactly what he wants done, not only in fundamentals, but in team play. Confidence of the members of the team, one in the other, and constant interest in how each comrade is developing will in time form a team spirit, a factor quite as potent in carrying a pig-skin as an extra hundred pounds of muscle. ”

“ He, of course, grows older, and by and by joins an average club, and gets on very well. The crack football players, however, have many maturities. They generally come slowly, but surely, and leave behind them powerful impressions. They are like the occasional planets, not the stars which are seen every evening if you care to look towards the "milky way." They are mostly fine-looking fellows, with pleasant countenances and grandly-moulded limbs. They have just passed a severe course of probation in the football field, without even an outward trace of anxiety. ”

“ There is no feature of football more beautiful than a long run in circumstances like these. The rush of the attacking phalanx against the rampart of bone and brawn; the melting away of the interference as it disposes of the men in the path of the runner; the emerging of the man with the ball into the open field and the judgment which he exercises, combined with his own strength and speed, call for the very highest ability. ”

“ No doubt the organisation of school games has had a great deal to do with turning the attention of promising lads at school to football as a career. It is true that one out of a thousand schoolboy players may get signed on, but I hardly know of half a dozen. Hundreds of young men apply to clubs for a trial, and are soon convinced that they have not skill enough, but those few who are lucky should weigh the matter seriously. I know there are many who may argue that they can, after their playing days are over, get a position as trainer or manager to some club. ”

“ A crowd of young men pursuing a round object, called a ball, with great earnestness of purpose. To the young cad, who can think of nothing but the colour of his latest pair of kid gloves, or the check of his newest acquisition in the shape of fashionable trousers, all out-door amusement is considered an interminable bore, the game of Football has, of course, no charm. ”

“ Not the least important thing about football is the matter of training, and nearly every professional club has a trainer, whose business it is not only to get the men fit, but also to keep them so for eight months. ”

“ On the part of the public there is general appreciation of the spirit which these two academies have brought into the great autumn sport, a spirit which combines with football per se the color, the martial pomp, the elan of the military. The merger is a happy one, because football in its essence is a stern, grim game, a game that calls for self-sacrifice, for mental alertness and for endurance ”

“ All you ever knew about football I could carve on granite and put in my eye and never feel it. Nothing to nothing against a crowd of farmer boys who haven’t known a football from a duck’s egg for more than a week! Bah! If I ever turned the Old Folks’ Home loose on you doll babies they’d run up a century while you were hunting for your handkerchiefs. Jackson, what do you suppose a halfback is for? I don’t want cloak models. I want a man who can stick his head down and run. ”

“ But I played football all through my college course and the microbe is still there. In the fall I think football, talk football, dream football. Even though I go out to the field and see little old Siwash lining up against a bunch of overgrown hippos from a university with a catalogue as thick as a city directory, the old mud-and-perspiration smell gets in my nostrils, and the desire to get under the bunch and feel the feet jabbing into my ribs boils up so strong that I have to hold on to myself with both hands. ”

“ He must carry his whole heart into every play of the game and must never lose his temper. These same rules, properly carried out, bring success in after life.
The same vital points, continually drummed into a player in his training, are sure to influence the spectators who daily gather on the field to witness the practice. These attributes, personified in the ideal football player, dominate the entire student body and create a spirit which reaches out from the athletic field through the campus and into the very recitation room. ”

“ Not only is football a great and worthwhile sport because it teaches fair play and discipline, but it also teaches the number one way of American life—to win. We are living in an era where all our sympathy and interest goes to the person who is the winner. In order to stay abreast with the best, we must also win. The most advantageous and serviceable lesson that we can derive from football is the intrinsic value of winning. It is not the mere winning of the game, but it is teaching the boys to win the hectic battle over themselves that is important. ”

“ Oh, I like football best, it's so lively. I like to see them when they get all bunched up, they look so funny, and then when some fellow gets the ball under his arms and goes shooting around, with the rest all jumping at him. ”

“ And when that happens it is sure to follow that the players will go into almost as strict training as the football men do now."
"Well, that sounds funny," exclaimed West.
"Digbee thinks one of the most objectionable features of football is the fact that the players go into it so thoroughly--that they train for it, and study it, and spend a good deal of valuable time thinking about it. But to me that is one of its most admirable features. When a boy or a man goes in for athletics, whether football or rowing or hockey, he desires, if he is a real flesh-and-blood being, to excel in it. ”

“ If they could speak they would tell you many a strange episode in the life of an Association football player, and how he kept his place in a leading club for nearly a dozen years. They have been old and dear friends, those well-worn boots, and although now somewhat curled up at the toes, have kicked many a good goal out of a hot and exciting scrummage in front of an opponent's upright posts, and even in an International tussle ”

“ Teeny-bits followed directions and again and again came down upon the coach and the captain, remembering their instructions to shift, to use his straight arm, to dodge, to change his pace and to exercise every stratagem that differentiates the skilful back-field runner from the novice. He felt that he was learning real football and took each bit of advice that was offered with an intense concentration. ”

“ Harry, we’ve left behind us the playtime of boyhood, and we’re beginning real life! But in that playtime we learned how to play real football. From now on we’ll apply all of the best and most strenuous rules of football to the big art of making a living and a reputation. ”