About football, the game I like.

A game I like

Written by A. Sayapin.

2016

A game I like

FOOTBALL

in some words:

Football is the biggest spectator sport in the world, with angling as the world’s biggest participant sport. While Formula 1 is the sport most watched on television, the World Cup is, after the Olympics, the most watched sporting event on television globally.

The long history of it counts more over some thousand years. It can’t be described shortly but I’ll try.

Football originated with kicking games played by people in ancient times.

A sport similar to football (called soccer in the United States and elsewhere) was played 3000 years ago in Japan. Chinese text from 50 BC mentions football-type games between teams from Japan and China. A text dating from 611 AD confirms that football was played in Kyoto, the ancient capital of Japan.

Ancient Greeks and Romans also played a game that resembled football – although the Greeks permitted carrying of the ball. Olympic games in ancient Rome featured a 50-minute football game with twenty-seven men on a side.

So as we can see there are some kinds of football.

How the sport spread from the East to Europe is not clear but England became the home of modern football. At first the game had a bad reputation among English royalty. Later it was included into PT.

The rules of play for soccer are simple. The referee makes most of the decisions and attempts to encourage fair play. The game starts off with a kick off and the teams are allowed to pass, dribble, juggle, head, kick and shoot the ball to place it down the field, and (hopefully or eventually) into their opponent's goal.

If the ball is kicked off the field over the length of the field, the other team is given a throw-in, where the ball is thrown over the player's head, and back onto the field. If the ball is kicked over the goal or across the width of the field, either a corner kick results, realizing by the offensive team, where the ball is placed on the corner of the field and kicked into play or the defensive team is awarded a kick, where the ball is placed on the corner of the goal box, and kicked back into play. If a goal is scored, the ball is taken back to the centre of the field and the team, scored against, kicks off and keeps playing.

The goalkeeper was formally distinguished in the 1880s.

The first football club was formed in Sheffield, England in 1857. The Football Association was founded on 26 October 1863 by 11 clubs meeting in London. (The word association was abbreviated to assoc., which became “soccer.”)

The Fédération Internationale de Football Association (FIFA) was founded in the rear of the headquarters of the Union Française de Sports Athlétiques at the rue Saint Honoré 229 in Paris on 21st of May, 1904. The first World Cup was held in 1930 in Uruguay.

Derived from the English game of rugby, American football was started in 1879 with rules instituted by Walter Camp, player and coach at Yale University. He played football at Yale and helped evolve the rules of the game away from Rugby and Soccer rules into the rules of American Football as we know them today.

Walter Camp contributed the following changes from Rugby and Soccer to American football:

• one side retained undisputed possession of the ball, until that side gives up the ball as a result of its own violations
• the line of scrimmage
• 11 on a team instead of 15
• created the quarter-back and center positions
• forward pass
• standardized the scoring system, numerical scoring
• created the safety, interference, penalties, and the neutral zone
• tackling as low as the knee was permitted - 1888
• a touchdown increased in value to six points and field goals went down to three points - 1912

The NFL or the National Football League, was formed in 1920.

But even another game derived from football.

Dr. James Naismith was the Canadian-born physical education instructor who invented basketball in 1891. He remembered a game he played as a child called "Duck on the Rock" that required players to knock a “duck” off a large boulder by throwing rocks at it. "With this game in mind, I thought that if the goal was horizontal instead of vertical, the players would be compelled to throw the ball in an arc; and force, which made for roughness, would be of no value. A horizontal goal, then, was what I was looking for, and I pictured it in my mind," he said. 

Naismith called the game Basketball – a nod to the fact that two peach baskets, hung ten feet up in the air, provided the goals. The instructor then wrote up 13 Rules.

The first formal rules were devised in 1892. Initially, players dribbled a soccer ball up and down a court of unspecified dimensions. Points were earned by landing the ball in a peach basket. Iron hoops and a hammock-style basket were introduced in 1893. Another decade passed, however, before the innovation of open-ended nets put an end to the practice of manually retrieving the ball from the basket each time a goal was scored.

“Some people think football is a matter of life and death. I assure you, it's much more serious than that”, - said Bill Shankly (Scottish footballer and manager who is best known for his time as manager of Liverpool).

Of course we mustn’t forget our footballers – the prominent one – Victor Ponedelnic (a former Soviet football player, regarded as one of the best strikers in Soviet football history, our cityman).

Millions of people in more than 140 countries play football. Football is played in the Olympics.

Nowadays my country is going to be a host one for World Cup 21st. And I’m very proud of it. And more over I’m proud of my city – Rostov-on-Don, Southern cluster – one of the 12 hosting cities.

Rostov Arena should be situated on the left bank of the Don River. Buoyed by its selection as a host city, Rostov-on-Don will be able to expand in size by developing its left bank, where the local tourism facilities and restaurants have traditionally attracted locals and visitors alike.

Rostov Arena's original design blends harmoniously into the picturesque landscape. The shape of the arena's roof imitates the meanderings of the Don River. The varying heights of the stands allow spectators to savour not only what is happening on the pitch, but also to enjoy views of Rostov-on-Don. From the left bank of the Don, the city looks particularly beautiful. Come and see.