Crespo_Vieri
Youth Team
Rome is where the art is
Friday, 13 December 2002
It may come as a shock to English people who have long held the view that they invented football, but really it comes from Italy. In a new volume of the Encyclopedia Treccani an entry heralded by Corriere della Sera as "a rather bold bit of historical revisionism" claims that Roman legionaries were playing the game over a thousand years before the English claimed to have invented it. The encyclopaedia claims that Roman soldiers adapted a Greek game, 'harpastum', which involved throwing or kicking a ball between two opposing teams in order to get it over the other side's goalline. The game was played with a ball composed of "vegetable matter" moulded and bound together with "the soft and gentle hair of young maidens". However, when maidens' hair was harder to come by, legionaries in first century BC England would often settle for "the skulls of slaughtered Britons". When they finally tired of the awful weather, warm beer and boiled food and returned to Italy, the Romans left football behind allowing Britons to develop the game. Meanwhile, the Romans' final full game was a heavy home defeat in a European tie against Alaric's German Visigoths in 410AD, after which they concentrated on developing medicine, art and dangerously unpredictable driving skills.
the link is http://www.uefa.com/magazine/news/Kind=1024/newsId=45847.html
Friday, 13 December 2002
It may come as a shock to English people who have long held the view that they invented football, but really it comes from Italy. In a new volume of the Encyclopedia Treccani an entry heralded by Corriere della Sera as "a rather bold bit of historical revisionism" claims that Roman legionaries were playing the game over a thousand years before the English claimed to have invented it. The encyclopaedia claims that Roman soldiers adapted a Greek game, 'harpastum', which involved throwing or kicking a ball between two opposing teams in order to get it over the other side's goalline. The game was played with a ball composed of "vegetable matter" moulded and bound together with "the soft and gentle hair of young maidens". However, when maidens' hair was harder to come by, legionaries in first century BC England would often settle for "the skulls of slaughtered Britons". When they finally tired of the awful weather, warm beer and boiled food and returned to Italy, the Romans left football behind allowing Britons to develop the game. Meanwhile, the Romans' final full game was a heavy home defeat in a European tie against Alaric's German Visigoths in 410AD, after which they concentrated on developing medicine, art and dangerously unpredictable driving skills.
the link is http://www.uefa.com/magazine/news/Kind=1024/newsId=45847.html
). But, the English are the first one to make the rules, the association which help to develop the game as it is today, a beautiful game.
... wtf 
