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CHAPTER 1 Origins The emergence of specific sets of rules governing different forms of football in the late nineteenth century and their social delineation was a gradual process. In Irish press reports, for instance, the generic term ‘football’ appeared above accounts of both rugby and soccer until well into the 1880s. R.M. Peter, in his 1880 Irish Football Annual, gave full accounts of the progress of both rugby and soccer – a lack of differentiation that would have been almost unimaginable a couple of decades later. Rugby originated in Ireland as a sophisticated strand of a preexisting football culture. In order to acknowledge the complex cultural processes that led to the differentiation of broad sporting categories into specific codes, this chapter will examine the early history of football in Ireland and Munster in its totality. Highlighting the precise circumstances in which rugby emerged as a regulated, self-contained code in Ireland, something of the early social cleavages and cultural biases within Irish sport will be emphasised. The origins of modern football Before focusing on Ireland, it is important to briefly reflect on the codification of football as it occurred in late nineteenth-century Britain. The late Victorian and Edwardian period has rightly been identified as the crucial period in the modernisation of football. This was the era when the first formal clubs were founded, when administrative bodies were formed, rules agreed upon on a national and sometimes international basis, and competitions established. Furthermore, it was an era when football garnered mass, cross-class spectator appeal and became subject to commercial interest. From the outset, it is crucial to note that the modern codes of football share a common ancestry in folk variants of the game. Critical to a fuller understanding of the history of sport is an awareness of the tension between continuity and innovation central to the evolution of sport from its pre-industrial to its modern standardised form. One commentator has stressed that 13 ‘rugby and soccer were innovations. Both had deep and ancient popular roots.’1 It has been well established within sport historiography that the invention of modern sport in its codified and structured form in the British Isles was an evolutionary process that saw a vibrant culture of folk customs rooted in traditional society evolve through various agencies into a modern, regulated phenomenon more in keeping with an industrialised society. This striking metamorphosis saw the marginalisation in the first half of the nineteenth century of a rural and seasonal body of cultural practices, predominantly orally transmitted and open to sharp regional variation in a localised society.2 Documentary evidence of football in Britain dates from the fourteenth century and surviving descriptions from that date to its eventual decline in the early nineteenth century depict a chaotic, amorphous practice, very frequently violent and varying from a relatively regulated practice with limited numbers of participants over a defined space to more unruly formats played over vast areas, with limitless numbers of protagonists and bound by little or no rules.3 The precise nature of the game varied between locales with different levels of emphasis on handling and kicking the ball. It was also intimately linked to holidays, with matches frequently taking place on Shrove Tuesday or during Easter and Christmas. Given that both rugby and soccer were first put on a formal administrative footing in Britain, historians have been able to construct a coherent narrative that sees folk football, subject to various social and cultural stresses and changes, adapt to modern conditions and evolve into highly regulated codes with specific social and cultural connotations. The works of Tony Collins, Tony Mason and Dave Russell all take folk football as their starting point and an understanding of pre-industrial football is clearly seen as being vital in interpreting the evolution of the modern codes.4 The steady yet incomplete demise of folk football was a reflection of the decline of rural society due to the onset of industrialisation and was facilitated by various legislative instruments that curbed the perceived disorderliness and potential for social unrest seen to be engendered in practices involving large gatherings (particularly of those perceived to be on the lower rungs of the social ladder) taking place over vast spaces. Why and how folk football developed into different forms of modern rule-bound football with regional biases was attributable to various factors, none of which individually provide the rationale for such a striking process of change. Pre-existing regional emphases on handling or kicking assisted...

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