Speaking of football: some thoughts on the early development of the game.

In the latter part of the paper, I review aspects of three stages of Curry's comprehensive six-stage model of modern football development and diffusion[12] - namely Stage 2 - Revisionist Forms of the Game; Stage 3 -the Public Schools (and notably the status rivalry hypothesis) and Stage 4 - University Compromise, again identifying areas of concern or issues for further study. Both the Eton and the Rugby rules were produced by those charged as "keepers" and conservers of their school's games in order to ensure that their respective internal and ever-growing audiences grasped the rules of football "as I played i at" their schools. And whereas public schoolboys generally experienced school life as an "inner directed existence",[85] it was as undergraduates or after leaving school that pupils moved beyond the limits of the "total institution"[86] that was their particular school and, on entering Oxbridge came into direct contact I on the field i with other public schoolboys whose experience of football or rowing was often different from their own. 'The close-knit community of the [great]public schools,[83] increasingly progressing into the universities from the late 18th century, was to be all-important in transmitting the sports of the schools into adult recreation'.[84] While the parallels between the development of cricket and football at the universities are seen largely in relation to club formation, financial organization and types and degree of associativity of members of those clubs, the parallels between the development of rowing and the development of football are much closer. [Extracted from the article]