Football with a severed head. Football with a severed head. The original version of the "great" game. Let's play or "kiss"

Oles Buzina asks the question:
And yet ki, why was football invented in Britain?

Football is a duel between two teams of eleven players, running across the field for two halves of 45 minutes each, trying to score a goal without using their hands. For the first time, its rules, close to the current ones, were formulated by the Football Association of England on December 1, 1863, after several meetings and debates in the Freemasons tavern in London. "Freemasons" are Freemasons. I think the tavern with that name was not chosen by chance. The vast majority of the British elite belonged to Masonic lodges. Thus, the Freemasons are the founders of modern football.

Football is not just a game. This is a way of controlling the masses, a valve that allows them to release excess aggressive energy. In the 19th century, the British ruling class was faced with the problem of organizing leisure activities for the lower classes. The simple Englishman of those times bore little resemblance to Newton and Shakespeare. It was a poorly educated, primitive creature who spent his free time drinking and fighting. English fans haven't changed much since then. Do you remember how in Kyiv the other day several of them, drunk as hell, forgot their disabled friend in a bar? So this is the current, ennobled version of the British fan! A hundred years ago they had trouble remembering their names at all.

They scared the monk. the church was terrified of medieval football players

Good old England is one of the wildest and most violent countries in the world. If you don't believe me, read "Oliver Twist" by Dickens or "The Prince and the Pauper" by Mark Twain. There was a small Gulag in every decent British town - it was called a "workhouse". I think it was the British who suggested to Stalin the idea of his Gulag. People were executed for vagrancy in England in the Middle Ages. King Henry VIII, in order not to spend money on an expensive divorce procedure, simply cut off the heads of his wives. Thank God, at least not personally, but with the help of the executioner. And he married either six or seven times. Where is Ivan the Terrible? It is not surprising that the first regicides in the history of Europe were also the British, who publicly cut off the head of their king Charles I in 1649. Now they are pretending to be good - they are celebrating the 60th anniversary of the queen’s reign. But I know these people - if they had been given free rein, they would have killed even my grandmother! Scary people - nothing is sacred when they want money. They traded blacks, plundered colonies, drove the Chinese crazy with opium, and gave and continue to give “political” asylum to all criminals from all countries.

Football without fighting? This could not even be imagined

When, reader, you watch modern football, remember: originally there was a human head instead of a ball! Then it was replaced with an inflated pig bladder. This game was so ferocious that during it they broke arms and legs, broke glass in windows, destroyed benches - they simply played on the streets of cities, crowd against crowd. And when King Edward II banned such football as socially dangerous in 1314, do you know what they did to it? The conspirators overthrew the king from the throne, imprisoned him in a castle and killed him by driving a hot rod into his anus. The king, in addition to not liking aggressive sports, was also gay. Therefore, the conspiratorial barons, sending him to the next world, said: “Die as you sinned!” This was the first, as I understand it, victim of dislike for football and British folk customs.

The British executed King Edward II back in the 14th century. for homosexuality and the ban on football

Of course, by 1863, when the Football Association of England published its rules, the little Briton had already gotten a little rough. But calling this creature civilized could only be a stretch. And they sent it to the workhouse, and they pushed it to America, and to Australia, but it still drank and hit the face of its own kind of individual. Therefore, the British gentlemen decided: let the most talented of these dangerous anthropoids be the players, and the rest - the spectators. Let's put them in the stands, give them beer - let them relax and think less about new revolutions and disruption of public order.

This was the main reason for the emergence of modern football - a game invented to sublimate the wildest tribal instincts. So that on the eve of the match they would shout: “Let’s arrange Poltava for the Swedes!”, and not arrange it in reality.

During the 2012 European Championship, Ukrainian writer, journalist and historian Oles Buzina made an interesting excursion into the history of the great game, calling his research “Football with a severed head.” The article was published on the writer’s website. We introduce our reader to the most interesting excerpts from it...

Left edge, flying obliquely, like a yacht on a sharp turn

As the author rightly recalled, Odessa residents were among the first to describe football in Russian literature. In particular, Valentin Kataev in the novel “My Diamond Crown”. This is what football looked like at the beginning of the 20th century in the memoirs of the genius of southern Russian literature:
“... a football ground, devoid of grass, where, in clouds of dust, the center forward sent the ball to the edge, skillfully picked up by the far left. The one on the far left threw the ball from one foot to the other and rushed forward - small, stocky, in a gray uniform jacket from the Richelieu gymnasium, without a belt, his nose like a shoe, his hair falling on his forehead, his trousers knee-deep in dust, sweaty, inspired, flying askew, like yacht on a sharp turn. From the turn he kicks with an old, poorly laced boot. The ball flies past the falling goalkeeper into the goal. The gate is two posts with a top crossbar, without a net. Continuing by inertia to rush forward, the little Richelieuite looks triumphantly at the audience and shouts to the entire site, clapping his hands to himself: “Bravo, me!” (Like Pushkin, who graduated from “Boris Godunov”. Oh yes Pushkin, oh yes son of a bitch!) As they would say now, “the final, victorious goal” of this ordinary gymnasium match was scored, the end of which was announced by the referee with the signal of the three-tone referee’s signal adopted at that time whistle."

Two football Palmyras

From the port of Odessa, football continued its march to the north of Russia. Here we will make a digression from the wonderful narrative of Oles Buzina and note that in the writer’s research we are talking about a small territory of a huge country. After all, even within its modern borders, present-day Ukraine, with its huge amount of territory annexed to it by Soviet leaders in different years, occupies less than 3 percent of the area of the then empire. Therefore, it would not be out of place to say that football conquered Russia in two converging directions - from Northern and Southern Palmyra, St. Petersburg and Odessa, where at that time, for obvious “maritime” reasons, there were a lot of Englishmen.
Of course, it was the capital of the empire, in contrast to the Little Russian hinterland, that set the tone. It is no coincidence that the date of birth of football in Russia is considered to be October 12 (24 according to the new style) 1897, when the first match recorded and announced by the domestic sports press took place on the banks of the Neva football teams“St. Petersburg Circle of Sports Lovers” (“Sport”) and “Vasileostrovsky Society of Football Players”.

Neva Sovereign Current and Shelmenko the Batman

Football was also played in Odessa, but obviously later, as in other Little Russian cities and towns. And if this circumstance does not bother Oles Buzina at all, who simply talks about football with interest, then his Ukrainian colleagues, it seems, did not allow him to sleep peacefully. They did not argue (thanks for that!) that the fact of the first match on the territory of the empire was recorded in St. Petersburg. But in order to prove that football in Ukraine originated earlier than in Russia, it was necessary to come up with something.
The Ukrainian Ministry of Truth, which spent a lot of ink on the new interpretation of various historical events, did not help with football. The Neva sovereign current with a specific date for the match in the capital of Imperial Russia did not allow fantasies to disperse. And yet, a cunning mind in Kyiv turned out to be a cunning one - Shelmenko the batman himself would probably envy such a move. If there is bad luck with one empire, you need to look for happiness in another.
The first Ukrainian match was in Austria-Hungary
Not in Russia, but in Austria-Hungary. Three years ahead of birth Russian football managed! I found in Gazeta Lwowska (the name, of course, the most Ukrainian) for 1894 (earlier, earlier than with St. Petersburg!) an article about a meeting between teams that represented the sports and gymnastics society “Falcon” from two cities - Lvov and Krakow (to be honest with history, then Lemberg, as Lviv was then officially called, and Krakow). Thus, on the territory of Austria-Hungary “the first match took place on the territory of a future independent power.” According to the regulations, it lasted until the first scored a goal, and therefore did it in just 7 minutes.

The first Ukrainian goal was scored by a Pole

Lviv won, and the son of an Austro-Hungarian officer, Włodzimierz Chomicki, scored the goal for the Lviv team. A purebred Pole, by the way (whether there were any Ukrainians on the Lvov team at all is modestly kept silent). The fact that Khomitsky is a purebred Pole is confirmed by the all-knowing NKVD. Immediately after World War II, Khomitsky reportedly moved from Lvov to Poland. Did he just suddenly move? Why?
The story is known: in May 1945, the deportation of the Polish population from Lvov began, which lasted until January 1946. The carriages, under the supervision of soldiers of the People's Commissariat of Internal Affairs, set off towards Krakow, Gliwice and Gdansk. Echelon after echelon. In one of them, our hero went to explore the lands of Silesia and Pomerania cleared of Germans.

Did Ukrainians play football in Lemberg?

The question is almost rhetorical, if you read not the Russian imperial documents, which, as usual, have no faith, but the Ukrainian ones. 40 years later, in 1938, at a meeting of the statistical commission of the Scientific Partnership im. Shevchenko" a report was held on the topic "National, social and professional structure of the population of Lvov according to the population census of December 9, 1931." It turned out that among the residents of Lvov there were only 7.8% of people who consciously considered themselves Ukrainians.
Summarizing the statistical material, the speaker came to the following conclusions: “Ukrainians in Lviv are mainly a young, free (that is, unmarried), migrant, not very literate, predominantly working element. For 30,000 of all Ukrainians and Ukrainian women who earn money in Lviv, there are 9,700 servants, 2,000 watchmen, 1,400 unskilled workers and 9,000 skilled workers and artisans. Apart from domestic servants, Ukrainians have nowhere relatively large number, and as for the 11% in trade, then out of 4,000 Ukrainians, half are watchmen... There is nothing to say about intelligent professions. Even in industry, Ukrainian workers and artisans play some role, but as a hired force.”
This was the case in 1931, and it is unlikely that the share of 7.8 percent of Lviv Ukrainians “flowing” into the city in the 20s of the last century from the total number of citizens was higher than in 1894. It is unlikely that their very position in the role of servants and watchmen has become noticeably better. Was it before the sports and gymnastics society "Falcon" and a football match in the Austro-Hungarian Empire? If only in the role of ice cream sellers for Polish gentlemen and Austrian gentlemen...

Version for fools

However, all this did not prevent the Football Federation of Ukraine, soon after the country gained independence, from declaring that July day in 1894 the date of the birth of game number one. Of course, Wlodzimierz Chomicki did not know about this - he died on July 12, 1953. His grave is in the Polish city of Chocyanów.
Guess where it is - of course, in the same Silesia where trains with deported Poles went from Lviv instead of Germans deported to East Germany, and the city was then called Kotzenau in German). There, a bronze obelisk was installed with the inscription: “On July 14, 1894 in Lviv, at the Sokola stadium, the first official football match took place between the teams of Krakow and Lviv. The first goal in this match, and at the same time in the history of Polish football, was scored by Włodzimierz Chomicki.”
Like this: Chomicki scored the first goal in the history of Polish football. This means that this was the first match in the history of Polish football, since the Poles played according to the “golden goal” regulations. The Poles' logic is clear. Ukrainians claim that if Lviv eventually became a Ukrainian city, then the team was also Ukrainian. Let it play in Austria-Hungary, let it consist of Poles, let the city be officially called Lemberg. Let be! But earlier than in St. Petersburg.

“Viipurin Reipas” is also our Russian?

Following this logic, you can rewrite the entire history anew. Including sports. You don't have to look far for examples. The birthday of hockey in Russia is December 22, 1946, when the first matches of the first USSR ice hockey championship were played in Moscow, Leningrad, Riga, Kaunas and Arkhangelsk. However, to “rejuvenate” history by almost 20 years domestic hockey With the use of Ukrainian know-how, it will not be difficult for us.
In 1928, the first Finnish hockey championship was held, which was won by the club from Vyborg “Viipurin Reipas”. Since the city of Vyborg is now part of Russian Federation, then, following the logic of the Football Federation of Ukraine, hockey in Russia originated in 1928 - with the same success as football in Lviv in 1894. Moreover, there is one more nuance that expands the “evidence base” - all hockey players of the Viipurin Reipas club » were born on the territory Russian Empire. But the Ukrainian Empire, it seems, never existed. However, if not every bird reaches even the middle of the Dnieper, then maybe there was such an empire...

Thighs of Ivan Tsybylkin and Hans Müller...

However, let's return to the very interesting material of Oles Buzina, who in the first part of his research, lovingly talks about the first years of football in Russia, does not mention, of course, Lemberg and the Poles who lived under the Austrians - it was not our land...
As in Odessa, football was brought to Kiev, writes Buzina, by foreigners. But not the British, but the Czechs, many of whom came to work in the “mother of Russian cities” from the already mentioned Austria-Hungary. Later our people joined them. In 1911, the team “Imperial Alexander Gymnasium” took part in the first match for the Kyiv Cup.
But one should not think that the march of football through the cities and villages of the country was triumphant. The author of the famous “Romance with Cocaine”, written in the 20s, M. Ageev, mocked both football mania and sports fans in general: “It is enough just to pay attention to the ever-growing popularity of such athletes to recognize that it is no longer just success, but the true adoration of these people that is capturing ever larger circles of society. Newspapers write about these people, their faces are photographed, appear in magazines, and it seems that very little is missing for these people to become national pride. One can still understand if the nation is proud of its Beethovens, Voltaires, Tolstoys (although that’s what the nation has to do with it) - but for the nation to be proud of the fact that Ivan Tsybulkin’s thighs are healthier than Hans Müller’s - don’t you think, gentlemen “that such pride testifies not so much to the strength and health of Tsybulkin, whose only merit will be his terribly healthy thighs, but to the weakness and illness of the nation.”

The death of the glory of Tbilisi Dynamo

The author, further reflecting on the connection between football and nationalism (this is how the question was posed on the national outskirts of the USSR), recalls how national football championships replaced the previous all-Union championship. Compared to the USSR Championship, it was a pitiful, dull spectacle. In the early 90s, those who had the good fortune to watch the rivalry between Spartak Moscow and Dynamo Kyiv in the 70s and 80s stopped going to the stadiums altogether. What happiness did we have, the writer says, from the defeat of some poor Vorskla by Dynamo? But this was the spirit of the era. Nothing could be done about this. And the first “national championship” in the USSR was started by tiny Georgia with a population of four million, which forever ruined the former glory of the Tbilisi Dynamo. Who is now interested in watching battles between teams of Georgian “wineries”?
The polemical part of the material is especially interesting - about the birthplace of football. Further we will do without comments, we read Oles Buzina with his version of the origin of football...

Shall we play or “kiss”?

Why was football invented in Britain? Nowadays, revisionist versions are fashionable, claiming that not England is the birthplace of football, but Ancient Greece, Rome, China, Italy and even pre-Columbian America. In my opinion, all these versions are worth the statement that “Galicia is the birthplace of Jesus Christ.” Given the popularity of football in the world, everyone wants to be its founder.
Indeed, ball was played all over the world two and three thousand years ago. There is a bas-relief of a naked ancient Greek. The Greek kicks the ball. An ancient Greek boy standing next to him looks at him and, as I understand it, is learning - adopting the technique. But there is not a single bas-relief where two ancient Greek teams would kick the ball around the field, trying to score it into the goal. Therefore, the image from the Athens Museum is an element of football, but not yet football.
The ancient Chinese also had something football-like. They called it "qiuzui" - translated as "push with your foot." There are also engravings that convey the spirit of this fun. The Chinese are standing in long robes and juggling a ball. Where are the headbutts? Where are the defenders' tackles? Who stole the gate? Why do we call this game “football” today instead of “qiuzue”?

The Long Arm of the Freemasons

No, football is a duel between two teams of eleven players, running across the field for two halves of 45 minutes each, trying to score a goal without using their hands. For the first time, its rules, close to the current ones, were formulated by the Football Association of England on December 1, 1863, after several meetings and debates in the Freemasons tavern in London. "Freemasons" are Freemasons. I think the tavern with that name was not chosen by chance. The vast majority of the British elite belonged to Masonic lodges. Thus, the Freemasons are the founders of modern football.

For the lower classes

Ivan the Terrible is resting

Good old England is one of the wildest and most violent countries in the world. If you don't believe me, read "Oliver Twist" by Dickens or "The Prince and the Pauper" by Mark Twain. There was a small Gulag in every decent British town - it was called a "workhouse". I think it was the British who suggested to Stalin the idea of his Gulag. People were executed for vagrancy in England in the Middle Ages. King Henry VIII, in order not to spend money on an expensive divorce procedure, simply cut off the heads of his wives. Thank God, at least not personally, but with the help of the executioner. And he married either six or seven times. Where is Ivan the Terrible?
It is not surprising that the first regicides in the history of Europe were also the British, who publicly cut off the head of their king Charles I in 1649. Now they are pretending to be good - they are celebrating the 60th anniversary of the queen's reign. But I know these people - if they had been given free rein, they would have killed even my grandmother! Scary people - nothing is sacred when they want money. They traded blacks, plundered colonies, drove the Chinese crazy with opium, and gave and continue to give “political” asylum to all criminals from all countries.

Poor Danish prince

Where did such a robber nation come from? And she was pushed from the continent to the island during the era of the Great Migration of Peoples. No one in Europe wanted to live next to the English tribe - they were fenced off by the English Channel so as not to have to deal with them. What horrified the Europeans most of all was the folk custom of these Angles, after a battle, of kicking the severed head of the leader of the defeated army across the field. Legend has it that the first such match took place in the 9th century, when the English staged a “football” with the freshly cut off head of a Danish prince who tried to land on the British Isles. But I don't believe in it. I think they had fun like this before. They cut off someone's head and they rush from village to village.
When, reader, you watch modern football, remember: originally there was a human head instead of a ball! Then it was replaced with an inflated pig bladder. This game was so ferocious that during it they broke arms and legs, broke glass in windows, destroyed benches - they simply played on the streets of cities, crowd against crowd. And when King Edward II banned such football as socially dangerous in 1314, do you know what they did to it? The conspirators overthrew the king from the throne, imprisoned him in a castle and killed him by driving a hot rod into his anus. The king, in addition to not liking aggressive sports, was also gay. Therefore, the conspiratorial barons, sending him to the next world, said: “Die as you sinned!” This was the first, as I understand it, victim of dislike for football and British folk customs.

Folk fun - instead of war

Of course, by 1863, when the Football Association of England published its rules, the little Briton had already gotten a little rough. But calling this creature civilized could only be a stretch. And they sent it to the workhouse, and they pushed it to America, and to Australia, but it still drank and hit the face of its own kind of individual. Therefore, the British gentlemen decided: let the most talented of these dangerous anthropoids be players, and the rest - spectators. Let's put them in the stands, give them beer - let them relax and think less about new revolutions and disruption of public order.
This was the main reason for the emergence of modern football - a game invented to sublimate the wildest tribal instincts. So that on the eve of the match they would shout: “Let’s arrange Poltava for the Swedes!”, and not arrange it in reality.

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Medieval British football. Modern reenactors, alas, cannot convey all of his primitive animal beauty - there are not enough broken arms

As you know, football was invented by the British. They carried this game all over the world on merchant ships. Therefore, in Ukraine the first Soccer game occurred in Odessa in 1878. Members of the Odessa British Athletic Club played. Naturally, among themselves. Odessa residents watched. And then they themselves began to kick the ball around the field. By the way, Odessa residents were among the first to describe this game in Russian literature. First, Alexander Kozachinsky in the story “The Green Van,” published in 1938 and subsequently filmed twice. And Valentin Kataev in the novel “My Diamond Crown”. Here it is, Odessa football at the beginning of the 20th century in the memoirs of this genius of southern Russian literature:

“...a football ground, devoid of grass, where, in clouds of dust, the center forward sent the ball to the edge, skillfully picked up by the far left. The one on the far left threw the ball from one foot to the other and rushed forward - small, stocky, in a gray uniform jacket from the Richelieu gymnasium, without a belt, his nose like a shoe, his hair falling on his forehead, his trousers knee-deep in dust, sweaty, inspired, flying askew, like yacht on a sharp turn. From the turn he kicks with an old, poorly laced boot. The ball flies past the falling goalkeeper into the goal. The gate is two posts with a top crossbar, without a net. Continuing by inertia to rush forward, the little Richelieu victoriously looks at the audience and shouts to the entire site, clapping his hands to himself: “Bravo, me!” (Like Pushkin, who graduated from “Boris Godunov”. Oh yes Pushkin, oh yes son of a bitch!) As they would say now, “the final, victorious goal” of this ordinary gymnasium match was scored, the end of which was announced by the referee with the signal of the three-tone referee’s signal adopted at that time whistle."

Italian dramatization. Already closer to the original!

Foreigners brought football to Kyiv, as to Odessa. But not the British, but the Czechs. At the beginning of the last century, many of them came to work in the “mother of Russian cities” from Austria-Hungary, which then included the Czech Republic. The cradle of Kyiv football is Shulyavka. More precisely, the territory of the current film studio named after. Dovzhenko. Next to it today are the ruins of the Bolshevik plant. Before the revolution, it was called the Graeter and Krivanek plant and produced steam engines and equipment for sugar factories. There were especially many Czechs who worked here—excellent craftsmen. The people were mostly young, single and healthy; they played ball in their free time. The first Kiev football field was laid out by the Czechs on the side of the Brest-Litovsk highway - where the apple trees of Dovzhenko’s orchard now bloom and “Big Politics” is filmed. In 1902, Czech workers from the Greter and Krivanek plant founded the first Kyiv team - “Yug”. In 1911, the first city city was created in Kyiv football league. It included six teams. The participants in the first match for the Kyiv Cup are also known - the Imperial Alexander Gymnasium team played with the Fourth Gymnasium team. It’s funny that in the memory of the former Aleksandrovsky high school student Misha Bulgakov, as well as in Kyiv mythology, this historical fact was not reflected at all. Probably, Mikhail Afanasyevich did not like football very much, preferring cognac and cards to it.

Back to the ancestors. In Italy, as in England, football was a man's game

Nevertheless, football immediately spread around the world at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries, becoming a universal craze in Europe, America, and Africa - wherever grass grows and the sun shines. And even where grass doesn’t grow - on beaches and school playgrounds trampled like horses’ feet. At school we used to play on the asphalt, every second risking our knees and elbows bleeding when we fell. They played until they were stupefied! They even tore each other's school pants!

However, almost simultaneously with football enthusiasts, football skeptics also appeared. The author of the famous “Romance with Cocaine,” written in the 20s, M. Ageev, mocked both football mania and sports fans in general: “You only have to pay attention to the ever-growing popularity of such athletes to recognize that it is no longer just success , and already the true adoration of these people captures all large circles of society. Newspapers write about these people, their faces are photographed, appear in magazines, and it seems that very little is missing for these people to become national pride. One can still understand if the nation is proud of its Beethovens, Voltaires, Tolstoys (although that’s what the nation has to do with it) - but for the nation to be proud of the fact that Ivan Tsybulkin’s thighs are healthier than Hans Muller’s - don’t you think, gentlemen “that such pride testifies not so much to the strength and health of Tsybulkin, whose only merit will be his terribly healthy thighs, but to the weakness and illness of the nation.”

Absolute freedom. Football could be played with both hands and feet. Modern rules originated in 1863.

But no matter how much people like Ageev ironize, football and nationalism are twin brothers. Actually, football is a symbol of nationalism. Think about it: “National Championship”, “National Championship”, “National Team”. Sixteen national teams - that's the European Championship for you.

The sports of the pre-national era were aristocratic and individualistic - tennis, fencing, horse riding. The sport of the era of nations is football: a collective game, where “us” and “them” find out, looking at two teams kicking a ball around the field, who is cooler? It is not without reason that the first symbol of independence for Ukraine and Russia after flags and anthems were the national football championships, which replaced the previous all-Union championship. Compared to the USSR Championship, it was a pitiful, dull spectacle. In the early 90s, those who had the good fortune to watch the rivalry between Spartak Moscow and Dynamo Kyiv in the 70s and 80s stopped going to the stadiums altogether. How happy were we when Dynamo defeated some poor Vorskla? But this was the spirit of the era. Nothing could be done about this. Let me remind you that the first “national championship” in the USSR was started by tiny four million Georgia, which forever ruined the former glory of the Tbilisi Dynamo. Who is now interested in watching battles between teams of Georgian “wineries”?

And yet, why was football invented in Britain? Nowadays, revisionist versions are fashionable, claiming that not England is the birthplace of football, but Ancient Greece, Rome, China, Italy and even pre-Columbian America. In my opinion, all these versions are worth the statement that “Galicia is the birthplace of Jesus Christ.” Given the popularity of football in the world, everyone wants to be its founder.

Medieval balls were most often stuffed with straw or wool.

Indeed, ball was played all over the world two and three thousand years ago. There is a bas-relief of a naked ancient Greek. The Greek kicks the ball. An ancient Greek boy standing next to him looks at him and, as I understand it, is learning - adopting the technique. But there is not a single bas-relief where two ancient Greek teams would kick the ball around the field, trying to score it into the goal. Therefore, the image from the Athens Museum is an element of football, but not yet football.

The ancient Chinese also had something football-like. They called it "qiuzui" - translated as "push with your foot." There are also engravings that convey the spirit of this fun. The Chinese are standing in long robes and juggling a ball. Where are the headbutts? Where are the defenders' tackles? Who stole the gate? Why do we call this game “football” today instead of “qiuzue”?

Mid-19th century The rules have already been invented, but the form sucks

They scared the monk. the church was terrified of medieval football players

Football without fighting? This could not even be imagined

The British executed King Edward II back in the 14th century. for homosexuality and the ban on football

Oles Buzina
http://www.segodnya.ua/news/14394957.html

On the Internet it has already become a kind of meme. But the meme is separate, and reality is separate. There have been no significant successes in the assault on Mosul yet. The Americans simply ask everyone to stand, figuratively speaking, on tiptoe and watch the victorious US flag, saying that we are about to take Mosul. Through the efforts of all the media, they want to freeze the public in this state at least a little longer. They would have to stand for a day and hold out for two nights - until the vote in the USA - and then there would be a flood.

Hence the frantic efforts to advance towards the city. But, strangely for the Americans, they do not provide any details of the ongoing operation. And they are also trying to shut everyone’s mouths, in such a way that it really looks like an information blockade.

Mosul is like a black box. The official representative of the Russian Foreign Ministry, Maria Zakharova, draws attention to this feature of the ongoing operation. And he adds: “The counter-terrorism operation carried out by the leading powers of the 21st century has turned into a medieval massacre, in which, first of all, the civilian population suffers. The population of Mosul is dying en masse both from terrorists and from the coalition forces opposing them. It turned out that there was no fundamental "There is no plan for rescuing civilians. There are no humanitarian corridors, not even close to that. There is no consistency in the evacuation of the population."

That is, the supposedly liberated Mosul simply ended up in a meat grinder, and even with two augers. One is airstrikes by the pro-American coalition (every day up to 40 civilians are killed there by bombs), and the other is ISIS inside the city, who continue the demonstrative executions of the population they hold hostage. But these victims are also on the conscience of the Americans.

American samizdat is breaking through the information blockade. Yes, this one has already appeared. Uncensored bloggers, using their network of trusted informants, still reveal how the “assault on Mosul” was organized.

One of these authors is Alice Donovan, who works at WeAreChange.org. Referring to the Inside Syria Media Center, she writes: “The five hundred elite American special forces deployed to Mosul are positioned at the forefront of Iraqi and Kurdish units. Military experts consider such a battle formation atypical, which will lead to imminent heavy losses, which Washington officials the faces will fall silent as usual."

According to Alice Donovan, such urgent efforts to storm Mosul are nothing more than part of Clinton's election PR campaign. It really seems like that. This means that five hundred American commandos deployed to Mosul are being sent to their deaths for Clinton. It is reported that there are already dead, but it is not possible to report them now.

One way or another, the assault on Mosul stalled. Something went wrong. Remember how State Department spokesman John Kirby croaked in September that “Russia will continue to send troops home in body bags”? Well, now it's the other way around. As they say, don’t dig a hole for someone else, you will fall into it yourself.

Meanwhile, a comparison between Aleppo and Mosul suggests itself. If military aircraft from Russia and Syria have not flown to Aleppo for 20 days, then the Americans will iron out Mosul to the fullest. In Mosul there are no humanitarian corridors, while in Aleppo there are still six for civilians, plus two for those with weapons. Everyone is guaranteed safety.

At the same time, the same official representative of the US State Department, John Kirby, says that “there is no benefit from Russia’s humanitarian pauses in Aleppo.” The official representative of the Russian Ministry of Defense, Igor Konashenkov, responded to this.

“Such statements once again show how different the State Department’s understanding of the “benefits” of humanitarian pauses is with us. recent months We delivered more than a hundred tons of essential goods to Aleppo - food, medicine and basic necessities. All the residents of Aleppo received all this without restrictions on the western or eastern part. During this time, the State Department did not deliver a single bread crumb to the Syrians, for whom it supposedly cares,” Konashenkov noted.

Not a single bread crumb from the Americans for the civilians of Aleppo, however, weapons from their side continue to fall to the terrorists.

Mosul is the capital of ISIS (an organization banned in the Russian Federation). The fighting moves further towards the center. The terrorists retreat, leaving the corpses of their fellow believers in the streets. Local residents of the El-Intisar district are not even trying to clean up the dead militants. They tell how much they hate ISIS (an organization banned in the Russian Federation). “We had neither water nor bread, but they ate from their stomachs and did not share with us,” people say.

Residents greet the armored cars of the Iraqi army entering the destroyed Mosul with restraint. But everyone is happy that they were able to survive. “Bombings are going on every day, but Allah has mercy on us for now and protects us from bombs and shells,” say local residents.

From time to time, artillery fire from self-propelled guns opens on neighboring blocks of Mosul. The offensive is progressing extremely slowly. Iraqi army commanders claim that there are still many civilians left in the city, so they do not want to risk them.

Retreating from the city of Qayara, ISIS set fire to all the oil fields in the surrounding area so that it would not reach the Iraqi authorities and to make it difficult for aircraft to target. The whole sky is covered in fumes and clouds of black smoke - this is a real environmental disaster.

The goals of the American attack aircraft turned out to be almost the same as those of ISIS (an organization banned in the Russian Federation) - first of all, they bombed oil refineries.

Local boys, grimy from the ash, went to school for the first time in two years. “We were not allowed to study. Adults were whipped on the streets if they did not dress according to Sharia. The fact that now there is nothing to breathe here is nothing, the worst is over,” they say.

Their fathers saw something different. They say that it was not an Islamic state, but the embodiment of hell on earth. “Before my eyes, they cut off the head of a respected man and began to play football with it,” one resident of Mosul province recalls with horror.

Old, still Soviet tanks, using direct fire, destroy the positions of ISIS (an organization banned in the Russian Federation) near Mosul.

“We took these tanks away from Saddam Hussein, and now they are saving the world from this ISIS infection,” said Nishwan, the commander of the tank crew.

In three weeks of fighting, the Kurds were able to occupy all strategic heights and block five of the six highways leading to the city. Bulldozers create long-term fortifications to prevent militants from counterattacking.

Kurdish Peshmerga detachments are liberating cities and towns around Mosul - there is no way to leave ISIS in the rear. The main forces are concentrated around Bashiki. He will be ironed out by coalition aircraft. By agreement, the capital of ISIS (an organization banned in the Russian Federation) is stormed by the Iraqi army. If they get stuck, the Kurds will also enter the city.

Iraqi special forces have already broken into eastern Mosul. “We are ready to join in at any time. It is important for us to remove terrorists from Mosul who constantly threaten free Kurdistan,” said Ali Fermi Bahram, commander of the front near the city of Bashiqa.

Captured rocket launchers ended up in the hands of the Peshmerga units. These homemade rockets are riveted from gas cylinders and filled with explosives. They don't shoot very far, but they can easily demolish an entire house to the ground.

If the militants do not agree to leave Mosul, the operation may drag on, and the city will turn into a continuous battlefield. ISIS does not want to let refugees out of the city, and this threatens another humanitarian catastrophe. The filtration camps for those who managed to escape from Mosul into Kurdish territory are already overcrowded.

Every day 200-300 people try to leave Mosul. They are checked, some are even arrested, suspecting them to be militants. But most people are frightened and tortured by constant shelling.

“We are very tired of the bombings. If the ISIS fighters just pass by our houses, they are immediately hit, and everything explodes along with our houses,” people say.

First, any village where militants have settled is bombed by US bombers, and then advanced Kurdish detachments enter there. Liberated villages - no houses, no inhabitants, just ruins. There are burnt-out fuel tankers on the streets. War-destroyed mosques reach into the sky with charred minarets.

“The military operation may end in a couple of months, but if politicians start their dirty games again, the war with ISIS (an organization banned in the Russian Federation) could last for years, like in Syria,” said Hussein Yazdanpana, commander of a Peshmerga unit.

As the Iraqi army enters Mosul, it is supported by Peshmerga fire from the north. Women's groups are considered the most irreconcilable enemies with ISIS (an organization banned in the Russian Federation). In every shot, young girls who are not yet 18 put all their hatred towards the crazy bearded men who set up slave markets in Mosul and stone women to death.

“I know very well what ISIS do to girls, so I will leave the last cartridge for myself so as not to be captured,” admitted Soma, a Peshmerga fighter.

A delegation of Russian Yazidis is also waiting for the liberation of Mosul on the front line. The largest diaspora of their co-religionists remained in the city. The Yazidis were turned into slaves, and those who did not want to convert to Islam were simply shot.

“The Americans announced an operation on Mosul back in February last year. Why were they waiting for so many months? They didn’t count how many people died. When it came to the elections, they immediately launched some kind of offensive,” said Ruslan Shamoyan, deputy chairman of the Union Kurds-Yezidis of Russia.

Christians also suffer. In the town of Bartella, liberated from ISIS (an organization banned in the Russian Federation), returning residents found their church destroyed, with a knocked down cross. The militants piled up the Bibles and burned them. In this town alone, four temples were desecrated or completely destroyed. Orthodox Christians were expelled from the province of Mosul as soon as it was captured by ISIS in 2014.

“We were told that if we did not leave Mosul before twelve o’clock, the ISIS would execute us. I saw how they blew up a temple and made a parking lot in its place,” recalls Faris Younan, one of the refugees.

A former owner of several trucks, Faris and his family took refuge in the Mat Mattai monastery. It was founded in mountain caves back in the 4th century. Throughout all these centuries, Christians of the Syriac Orthodox Church, persecuted in the Middle East, were saved here. The ISIS fighters did not reach the monastery literally several kilometers.

“It’s nothing new. It’s always been hard for Christians in the Middle East. I left Mosul back in 2006, when religious fanatics killed my brother,” said one of the refugees, a monk.

He doesn’t know how the assault on Mosul will end, but he is sure that these impregnable walls in the mountains will still serve those who left below the lights of the city plunged into medieval darkness.

As you know, football was invented by the British. They carried this game all over the world on merchant ships. Therefore, the first football match took place in Ukraine
Source in Odessa in 1878. Members of the Odessa British Athletic Club played. Naturally, among themselves. Odessa residents watched. And then they themselves began to kick the ball around the field. By the way, Odessa residents were among the first to describe this game in Russian literature. First, Alexander Kozachinsky in the story “The Green Van,” published in 1938 and subsequently filmed twice. And Valentin Kataev in the novel “My Diamond Crown”. Here it is, Odessa football at the beginning of the 20th century in the memoirs of this genius of southern Russian literature:

Italian dramatization. Already closer to the original!

Foreigners brought football to Kyiv, as to Odessa. But not the British, but the Czechs. At the beginning of the last century, many of them came to work in the “mother of Russian cities” from Austria-Hungary, which then included the Czech Republic. The cradle of Kyiv football is Shulyavka. More precisely, the territory of the current film studio named after. Dovzhenko. Next to it today are the ruins of the Bolshevik plant. Before the revolution, it was called the Graeter and Krivanek plant and produced steam engines and equipment for sugar factories. There were especially many Czechs who worked here—excellent craftsmen. The people were mostly young, single and healthy; they played ball in their free time. The first Kiev football field was laid out by the Czechs on the side of the Brest-Litovsk highway - where the apple trees of Dovzhenko’s orchard now bloom and “Big Politics” is filmed. In 1902, Czech workers from the Greter and Krivanek plant founded the first Kyiv team - “Yug”. In 1911, the first city football league was created in Kyiv. It included six teams. The participants in the first match for the Kyiv Cup are also known - the Imperial Alexander Gymnasium team played with the Fourth Gymnasium team. It’s funny that in the memory of the former Aleksandrovsky high school student Misha Bulgakov, as well as in Kyiv mythology, this historical fact was not reflected at all. Probably, Mikhail Afanasyevich did not like football very much, preferring cognac and cards to it.

Back to the ancestors. In Italy, as in England, football was a man's game

Absolute freedom. Football could be played with both hands and feet. Modern rules originated in 1863.

The sports of the pre-national era were aristocratic and individualistic - tennis, fencing, horse riding. The sport of the era of nations is football: a collective game, where “us” and “them” find out, looking at two teams kicking a ball around the field, who is cooler? It is not without reason that the first symbol of independence for Ukraine and Russia after flags and anthems were the national football championships, which replaced the previous all-Union championship. Compared to the USSR Championship, it was a pitiful, dull spectacle. In the early 90s, those who had the good fortune to watch the rivalry between Spartak Moscow and Dynamo Kyiv in the 70s and 80s stopped going to the stadiums altogether. How happy were we when Dynamo defeated some poor Vorskla? But this was the spirit of the era. Nothing could be done about it. Let me remind you that the first “national championship” in the USSR was started by tiny four million Georgia, which forever ruined the former glory of the Tbilisi Dynamo. Who is now interested in watching battles between teams of Georgian “wineries”?

Medieval balls were most often stuffed with straw or wool.

Mid-19th century The rules have already been invented, but the form sucks

They scared the monk. the church was terrified of medieval football players

Football without fighting? This could not even be imagined

The British executed King Edward II back in the 14th century. for homosexuality and the ban on football

https://www.segodnya.ua/news/14394957.html