The rules of football

Trick start. There aren’t any rules, you see. There are only LAWS. Seventeen in all and pretty much untampered with since they were first written down in 1886 by the International Football Association Board.
They deal with the basics - pitch size and markings, ball size and weight, goal posts, referees and assistants, ways of starting play and ways of scoring. Oh, and cautions and sendings off.
If it’s that simple, you may ask, how come there have been intense arguments ever since that first ball was kicked ?
Well, that’s the problem right there, I suppose. It’s a ball. It’s supposed to be spherical, between 27 and 28 inches circumference, weighing between 14 - 16 ounces and inflated to about 16lbs per square inch.

Everyone understands Newton’s principle of motion - a force applied to an object will cause that object to move in a way that is directly proportional to the force applied. Newton wasn’t a footballer, though.
What he avoided mentioning was the DIRECTION in which a kicked ball is likely to move. Because it’s a sphere, although you may want it to travel straight, the slightest deviation from the straight when you kick it means that it will veer to the left or right - and that’s without accounting for any spin you impart, which can make it loop up, skid along the surface, bend like a boomerang or rise like a rocket until it runs out of steam. It could also pop, of course (in which case, if it is during the course of a match, it is replaced by dropping the replacement ball at the place where the first ball became defective - Law 2).

                                                     








In the unlikely event that you have never actually kicked a proper match ball, then you really ought to remedy this as soon as possible. There are some aspects of the game that can never be realistically replicated - what it’s like to take the fifth penalty in a shoot-out in a World Cup Final with an audience of 260 million, for example. This is called pressure, and does strange things to a person’s confidence. The experience of kicking a proper football, in a match, but under minimal pressure, can be experienced relatively easily without having to explain that you're a first timer.
Here's how. All you need to do is locate the nearest park on which matches are played on a Saturday or Sunday. They are easy to spot as, in addition to pitch markings, from about 9am at weekends you will see cars drawing up and disgorging as diverse a group of men (or women, these days) as you could wish to see, ranging from young, fitness addicts, barely out of school, or possibly still at school, right through to grizzled old-timers who swear each week that this will be their last game. They will be squeezing their corny, calloused feet into dirty boots, carrying goal nets about, inserting corner flags and having a last minute fag before kick-off. There will be a scattering of spectators - in the case of men this is usually the new girlfriend of one or two of the players (that’s a separate girlfriend for each player in most cases), possibly a wife, although this is stretching marital devotion, and perhaps a parent or two of the younger players. Women players tend to attract their own female friends, who may or may not be accompanied by their boyfriends.
There may even be a scout from a bigger club - it depends on the game. What there won’t be, and this is where you come in, is anything behind the goal to prevent the ball from travelling miles after a bungled shot. All you need to do is position yourself a reasonable distance behind a goal and wait. At some point in the match you will have the opportunity to retrieve the ball, as no player really wants to expend energy chasing after a dead ball. All you have to do is walk nochalantly after the ball and then kick it back in the direction of the goal. All eyes will be on you as you do this, incidentally, but that is invaluable in itself for appreciating in microcosm the pressure on the penalty taker. If this is the first time that you have ever kicked a proper football, and your experience to date is watching how players on the telly can effortlessly bend a lobbed ball 60 yards directly to a team-mate’s left foot, you will be surprised at how short a distance you can actually impel it. It will be pretty much the same type as those used in any other match, but will be harder than you think, and heavier and the thing will not travel anywhere near the direction in which you kick it. Oh, and by the way, if you do it wrong, and use your big toe there’s a good chance you’ll break it (your toe, not the ball). That’s it. You’ve made contact and it’s your first learning experience, that kicking a ball to where you want it to go is nothing like as easy as it looks. (If you have fortuitously managed to return the ball to the goalie, incidentally, then stroll back nonchalantly to where you were stood, perhaps innocently inspecting your fingernails, or maybe considering an important text or tweet. If, as is more likely, you have sent the ball about half the distance of a nonchalant spit and only approximately in the intended direction, immediately pull out your mobile phone as though temporarily distracted by its ring and walk urgently away from the area. Do not look back.)














From now on, this blog will assume that you appreciate the finer points of kicking a football and are ready to move on to what can be done with it.

How to watch football

Watching football is a deceptively accessible pleasure, and whilst it is perfectly permissable (and some consider essential) to hurl abuse at the fourth official, an opposing centre-forward or your own team’s mascot, should you make the mistake of confusing any of these, your standing in the eyes of your peers will be substantially diminished (you shouldn’t be standing at a Premiership ground, anyway).
Before they started wearing pretty pastel colours for the television cameras, Referees and their Assistants (or ‘linesmen’, as they used to be called) dressed from toe to Acme Thunderer in darkest black. That is how my friend McWhirter recalled them from his very few schoolboy days on the terraces. This accounts for his faux pas as a guest for the first (and only) time in his new employer’s box at one of the country’s more prestigious grounds. McWhirter tried to ingratiate himself with his new boss by initiating the hurling of abuse at the darkly clad figure patrolling by the dug-out prior to the game. If only he had taken the precaution of checking the team’s new signings, he would not have made the mistake that cost him a substantial contribution to church funds and eventually his job. What McWhirter had failed to appreciate was that the club’s latest latin-american signing was deeply religious and had introduced an unusual rider to his contract. This explains why the new signing took particularly unkindly to McWhirter screaming “Who’s the bastard in the black?” as she was the nun whose contract obliged her to bless the subs bench. In the ensuing fracas, the bench was trashed, the new signing demonstrated the less religious side of his make-up and the nun showed a surprising turn of speed - and an equally surprising pair of testicles, but that's another story.

This blog will not only help you avoid such elementary mistakes, but will enable you to appreciate the finer points of watching the noble game.

Warm up exercise

For the first eighty years of its existence (the ‘modern’ game started around 1870), the tradition of ‘going to the match’ was passed with care from father to son. Women were involved from time to time, mainly in the procreation aspect of the tradition, but overwhelmingly, football crowds comprised men. Gloriously freed to shout, sing and swear out loud, men of all ages had their tweed jackets and broken-peaked caps jostled, soaked, frozen and, on rare occasions even lightly dampened with sweat in the cause of supporting their team.

The action was live, without the slightest thought of a replay, and no-one could have foreseen that some day in the distant future, seriously single-minded scientists would develop sophisticated euipment not in the uplifting cause of curing cancer or even the common cold, but merely to determine whether an inflated sphere of leather had crossed a whitewashed line or not.
In those days a father could explain the offside rule to his son in such simple language that the son wondered how it was that the referee failed to understand it, or at least got it so wrong so often. Without the plague of the instant replay, the knowledge imparted by father on the terraces was sacrosanct. It’s debatable whether society’s gain of the absolute knowledge about whether it was a penalty or not is a reasonable trade for the loss of parental respect in formative years. It all depends which way the penalty is being awarded, I suppose.

The point is, for the past sixty years, football has been the most accessible sport for all of us. Whether our fathers took us to matches or not, or even whether we know our fathers is now irrelevant - we can access football every minute of the day, if we so choose. And therein lies the irony. There are now more people watching the game than could ever have been imagined by my father, (a World Cup Final attracts at least 260 million viewers, or six times as many people who packed out the terraces over a 60 year period of watching football Stockport County) and yet, perversely, there are probably less people watching the game now who know what they are looking out for. They don’t have anyone to explain it to them, you see.
They do now.
This blog will be your father on the terraces, your brother on the settee and McWhirter’s wife on that night the car broke down on the A41 - in other words, what passes between us will remain a secret known only to you and I.

 

It has to remain a secret, you see, as, in this football obsessed world, if you are old enough to read this, then you are already too old to ask naive questions about whether it’s possible to score if you kick the ball into your own net after a direct free kick, or whether the six yard box is measured from the outside of the goal post or the inside. After a certain age, there’s an assumption that you know these things. You’ve gone too far to risk your credibility by asking someone the obvious.

There are only three ways to watch football : live at a match, ‘live’ on TV or internet, or post-match, edited highlights. You don’t need any knowledge to appreciate that there is a certain level of skill involved, but to maximise your pleasure, the more you know, the more you will enjoy. Read on and enjoy......