HOW DID FOOTBALL START?

The very first account of football was made by William FitzStephen who was a clerk to Thomas Becket.  In 1170 William FitzStephen travelled to London from Canterbury and saw that after dinner all youth of the city went out into the fields for the very popular game of ball.

A century later a monk recorded in his diary that a game with young men propels a hug ball by striking it and rolling long the ground and not with their hands but with their feet.  He also wrote that the most injuries came from self-stabbing when players fell on their daggers.

The game was becoming very popular but for the kings. They rather saw the young men dying on the battlefield than during a game of football. When Edward II was running short of soldiers he decide to ban the game in the 1300s and it stayed banned till Charles II came on the throne..

There remained a gap of 700 years between the earlier footballs till the women in 1860s started to kick the ball around again. It was during the industrial revolution when fast number of women started to work next to the men in the mills. The women saw the men playing football and decide to join in. Slowly they built their own team and in 1881 appeared a report that the Edinburgh match was organised by Helen Matthews.  She was also one of the first campaigners of women’s right to vote.

Quite a number of the earlier players were also suffragettes.

During the First World War while the men were on the front the women football teams  became organised and drew a very large crowd every time.  It wasn’t more then four years after the war when the FA banned the women to play on their football ground.  This was a devastating blow.

They carried on playing on sports-field and open ground for charity. They collected quite an amount of money for the soldiers coming back from the war injured or traumatised.