WORK AND PLAY

DAVE PROUDLOVE LOOKS AT HOW THE ORIGINS OF FOOTBALL LAY IN THE FACTORIES, MINES AND SHIPYARDS OF INDUSTRIAL ENGLAND

- 

WORKING man's ballet was a phrase that I often heard my Dad utter as he talked about football when I was a young boy, or should I say when he talked about Stoke City.

And that's because it's how Tony Waddington - that legendary manager of the Potters - used to describe the beautiful game, and Dad hung on the Wad's every word.

Dad was a working man, and he did some tough jobs in some tough environments.

In the main he worked our city's famous pottery factories. But in my lifetime, he also worked in a foundry, a brickworks and an ordnance factory.

A few pints and football was his escape from it all, and Stoke City in the main, though Dad would watch any football that happened to be on the TV, or local semipro games. Football really was his ballet.

And that's just one working man.

There were - and still are - millions more working people around the country for whom football - at 3pm on a Saturday, or 3.15pm for a while in Stoke - was their main source of entertainment.

But as well as watching the game, there were many that also played it, representing their place of work or community.

Alongside educational institutions and the church, industrial workplaces and communities provided some of the country's first organised football clubs, and hence the roots of English football.

Football as we know it was shaped by the public schools during the 1800s with their taming of 'mob football', the kind still celebrated in Ashbourne on Shrove Tuesday. The game developed further with the rise of the amateur game throughout the Home Counties, before spreading to expanding industrialised urban areas, though the development of football in such places was constrained by the availability of time and spaces where the game could be played.