INJURY MANAGEMENT

Injury Management



Injury Management

One of the main objections to playing football in the Middle Ages was that it was harmful to the health of the participants. One manor record, dated 1280, states: "Henry, son of William de Ellington, while playing at ball at Ulkham on Trinity Sunday with David le Ken and many others, ran against David and received an accidental wound from David's knife of which he died on the following Friday." In 1321, William de Spalding, was in trouble with the law over a game of football: "During the game at ball as he kicked the ball, a lay friend of his, also called William, ran against him and wounded himself on a sheath knife carried by the canon, so severely that he died within six days." There are other recorded cases during this period of footballers dying after falling on their daggers.

In 1531 the Puritan preacher, Thomas Eliot, argued that football caused "beastly fury and extreme violence". Whereas the Welsh author, George Owen wrote that "the gamesters return home from this play with broken heads, black faces, bruised bodies and lame legs." In his book, Anatomy of Abuses (1583) Philip Stubbs claimed that ""sometimes their necks are broken, sometimes their backs, sometimes their legs, sometimes their arms, sometimes one part is thrust out of joint, sometimes the noses gush out with blood... Football encourages envy and hatred... sometimes fighting, murder and a great loss of blood."

However, there were some people who thought that football was good for the health of young men. Richard Mulcaster, the headmaster of Merchant Taylors' School, wrote in 1581, that football had "great helps, both to health and strength." He added the game "strengtheneth and brawneth the whole body, and by provoking superfluities downward, it dischargeth the head, and upper parts, it is good for the bowels, and to drive the stone and gravel from both the bladder and kidneys."

In the 19th century several people argued that football had the potential to improve the health of the working-classes. In 1881 Sir Watkin Williams-Wynn, MP for Denbighshire, argued: "Much has been said of the British spending their time on drinking... These kinds of sports... keep young men from wasting their time... after playing a good game of football... young men is gladder to go to bed then visiting the public house."

Lionel Holland, a member of the Conservative Party, represented Bromley-by-Bow in the House of Commons. In 1897 Holland argued that football "gave us a whiff of the health and vigour of country life which no other sport could do in the crowded metropolis."

Some doctors disagreed about the health benefits of football. In an article published in The Lancet on 22nd April 1899 it was claimed that playing football posed a serious threat to the long-term health of the participants. The article pointed out that the main danger to health posed by the game was when one player charged another who was trying to head the ball: "To smash cruelly into him and knock ...