Читать книгу Bushell's Best Bits - Everything You Needed To Know About The World's Craziest Sports - Mike Bushell - Страница 41
TABLE FOOTBALL
ОглавлениеIt’s the one sport that made me nervous when around my grandma Olive. There was something about the metal bars and the plastic rotating players that changed her character completely. She had the meanest defence in the family and would live and breathe each headed clearance as if she had pulled the shirt on herself. Even in her seventies she would be like a cat on hot coals, with her wrist flicks and shrieks of passion.
For most of us, it’s just an absorbing family tradition or a game in the pub, but there is now a flourishing British ‘Foosball’ team with a national BFA league planned for 2013. Indeed the British team went to Germany in January 2012, for the European championships and competed in front of 5000 people, in a packed sports hall in Bonn.
There are seven different stories about how table football began. One cites early children of servants spending time in backyards, using clothes pegs tied onto a pole. Another popular myth is that the game was started by a Tottenham Hotspur fan, Harry Searles Thornton, in the 1920s. Those who believe this version say he wanted to replicate the beautiful game at home. He had his lightbulb moment when fiddling with a box of matches. As he lay the matches across the box, the idea of bar football came to him. Some players dispute this tale – ‘We won’t ever agree on how it started,’ said Ben Mason, coordinator of the British team.
There are now table football federations around the globe and a world ranking system, with Americans dominating most recently. The World Series is like the tennis tour, with five world championship events culminating in the end of season series finale, for the top 32 players in the world, in France, every January. Players and teams come from as far Kuwait, Argentina, Costa Rica, Iran, Malaysia and Japan. There is also a player to outshine even the likes of Federer, Sampras and Nadal. Belgian Frederic Collignon is the 19-time world champion.