Wwi christmas truce soccer game

Moreover, FIFA, the world governing body for international soccer, had been created just a decade earlier and the German and English national teams had played one another four times in the six years preceding the war, with England winning three times and the other match ending in a draw.

One firsthand account of a game, from Cpl. So football in the firing line between the British and Germans is the truth, as I was one that played. British officer Peter Jackson, in an interview with the Imperial War Museum nearly a half-century after the conflict, also clearly remembered a Christmas Eve game.

After a while he relented, and the football match began. During the Contra War in Nicaragua in the s, a Sandinista patrol reportedly came across a small group of anti-government rebels, and with neither side willing to violate the delicate cease-fire then in place, they decided to settle their differences with a baseball game in a nearby pasture. That the story is almost certainly apocryphal does little to diminish its message: play ball, not war.

Everybody out there in the trenches still thought the war was worth fighting. Is it a few lads rolling a ball along the ground, or is it a group playing a game with, say, agreed goal posts?

Mark Connelly is a professor of modern British military history at the University of Kent, who last week presented his findings at a public symposium at the university. The symposium considers whether a Christmas truce football match took place, and why the truce has attained such iconic status in British popular culture. You can count on one hand the number of accurate accounts about football during the truce.

There are plenty of hearsay accounts, and a few fantasist accounts too — for example, an officer named Peter Jackson claimed to have played, but in was rumbled and admitted he had made the whole thing up — and there are a number of hearsay reports, of people having heard about a match, but there are only four pieces of evidence from soldiers who either played or witnessed the match.

After researching the Christmas truce for 15 years, I can usually spot the real accounts from the fakes. Until this year, I, like Mark, believed there was not enough concrete evidence to say that any football took place.

Two were accounts by men who said there was no football, the third — after 15 years of looking — was an account by a Norfolk corporal who said he played. The Broncos are now one step closer to likely being sold.

Thielen isn't putting all of the blame on Zimmer and Spielman. Two Crimson Tide coaches are accepting promotions at there big-time programs. The Alabama coach's Crimson Tide lost to Georgia in the national championship game. Cameroon captain Vincent Aboubakar scored twice in matchday 1 of the Africa Cup of Nations to achieve what no player from the other 23 title contenders managed in their initial outing. Klay Thompson had a very Klay-like reaction to not getting the ball on an open-look in transition.

Close this content. Read full article. Kevin Baxter. A World War I sculpture in Stoke-on-Trent, England, celebrates the Christmas Day truce, during which rival troops stopped fighting, left the trenches and are said to have played soccer instead.

The 8-foot clay sculpture titled "All Together Now" shows two soldiers, one British and the other German, greeting each other next to a soccer ball. Story continues. Reenactors from various living-history groups are dressed in World War I British and German uniforms as they kick around a soccer ball to celebrate the Christmas Truce in Ploegsteert, Belgium.

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Recommended Stories. NBC Sports. One lasted only an hour, after which both teams were exhausted. And though corpses had been cleared from the battlefield earlier that day, shell holes and the soldiers' huge boots made close control impossible. Players who fell in the mud were pulled out by the enemy, to cheers from spectators perched on the parapets. I should think there were about a couple of hundred taking part I was pretty good then, at There was no sort of ill-will between us.

It was simply a melee -- nothing like the soccer you see on television. The boots we wore were a menace -- those great big boots we had on -- and in those days the balls were made of leather and they soon got very soggy. Not everyone liked the truce. Superior officers on both sides stopped it within days. The British brigadier CM Richards also quoted by Weintraub recalled in a postwar memoir having received a signal from Battalion Headquarters on Christmas Day "telling me to make a soccer pitch in No Man's Land, by filling up shellholes, etc, and to challenge the enemy to a match on the 1st January.

I was furious and took no action at all. I wish I had kept that signal. Stupidly I destroyed it -- I was so angry. It would have been a good souvenir. A year-old German soldier named Adolf Hitler was equally shocked by the truce. Told later that men of his regiment had played soccer with them, he exclaimed: "Something like that should not happen in wartime.

Have you no German honor? Indeed, the British Council found that over two-thirds of British adults knew about them.

Schools around Britain are playing commemorative matches. Earlier this month, before every English professional game, all 22 starting players posed for a group photograph, recalling the picture of German and British soldiers posing together. You can see why people remember. The Christmas truce offers a glimpse of an alternative history: a 20th century in which, starting at Christmas , everyone stops shooting and starts playing soccer.

Then we'd have had no Russian revolution in , no future for lance-corporal Hitler, no Stalingrad, Auschwitz or the divided Europe of the Cold War. There's one other thing to say about the Christmas soccer. To the soldiers chasing balls amid shell holes that day, one fact was obvious: soccer wasn't war. In fact, it was its opposite.