Tony Collins

This ambitious and fascinating history considers why, in the space of sixty years between 1850 and 1910, football grew from a marginal and unorganised activity to become the dominant winter entertainment for millions of people around the world. The book explores how the world’s football codes - soccer, rugby league, rugby union, American, Australian, Canadian and Gaelic - developed as part of the commercialised leisure industry in the nineteenth century. Football, however and wherever it was played, was a product of the second industrial revolution, the rise of the mass media, and the spirit of the age of the masses. Important reading for students of sports studies, history, sociology, development and management, this book is also a valuable resource for scholars and academics involved in the study of football in all its forms, as well as an engrossing read for anyone interested in the early history of football.

A Global History of How the World's Football Codes Were Born

How Football Began

In September 2013 Tony Collins took advantage of a long-overdue sabbatical to walk the 490 miles of the Camino, from the French border to Santiago de Compostela in northern Spain. For decades he had helped to provide the evangelical churches of the world with reading material. Now he was deliberately stepping out of his comfort zone: a pilgrimage, carrying his pack, through a land whose language he did not speak, into a religious culture far removed from his own, in search of sources of reverence. He would not walk alone: the Way has many adherents, well over 200,000 completing their Camino during that year. He had expected the Way to be arduous, and so it proved. But he had not expected so bracing an internal journey, his battered soul laid down for examination, past errors offered up for scrutiny. Nor had he expected such moments of intense spiritual encounter; nor so many precious friendships. He discovered, above all, as have many before him, that the Road leaves an indelible mark.

A Publisher on Pilgrimage

Taking My God for a Walk

From the myth of William Webb Ellis to the glory of the 2003 World Cup win, this book explores the social history of rugby union in England. Ever since Tom Brown’s Schooldays the sport has seen itself as the guardian of traditional English middle-class values. In this fascinating new history, leading rugby historian Tony Collins demonstrates how these values have shaped the English game, from the public schools to mass spectator sport, from strict amateurism to global professionalism. Based on unprecedented access to the official archives of the Rugby Football Union, and drawing on an impressive array of sources from club minutes to personal memoirs and contemporary literature, the book explores in vivid detail the key events, personalities and players that have made English rugby. From an era of rapid growth at the end of the nineteenth century, through the terrible losses suffered during the First World War and the subsequent ‘rush to rugby’ in the public and grammar schools, and into the periods of disorientation and commercialisation in the 1960s through to the present day, the story of English rugby union is also the story of the making of modern England. Like all the very best writers on sport, Tony Collins uses sport as a prism through which to better understand both culture and society. A ground-breaking work of both social history and sport history, A Social History of English Rugby Union tells a fascinating story of sporting endeavour, masculine identity, imperial ideology, social consciousness and the nature of Englishness.

A Social History of English Rugby Union

An archaeological dig in the English countryside might be considered the safest of pastimes, but not for Simon Tappins. His life is turned upside down when a dramatic discovery sends him back two thousand years into a world time forgot. He is plunged into a dangerous period of British history, a pivotal point when the Roman Empire is collapsing and Saxon hordes are invading, sweeping aside the last legions. Simon is caught between the approaching Saxons and the ferocious but futile last stand of a Roman governor who, with the support of Germanic mercenaries, is intent on escaping with the wealth he has accumulated. Through all this runs Simons quest to solve a mystery. Only the lost crystal of Thar Cernunnos has the power to take him back to his own time, but while clues crop up regularly, they are always enigmatic, often cryptic, and seemingly impossible to solve. However, it is his emotional involvement with native girl Senicca that presents the greatest challenge. If he makes the wrong decision now, in two thousand years time, the consequences will be fatal. In accurate and fascinating detail many aspects of everyday life in these times are disclosed. The story explores what it was really like to live in a Roman town. The principal character experiences the sounds of the market place, the smells from the wine bars and food shops, and the choking smoke from the industrial quarter. But it is the people and their cultural and political organization which reveals the unique economic ambience of the town during this dangerous period. The story also weaves a strange tale of unearthly powers of priests, the terrifying predictions of Celtic Gods and the struggles, perils and small triumphs of surviving in a time filled with savage conflict.

Key to the Ancient World of Thar Cernunnos

The Lost Crystal

Tony Collins has published over 1400 books, and racked up innumerable errors. Dozens of titles have failed. He's been involved in a court case, overlooked bestsellers and offered bad advice. But he has always loved books, and the crafting of books. For more than forty years he has tried to publish books that make a difference. This is his tale.

How to Make Mistakes in Publishing

They'll Never Read That

David Bicknell

Ever since Babbage invented the computer, it's been crashing. Today nearly every business uses computers but few do so with confidence. Crash reveals that the same ten factors recur in most disasters, and shows you how to avoid them

Ten Easy Ways to Avoid a Computer Disaster

Crash

As a child, Tony Collins was laser focused on a single goal -- making it to the NFL. With hard work and steely determination, Collins defied the odds and lived that dream -- reaching both the Pro Bowl and the Super Bowl as one of the most productive running backs in New England Patriots history. But the road to Collins' dream was littered with temptation, and as he gave in to destructive addictions he reached a sudden dead end in his life as a pro football player. From a deep valley carved by his damaging choices, Collins let the power of hope and redemption pull him up to a new purpose of inspiring others and living every day to the full. The dramatic story of Tony Collins' transformation is a reminder that love and positive thinking have the power to save a life.

Turning My Mess Into a Message

Broken Road

John Nauright

Twenty years of professionalism has seen rugby union undergo dramatic transformations, from changes to everyday training cultures to the growth of the Rugby World Cup into one of the largest global sporting events. The Rugby World in the Professional Era is the first book to examine the effect that professionalism has had across a number of different aspects of the game and the wider socio-cultural significance of these changes through case studies from across the globe. Drawing on contributions from scholars from across the rugby-playing world, the book explores the role of rugby's professionalisation through a number of social-scientific lenses, including: labour migration race and indigenous populations the globalisation of the game mega-event management male sexualities media representations of rugby - from broadcasting matches to rugby in museums and on stage and screen Offering insights into under-researched areas of the sport, such as the growth of Rugby Sevens into an Olympic sport, and providing the most up-to-date recent history of the sport available, The Rugby World in the Professional Era is essential reading for anyone with an academic interest in rugby, and any student or scholar with interests in sports history, sports sociology, sport management or the economics of professional sport.

The Rugby World in the Professional Era

Bailliere's Veterinary Diary, 1987

Since it’s first publication, Rugby’s Great Split has established itself as a classic in the field of sport history. Drawing on an unprecedented range of sources, this deeply researched and highly readable book traces the social, cultural and economic divisions that led, in 1895, to schism in the game of rugby and the creation of rugby league, the sport of England’s northern working class. Tony Collins’ analysis challenges many of the conventional assumptions about this key event in rugby history – about class conflict, amateurism in sport, the North-South divide, violence on the pitch, the development of mass spectator sport and the rise of football. This new edition is expanded to cover parallel events in Australia and New Zealand, and to address the key question of rugby league’s failure to establish itself in Wales. Rugby’s Great Split is a benchmark text in the history of rugby, and an absorbing case study of wider issues – issues of class, gender, regional and national identity, and the impact of the commercialization and recent professionalization of rugby league. This insightful text is for anyone interested in Britain’s social history or in the emergence of modern sport, it is vital reading.

Class, Culture and the Origins of Rugby League Football

Rugby's Great Split

Why are the Olympic Games the driving force behind a clampdown on civil liberties? What makes sport an unwavering ally of nationalism and militarism? Is sport the new opiate of the masses? These and many other questions are answered in this new radical history of sport by leading historian of sport and society, Professor Tony Collins. Tracing the history of modern sport from its origins in the burgeoning capitalist economy of mid-eighteenth century England to the globalised corporate sport of today, the book argues that, far from the purity of sport being ‘corrupted’ by capitalism, modern sport is as much a product of capitalism as the factory, the stock exchange and the unemployment line. Based on original sources, the book explains how sport has been shaped and moulded by the major political and economic events of the past two centuries, such as the French Revolution, the rise of modern nationalism and imperialism, the Russian Revolution, the Cold War and the imposition of the neo-liberal agenda in the last decades of the twentieth century. It highlights the symbiotic relationship between the media and sport, from the simultaneous emergence of print capitalism and modern sport in Georgian England to the rise of Murdoch’s global satellite television empire in the twenty-first century, and for the first time it explores the alternative, revolutionary models of sport in the early twentieth century. Sport in a Capitalist Society is the first sustained attempt to explain the emergence of modern sport around the world as an integral part of the globalisation of capitalism. It is essential reading for anybody with an interest in the history or sociology of sport, or the social and cultural history of the modern world.

A Short History

Sport in Capitalist Society

Wray Vamplew

John Martin

Compiled by leading researchers, the Encyclopedia of Traditional British Rural Sports is a comprehensive guide to the games, recreational activities and competitive events that emerged from the rural society of Britain's past. The first reference work on the subject to be published in a century, it provides an authoritative record of Britain's indigenous sports, and full discussion of the issues surrounding rural sports today.

Encyclopedia of Traditional British Rural Sports

Rugby has always been a sport with as much drama off the field as on it. For every thrilling last-minute Jonny Wilkinson drop-goal to win the world cup or Jonah Lomu rampage down the touchline for a try, there has been a split, a feud or a controversy. The Oval World is the first full-length history of rugby on a world scale – from its origins in the village-based football games of medieval times up to the globalised sport of the twenty-first century,now played in well over 100 countries. It tells the story of how a game played in an obscure English public school became the winter sport of the British Empire, spread to France, Argentina, Japan and the rest of the world and commanded a global television audience of over four billion for the last world cup final. And how American football – and other games such as Australian, Canadian and Gaelic football – emerged from rugby and highlight just how much the modern gridiron game owes to its English cousin. Featuring the great moments in the game's history and its great names – such as Jonah Lomu, David Duckham, Serge Blanco, Billy Boston and David Campese alongside Rupert Brooke, King George V, Boris Karloff, Charles de Gaulle and Nelson Mandela – The Oval World investigates just what it is about rugby that enables it to survive and thrive in countries with very different traditions and cultures. This is the the definitive world history of a truly global rugby.

Tony Collins

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