Dominant–non-dominant asymmetry of kicking a stationary and rolling ball in a futsal context

The aim of this study was to analyse the characteristics of the asymmetries in the dominant and non-dominant limbs when kicking stationary and rolling balls. Ten experienced Brazilian amateur futsal players participated in this study. Each participant performed kicks under two conditions (stationary ball vs. rolling ball) with the dominant and non-dominant limbs (five kicks per condition per limb). We analysed the kicking accuracy, ball and foot velocities, angular joint displacement and velocity. The asymmetry between the dominant and non-dominant limbs was analysed by symmetry index and two-way repeated measures ANOVA. The results did not reveal any interaction between the condition and limb for ball velocity, foot velocity and accuracy. However, kicking with the dominant limb in both kicks showed higher ball velocity (stationary ball: dominant – 24.27 ± 2.21 m · s^?1 and non-dominant – 21.62 ± 2.26 m · s^?1; rolling ball: dominant – 23.88 ± 2.71 m · s^?1 and non-dominant – 21.42 ± 2.25 m · s^?1), foot velocity (stationary ball: dominant – 17.61 ± 1.87 m · s^?1 and non-dominant – 15.58 ± 2.69 m · s^?1; rolling ball: dominant – 17.25 ± 2.26 m · s^?1 and non-dominant – 14.77 ± 2.35 m · s^?1) and accuracy (stationary ball: dominant – 1.17 ± 0.84 m and non-dominant – 1.56 ± 1.30 m; rolling ball: dominant – 1.31 ± 0.91 m and non-dominant – 1.97 ± 1.44 m). In addition, the angular joint adjustments were dependent on the limb in both kicks (the kicks with non-dominant limb showed lower hip external rotation than the kicks with the dominant limb), indicating that the hip joint is important in kick performance. In conclusion, the kicks with the non-dominant limb showed different angular adjustments in comparison to kicks with the dominant limb. In addition, kicking a rolling ball with the non-dominant limb showed higher asymmetry for accuracy, indicating that complex kicks are more asymmetric.     

Labour market regulation and team performance: The Victorian Football League's Coulter Law, 1930–1970

The Coulter Law was a set of Victorian Football League (VFL) recruiting and payment rules that operated from 1930 to 1970 and set maximum wages for individual players. Testing of the conventional view – that most VFL clubs breached these rules to maximise the utility derived from winning games – is hampered by the unavailability of individual wage data. We develop a model that observes connections between player turnover and team performance at three VFL clubs. The ways that clubs managed team payrolls in a regulated labour market are not sufficient to explain variations in team performance. Clubs lost experienced players to minor leagues, regardless of whether they complied with the Coulter Law. The ability of clubs to develop replacement players had a stronger influence on team performance.     

The role of sport in reflecting and shaping group dynamics: The “intergroup relations continuum” and its application to Fijian rugby and soccer

A significant body of knowledge exists around the role of intergroup relations in sport for development and peace (SFDP). However, while numerous SFDP researchers have investigated overt conflict, scholars have typically overlooked the varied nature of intergroup relations in comparatively stable SFDP environments. In addressing that issue, the authors explore intergroup relations in the context of Fiji, a country which in recent years has moved from a society characterized by the politics of coup d'état to democratic government and relatively peaceful social relations. That said, Fiji has long been shaped by a fundamental cultural divide between Indigenous Fijians (iTaukei) and Fijians of Indian ancestry (Indo-Fijians): this is reflected in the de facto separatism between these groups in relation to their role in rugby union and Association football (soccer). The authors present a qualitative framework—the Intergroup Relations Continuum (IRC)—by which to map intergroup relations as they apply in Fiji according to identity, ethnicity and sport. While the IRC is applied here in a Fijian context, the model is intended to be generalizable, aiming to provide a practical instrument for researchers, sport managers, policymakers and local stakeholders. The goal is to allow them to visually illustrate group affinities, rivalries, and sensibilities in terms of collective relationships that characterize sport and society.     

‘An Outrage,Not Athletics’: Apartheid and South African–United States Rugby Relations, 1976–1990

Abstract

In the period from1976 to1990 during the international campaign against apartheid, some affiliate members of the USA Rugby Football Union, went out of their way to establish and maintain a strong relationship with the South African Rugby Football Board and its successor, the South African Rugby Board. Over the course of six reciprocal tours, they ignored the campaigns of the worldwide anti-apartheid movement and the British Commonwealth. In their dogged pursuit of a sporting relationship with a key South African cultural institution that buttressed apartheid in a sport that, at best, enjoyed minority status in the United States, they defied both their own national federation and the American Olympic Committee. By 1990 as the international campaign against apartheid became a truly worldwide affair, US–South Africa rugby relations were suspended in line with larger political developments both within and outside of the country. This essay, beyond mapping the trials and tribulations of that relationship, also foregrounds a largely hidden history in order to fill the existing gap in the official sporting histories of both the United States and South Africa.     

Muscular Christianity and its makers: sporting monks and churchmen in Anglo‐Norman society, 1000–1300

This research focuses on the (scientific) interaction between civil and military institutions of physical education during the interwar period in Belgium. Based on experimental scientific research, Albert Govaerts, the Research Director of the Military Institute of Physical Education (MIPE), concluded that the Danish gymnastics method of Niels Bukh was more efficient and suitable than the traditional Swedish gymnastics method, which had become institutionalised at an academic level in Belgium since 1908. Based on Govaerts' research results, Danish gymnastics was introduced in 1934 into the entire Belgian Army as the official method of practice and, a few years later, the Danish method was also adopted ‘externally’ in a few Belgian civil institutions. A chronological transition of Scandinavian methods as a result of the modernisations that were implemented did not therefore appear to proceed so naturally in Belgium. The MIPE was to carry out a similar role as a professional profile keeper in the field of physical education in Belgium up to 1947. From a sports historiographical perspective, these Belgian results form a starting point for further international comparative research into early interaction between military and civil institutions of physical education and the associated processes of discipline building, scientification and profile keeping.     

Sporting reunions,contemporary collections and collective biographies: a case study of Harry Batt’s 1971 England team

ABSTRACT

This article centres on a reunion held at the National Football Museum in 2018 of women football players active before 1993, particularly the England team for the unofficial Women's World Cup in 1971. After outlining the organisation of the tournament, the experience of the three youngest England players is articulated using oral history case studies. Finally the argument suggests that social strategies, such as reunions, enable a degree of reminiscence therapy and provide museum and archives with potential material, currently in the private domain, to build contemporary collections, provided that players are willing to gift or loan their items.     

‘Competitive Balance’ in the Top Level of English Football, 1948–2008: An Absent Principle and a Forgotten Ideal

Competitive balance is thought to be an important aspect of sport. Notions of ‘equity’ or ‘fair play’ appeal to the concept of competitive balance. Focusing upon the period between 1948 and 2008, this paper uses data from the top division of English football to investigate what has happened to competitive balance through the use of three measures. The first measure is an index, similar to a concentration ratio, that seeks to capture the extent to which the four most successful teams, by decade, have dominated the league. The second measure uses the Herfindahl index to discover the number of competitive teams in the league over the six decades. The final measure looks, season by season, at the probability of repeat success. The results suggest, from all three measures, that competitive balance has decreased and that the ‘beautiful game’ in England is in danger of becoming a monopoly of the few.     

Manchester and the Emergence of an Association Football Culture, 1840–1880: An Alternative Viewpoint

This paper provides a critique of the article by Gary James and Dave Day on ‘The Emergence of an Association Football Culture in Manchester, 1840–1884', published in Sport in History. We suggest an alternative interpretation of Manchester's football history during this period, arguing that Association football was a minor form of football in a city largely dominated by the rugby code. Furthermore, by employing an artificial construct of Manchester the authors have produced the wrong answer to the wrong question. Rather than trying to prove that Manchester developed an important Association football culture, we suggest they ought to have addressed the question of why such a culture did not exist. The contribution to the development of Association football of three isolated ‘transitory’ clubs in a city as large as Manchester is certainly not ‘substantial’. Subsequently, James and Day also fail to exploit fully their evidence for early football in the Manchester area by omitting to relate this properly to the much wider ongoing debate surrounding the origins of football. Conversely, there is ample evidence that ‘substantial’ Association football developments actually occurred in East Lancashire, centred on Bolton, Blackburn and Darwen, developments that are scarcely noted in James and Day's account.     

An Exception in War and Peace: Ipswich Town Football Club,c. 1907–1945

This article explores the development of a football club as a means of understanding its late adoption of professionalism and its unusual wartime conduct. Ipswich Town were the only Football League team not to kick a ball for the duration of the Second World War. Arguably, the underlying causes of the club's inactivity in both global conflicts can be found in the patriotic and staunchly amateur ethos that permeated the organisation, resulting in a very late conversion to the professional game in 1936. When the Amateur Football Association (AFA) seceded from the Football Association (FA) in 1907, Ipswich Town sided with the gentlemen amateurs and competed in the socially-exclusive Southern Amateur League until the season before the club adopted professionalism. The unique nature of Ipswich Town's evolution offers an opportunity to explore the decline of this branch of the game in the face of professional football, the protagonists who were caught up in it, and the relationship between football and civic pride. In wartime, the human and social continuities between the professional company and its amateur predecessor arguably proved to be more influential than the ruptures that resulted from a controversial inter-war abandonment of cherished amateur principles.     

Sport,Science, and the Social Question in Early Twentieth-Century Argentina: An Analysis of Parliamentary Discussions, 1907–1924

This research reveals an unexplored aspect of Argentina’s sport policy-making process during the first three decades of the twentieth century. Contrary to the common assumption that little attention was paid to sport by early twentieth-century politicians, several bills proposing institutional support for the promotion and organization of national sport were presented in the Argentinean legislature. In order to support these proposals, many legislators resorted to medical and physiological discourse as the most important legitimizing force. Poverty, poor hygiene, and epidemic diseases, generated by rapid modernization and urbanization, urged some turn-of-the-century Argentine political elites to attempt a degree of social intervention within the general framework of the liberal-conservative order, as a way to counteract these evils and further advance the national progress enjoyed since the nineteenth century. In this context, sport was ardently advocated by some politicians as a means to raise scientifically the physical and moral constitution of the ‘Argentinean race’.     

Rhodesia's ‘rebel and racist’ Olympic team: Athletic glory,national legitimacy and the clash of politics and sport

This article traces the history of the Olympic participation of the Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland, then the British colony of Southern Rhodesia, and then unilaterally independent settler-ruled Rhodesia after 1965, placing heavy emphasis on the racially integrated aspects of the sporting sphere. Rhodesia's status in the International Olympic Committee inevitably came under assault after 1965 owing to its white government and international sporting sanctions. The battles of the press, the high-level diplomatic manoeuvring, and finally the IOC debate first to exclude Rhodesia from Munich and then to permanently expel the Rhodesian NOC in 1975 are analysed in detail. As a charismatic organization, the IOC operated outside the world of rules and rational principles, devoted to certain values expressed in ‘Olympism’. Because of this commitment, and the resulting belief that politics had no place in sport, the IOC was insulated from the great changes taking place in the world at large. The newly independent world sought to make democratic equality a part of the Olympic vision, trumping the long-held charismatic principles of the IOC; the expulsion of Rhodesia was the culmination of this trend.     

An expert’s mind in action: Assessing attentional focus,workload and performance in a dynamic,naturalistic environment

ABSTRACT

The aims of this study were to (1) to explore attentional strategies in expert judo players and (2) investigate how attentional focus affects performance effectiveness and perceptions of workload in expert judo players during real competitions. Fourteen expert male judo players participated in the study. A simulated recall method was used following participants’ competition to explore contents of attention qualitatively. The data analysis process for the qualitative portion of the study was an iterative process between inductive and deductive analyses. Quantitative analyses of performance outcomes and workload were then associated with the qualitative findings. Qualitative results revealed that the focus of attention was dynamic and complex, with technical aspects of the movements as the highest identified focus. Quantitative analyses revealed that reporting a lower quantity of attentional cues and higher percentage of focus on opponent resulted in higher performance effectiveness and less perceptions of workload. This study indicates that cognitive control and automaticity may work in a synergistic manner for successful skill execution in expert performance.     

Child-rearing in public spaces: the challenging dual-role relationships of parent–coaches and child–athletes of coaches in Swedish team sports

ABSTRACT

The aim of this study was to examine the challenges of being either a parent–coach or a child–athlete of a coach within the context of Swedish youth sport. Conceptually, this paper draws on educational and sociological theories regarding changing perspectives in child-rearing. The results are based on data gathered from interviews with parent–coaches and child–athletes (age 13–15) of coaches involved in team sports. The results indicate that a range of meanings emerged through these unique sets of interactions, resulting in both positive and negative experiences for both children and their parents. To manage the perceived challenges, four behavioural strategies were used including fairness, distancing, defence and quitting. Overall, this study provides a deeper understanding of the challenges of these unique dual roles in relation to contemporary child-rearing perspectives.     

‘I am a Chess-player’: Respectability in Literary and Urban Space, 1840–1851

Between 1840 and 1851, amateur and professional chess became an increasingly prominent part of the Victorian leisure world. A rapid rise in both literary output on the game and the number of places where it was played fortified the popular image of chess as rational and respectable. This paper challenges this image through close examination of the chess-player and writer George Walker's 1840 article The Café de la Régence. By considering Mike Huggins' challenge to the idea of a homogeneous Victorian middle-class respectability and taking up his implicit call to the historian of middle-class leisure to re-examine all leisure activities, particularly those that have, as the chess-player has until recently, evaded scholarly attention, this paper builds on revisionist challenges to the homogeneous respectability discourse. Providing an alternative reading of the chess-player as a potentially disreputable figure on display in the brightly-lit, notorious Parisian night, Walker depicts a loud, noisy, crowded, ill-mannered, sexist, and money-grabbing environment filled with passion and emotion, far removed from rational recreations that aimed at the individuals' improvement of health and physique, and personal, civic and national prestige.     

Olympic medals and demo-economic factors: Novel predictors,the ex-host effect,the exact role of team size,and the “population-GDP” model revisited

The present study revisited the problem of estimating Olympic success by critical demo-economic indicators. The sample consisted of the 75 winner countries at the Athens 2004 Olympic Games (not previously analyzed). Medal totals were log-linearly regressed on land, population, GDP, urban population, inflation, growth rate, unemployment, labor force, health expenditures, ex-host, and team size. Multiple regression assumptions were tested with proper diagnostics including collinearity. Olympic team size was the best single predictors of Olympic medals (R² = 0.690, p < 0.001), and as an alternative criterion variable was significantly regressed on population, growth rate, health expenditure, and unemployment (R² = 0.563, p < 0.001). Medal totals were significantly regressed on population, ex-host, health expenditure, growth rate, and unemployment (R² = 0.541, p < 0.001). The classical population-GDP model extracted only 28% of the variance in total medals (R² = 0.277, p < 0.001), and this was slightly improved when combined with unemployment (R² = 0.365, p < 0.001). It appears that the size of the Olympic team plays the role of transmitting the composite impact of a country's size and economy to the end-phase of Olympic success. Winning Olympic medals depends on the combined potential of population, wealth, growth rate, unemployment, ex-host, and social-sport expenditures. Larger and wealthier countries win more medals by “producing” larger Olympic teams as a result of possessing more athletic talents and better support for social and sport related activities.     

Kinematics of a striking task: accuracy and speed–accuracy considerations

Handballing in Australian football (AF) is the most efficient passing method, yet little research exists examining technical factors associated with accuracy. This study had three aims: (a) To explore the kinematic differences between accurate and inaccurate handballers, (b) to compare within-individual successful (hit target) and unsuccessful (missed target) handballs and (c) to assess handballing when both accuracy and speed of ball-travel were combined using a novel approach utilising canonical correlation analysis. Three-dimensional data were collected on 18 elite AF players who performed handballs towards a target. More accurate handballers exhibited a significantly straighter hand-path, slower elbow angular velocity and smaller elbow range of motion (ROM) compared to the inaccurate group. Successful handballs displayed significantly larger trunk ROM, maximum trunk rotation velocity and step-angle and smaller elbow ROM in comparison to the unsuccessful handballs. The canonical model explained 73% of variance shared between the variable sets, with a significant relationship found between hand-path, elbow ROM and maximum elbow angular velocity (predictors) and hand-speed and accuracy (dependant variables). Interestingly, not all parameters were the same across each of the analyses, with technical differences between inaccurate and accurate handballers different from those between successful and unsuccessful handballs in the within-individual analysis.