Review by the Irish Post
The Game That Would Be King sets out to do something audacious: rewrite what we think we know about the origins of soccer. Brendan Murphy’s new work, published by Meyer & Meyer Sport earlier this month, is part scholarly odyssey, part time-traveller’s guide, charting the evolution of ball games over five millennia. The journey stretches from ancient Egypt to Mesoamerica, through the Greeks, the Chinese dynasties, and the Roman Empire, before arriving in medieval Britain and, crucially, Ireland, where much of the real action begins. Kicking a ball, it seems, was a ubiquitous pastime.
Murphy traces a family tree of games long forgotten: trapball, stoolball, the wonderfully named “camping” and “knappan”, with hockey, hurling, baseball, bowling, tennis and golf stepping into view along the way. Exotic cousins — baggataway, knattleikur, soule, calcio — are part of the story too, although possibly not in evolutionary terms; just evidence that playing ball seems to have been with us, in most areas of the world, for a long time. Soccer remains centre stage, but the wider cast gives the book its colour, strangeness and charm.
For Irish readers there is particular interest. Large portions of the research delve into hurling’s antiquity and its role as arguably Europe’s earliest post-Roman field sport. Murphy mines political and literary sources to show how, over centuries, an Irishman striking a ball could, in the wrong company, be seen as subversion. Newspapers bristle with official suspicion, and the author threads these social and political echoes through the narrative with care.
There are fascinating digressions too, not least Murphy’s reiteration of evidence that elements of Norse mythology may have sprung from Irish oral tradition, supported by the striking statistic that 43 per cent of Iceland’s first settlers came from Ireland and Scotland. This, of course, is not new research, and has been attested to before. “The Irish brought to Iceland their literature and their learning – of which the Scandinavians had nothing,” said Halldór Laxness, Iceland’s Nobel Laureate in Literature. “Without the sagas we would just be another Danish island.”
Packed with oddities, anecdotes and ephemera, The Game That Would Be King is a dense but engaging work — likely the most comprehensive history of early ball games yet assembled, described in the publisher’s words as “a revolutionary text”.