Artículos de revistas sobre el tema "Tournaments, 1959"

During the last two decades the interests of scholars of early drama and of urban historians have found common ground in the study of urban celebration and ceremonial. For the student of early drama the beginnings of this interest coincided with a redefinition of the area and nature of the study of early drama, a shift in emphasis from the textual and literary problems of the few extant dramatic texts to the circumstances and conditions of their performance. Signalled in the mid-1950s by F.M. Salter's revealing study of the production of Chester's Whitsun plays, this movement gained impetus from Glynne Wickham's investigations of the development of English stagecraft between 1300 and 1660, the first volume of which appeared in 1959, which illustrated the interdependence of a range of ostensibly disparate activities, such as plays, royal entries and tournaments. Then, in the 1970s an iconoclastic challenge to traditional theories about the staging of mystery plays was mounted by Alan H. Nelson, drawing upon various local records, and from the resulting controversies was born a new initiative, the Records of Early English Drama, whose avowed purpose is ‘to find, transcribe, and publish external evidence of dramatic, ceremonial, and minstrel activity in Great Britain before 1642’. That series is still ongoing and already constitutes a major primary resource of regional documentary transcripts for all interested in early dramatic and quasidramatic activity, suggesting a hitherto unsuspected diversity and frequency of dramatic activity throughout England.

A class of modification is proposed for calculating a score for each Player/team in Unbalanced Incomplete paired Comparisons Sports Tournaments. Many papers dealing with Balanced Incomplete Paired Comparison Sports Tournaments with at most one comparison per pair have appeared since 1950. However, little has been written about unbalanced situations in which the player /the team (object) ( j ) plays unequal number of games against the player/the team( m ) in a tournament, and the results of all games can be summarized in a Win-Lose matrix Y = { Yjm } , where Yjm = 1,0,1/2, respectively, according to as the player or the team ( j ) wins, losses or draws against the player or the team (m ). Published papers by Ramanujacharyulu (1964), Cowden, D.J. (1975), and David, H. A.(1988) have concentrated on the problem of converting the results of unbalanced incomplete paired comparison tournaments into rank with little consideration of the main relative ability on each player or team. We suggest (modification) another way of quantifying the outcomes of the games/tournaments, in particular, ratings on a scales, 0 to 5, 1 to 10 .ect. It is important to consider not only the vector Vj(d) or the vectors Sj, in scoring and ranking the k teams in such tournaments, but also the vector Zj, where Zj = Sj + SjRj, to take into account the ratio of the relative ability of each team ( Rj ). The proposed modification helps to introduce these methods for use in comparisons/games (tournaments), where the player/team are quantified on a special scale. e.g. 0-5, 1-10, ..etc. We conclude the following:- The scores stabilized to three decimal places at iteration 2 in Cowden’s method Vj(d) .see table(1.4). The scores stabilized to three decimal places at iteration 2 in David’s method Sj , and it’s modification Zj. The proposed modification (Zj) has the advantage of removing ties from David’s method (Sj), and hence it is the best method.

Purpose: an analysis of the competitive activity of men's club handball teams in the final tournament of the European Champions and Champions League Cup gives you the opportunity to determine the rating of the teams on the continent and the development tendencies of the game. Material: the best men's handball clubs from 52 national federations in Europe which competed in the qualifying tournament and the group stages of the draw and were the winners and prize winners of the European Champions and Champions League Cup of 1956/1957-2017/2018. A systematic review of the available qualitative literature was conducted according to Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic reviews. The “Web of Science”, “Physical Education Index (ProQuest)”, “Google Scholar” and “Scientific Periodicals Ukraine” databases were used in order to ensure, from an early stage, the scientific quality of the revised studies. The research was conducted based on ‘any field’ (e.g. title, abstract, text) and no restrictions were made regarding the language of publication. The terms used in the research were “teams scoring performance”, “elite handball”, “game location”, “players exclusions”, “home advantage”, “quality”, “opposition”, and “indicators”. The quality of the articles was assessed by a set of criteria developed by members of the Evidence for Policy and Practice Information and other specialists. The initial search found 132 journal articles; for a final list of 52 publications. Results: The article covers the organizational aspects of the competitive activity of men's handball clubs in Europe at the European Champions and Champions League tournaments from 1956 to 2018. The given analysis of the highest achievements of the leading handball clubs which are not only winners and prize winners, but also the countries that they represented. The winners and prize winners are marked both between teams of different countries and teams of one country. Conclusions: Achievements and rankings of the leading handball clubs in the international arena are the main components of preparing them for official competitions: new approaches to planning the preparation of players and teams for higher sports achievements and maximum realization of individual opportunities; the integration of the individual readiness of highly skilled handball players into leading handball clubs; to the important aspects of the new rules of the game, which are developed in the theory and implemented in practice; the main tendencies in the international and European handball that systematically develop and apply to a core of players as well as the next reserve.

Purpose: an analysis of the competitive activity of men's club handball teams in the final tournament of the European Champions and Champions League Cup gives you the opportunity to determine the rating of the teams on the continent and the development tendencies of the game. Material: the best men's handball clubs from 52 national federations in Europe which competed in the qualifying tournament and the group stages of the draw and were the winners and prize winners of the European Champions and Champions League Cup of 1956/1957-2017/2018. A systematic review of the available qualitative literature was conducted according to Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic reviews. The “Web of Science”, “Physical Education Index (ProQuest)”, “Google Scholar” and “Scientific Periodicals Ukraine” databases were used in order to ensure, from an early stage, the scientific quality of the revised studies. The research was conducted based on ‘any field’ (e.g. title, abstract, text) and no restrictions were made regarding the language of publication. The terms used in the research were “teams scoring performance”, “elite handball”, “game location”, “players exclusions”, “home advantage”, “quality”, “opposition”, and “indicators”. The quality of the articles was assessed by a set of criteria developed by members of the Evidence for Policy and Practice Information and other specialists. The initial search found 132 journal articles; for a final list of 52 publications. Results: The article covers the organizational aspects of the competitive activity of men's handball clubs in Europe at the European Champions and Champions League tournaments from 1956 to 2018. The given analysis of the highest achievements of the leading handball clubs which are not only winners and prize winners, but also the countries that they represented. The winners and prize winners are marked both between teams of different countries and teams of one country. Conclusions: Achievements and rankings of the leading handball clubs in the international arena are the main components of preparing them for official competitions: new approaches to planning the preparation of players and teams for higher sports achievements and maximum realization of individual opportunities; the integration of the individual readiness of highly skilled handball players into leading handball clubs; to the important aspects of the new rules of the game, which are developed in the theory and implemented in practice; the main tendencies in the international and European handball that systematically develop and apply to a core of players as well as the next reserve.

Słowa kluczowe: edukacja, zapasy, współpraca, region, Obwód Kaliningradzki. Streszczenie Wkrótce po zakończeniu działań wojennych (1945) utworzono w Okręgu Mazurskim pierwsze placówki oświatowe i rozpoczął się proces edukacyjno-wychowawczy. Po przekształceniu okręgu w województwo olsztyńskie przybył na Warmię ppor. Zenon Rydziński i jako oficer-zapaśnik propagował na modnych wówczas festynach i zawodach pokazowych walory uprawianej niegdyś dyscypliny sportowej. Po utworzeniu w Olsztynie Okręgowego Związku Zapaśniczego szkolenie prowadzono także w powstających spontanicznie klubach i sekcjach Ludowych Zespołów Sportowych. Wspomniane stowarzyszenia szczególnie cenną rolę odgrywały w środowiskach wiejskich. Po zgłębieniu podstaw nawiązano współpracę z Obwodem Kaliningradzkim. Wzajemna wymiana doświadczeń skutkowała wzrostem poziomu wyszkolenia sportowego, budowaniu zrębów przyjaźni między obu społecznościami, a wyjazdy zagraniczne stwarzały możliwość bliższego poznania regionów i kultury mieszkającej tam ludności. Ekipy wyjeżdżające za granicę tworzono z najlepszych zawodników, a powołanie w skład drużyny było dla zapaśników jednocześnie wyróżnieniem i nagrodą. W wymianie sportowej uczestniczyła także młodzież uprawiająca sport w szkolnych sekcjach. W treningach brali udział również młodzi Romowie i Ukraińcy i był to wzorcowy przykład integracji społecznej. Wzrastający poziom wyszkolenia skutkował uczestnictwem w turniejach ogólnopolskich, mistrzostwach Polski, a w roku 1978 rozegrano nawet mecz z przebywającą w Polsce drużyną stanu Colorado (USA). Bibliografia Archiwum Akt – Archiwum Akt Nowych w Warszawie, Państwowy Urząd Wychowania Fizycznego i Przysposobienia Wojskowego. 78, s. 22, Stan urządzeń. [Device status] 78, s. 22. 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Dmowski, Skubis, 1976 – Dmowski Zygmunt, Skubis Jacek. Zapasy judo. Warszawa 1976. 133 s. [Judo wrestling]. Warszawa 1976. 133 s. [Poland]. Tracewski, 1979 – Tracewski Janusz. Zapasy dla ciebie. Warszawa 1979. 18 s. [Stocks for you]. Warszawa 1979. 18 s. [Poland]. Filipkowski, 1979 – Filipkowski Tadeusz. Węzłowe problemy oświaty województwa olsztyńskiego po1945r. [Key problems of education in the Olsztyn voivodeship after 1945]. W: Zeszyt Pedagogiczny. 50 lat szkolnictwa polskiego na Warmii i Mazurach. Olsztyn 1979. S. 97– 128. [Poland]. Gąsiorowski, 2005 – Gąsiorowski Andrzej. Podróże historyczne i krajoznawcze na pograniczu pruskim 1466 – 1939. Olsztyn 2005. 379 s. [Historical and sightseeing trips in the Prussian borderland 1466 – 1939]. Olsztyn 2005. 379 s.[Poland]. Godlewski, 1987 – Godlewski Piotr. Mini-zapasy. [Mini-stocks]. W: Wychowanie Fizyczne i Higiena Szkolna 1987, Nr 8. Warszawa 1987. S. 5 – 12. Godlewski, 1987 – Godlewski Piotr. Rozwój organizacyjny sportu zapaśniczego w pierwszych latach Polski Ludowej. [Organizational development of wrestling sport in the first years of People's Poland]. W: Monografia AWF, Poznań, 1987, Nr 235. S. 233–242. Godlewski, 1987 – Godlewski Piotr. Aktualne problemy badań w zapasach, Warszawa 1987. 59 s. [Current research problems in stocks]. Warszawa 1987. 59 s. [Poland]. Godlewski, 1988 – Godlewski Piotr. Zarys dziejów polskiego zapaśnictwa profesjonalnego. Gorzów Wielkopolski 1988. 64 s. [An outline of the history of Polish professional wrestling]. Gorzów Wielkopolski 1988. 64 s. [Poland]. Gross, 2011 – Gross Radosław. Powszechna Organizacja „Służba Polsce” w województwie olsztyńskim w latach 1948 – 1955. Olsztyn 2011. 384 s. [The General Organization "Służba Polsce" in the Olsztyn voivodship in the years 1948 – 1955]. Olsztyn 2011. 384 s. [Poland]. Górniewicz, 2008 – Górniewicz Józef. Teoria wychowania. Olsztyn 2008. 187 s. [The theory of education]. Olsztyn 2008. 187 s. [Poland]. Jaroszewski, Połaniecka, 2019 – Jaroszewski Julian, Połaniecka Agnieszka. Sukcesy sportowe zapaśników z terenu województwa łódzkiego w latach 1945 – 1990. [Sports successes of wrestlers from the Łódź Province in 1945 – 1990]. W: Sport i Turystyka. Środkowoeuropejskie Czasopismo Naukowe 2019, t. 2, Nr 3. Częstochowa 2019. S. 71– 93. Księga Pamiątkowa – Księga Pamiątkowa Ludowego Klubu Sportowego „Agrokompleks” Kętrzyn. [Memorial Book of the People's Sports Club "Agrokompleks". Kętrzyn]. 52 s. [Poland]. Masztaler, Walichnowski, 1999 – Masztaler Jan, Walichnowski Feliks. Wokół stadionu Leśnego. [Around the Leśny Stadium.]. Olsztyn 1999, 38 s. [Poland]. Mistrzostwa w zapasach, 1971 – Mistrzostwa w zapasach. [Wrestling Championship]. W: Gazeta Olsztyńska 1971, Nr 33. S. 4. [Poland]. Nowocień, 2013 – Nowocień Jerzy. Studium o pedagogice kultury fizycznej. Warszawa 2013. 248 s. [A study on the pedagogy of physical culture]. Warszawa 2013. 248 s. [Poland]. Nowakowski, Grotkowski, 1955 – Nowakowski Witold, Grotkowski Józef. Zapasy klasyczne, Warszawa 1955. 90 s. [Classic stocks]. Warszawa 1955. 90 s. [Poland]. Nowe związki, 1965 – Nowe związki. [New relationships]. W: Głos Olsztyński 1965, Nr 209. S. 6. [Poland]. Piłkarze Warmii, 1956 – Piłkarze Warmii i Piszczewiko inaugurują przyjacielskie kontakty Olsztyna i Kaliningradu. [The players of Warmia and Piszczewiko inaugurate friendly contacts between Olsztyn and Kaliningrad]. W: Głos Olsztyńsk 1956, Nr 218. S. 5. [Poland]. Remis na olsztyńskim, 1956 – Remis na olsztyńskim ringu Kalioningrad – Olsztynianka 10:10. [Draw in the Olsztyn ring Kalioningrad - Olsztynianka 10:10]. W: Głos Olsztyński 1956, Nr 228. S. 4. [Poland]. Szypulski, 1991 – Szypulski Edward. Działalność sekcji zapaśniczych na terenie województwa olsztyńskiego w latach 1957 – 1990. Gorzów Wielkopolski 1991. S. 36. [Activity of wrestling sections in the Olsztyn voivodeship in 1957 – 1990]. Gorzów Wielkopolski 1991. S. 36. Tracewski, 2010 – Tracewski Janusz. Zapasy. W drodze do mistrzostwa, Warszawa 2010. 153 s. [Wrestling. On the way to the championship]. Warszawa 2010. 153 s. [Poland]. Tracewski, 2017 – Tracewski Janusz. Polska szkoła zapasów, Warszawa 2017. 128 s. [Polish school of wrestling]. Warszawa 2017. 128 s. [Poland]. Trzeba pokochać sport, 1975 – Trzeba pokochać sport. [You have to love sport ]. W: Wiadomości Sportowe 1975, Nr 48. S 4. [Poland]. Turniej piłkarski, 1965 – Turniej piłkarski w Braniewie. [Football tournament in Braniewo]. W: Głos Olsztyński 1965, Nr 159. S. 6. [Poland]. Turniej zapaśniczy, 1980 – Turniej zapaśniczy z udziałem reprezentacji Kaliningradu. [Wrestling tournament with the participation of the Kaliningrad national team]. W: Agrokompleks 1980, Nr 20-21. S. 8. [Poland]. Urniaż, 2000 – Urniaż Jerzy. Sport na Warmii i Mazurach w latach 1945 – 1975. Olsztyn 2000. 270 s. [Sport in Warmia and Mazury in the years 1945 – 1975]. Olsztyn 2000. 270 s. [Poland]. Urniaż, 2008 – Urniaż Jerzy. Współpraca sportowa w regionach warmińsko-mazurskim i kaliningradzkim w latach 1956 – 2006. Olsztyn 2008. 285 s. [Sports cooperation in the Warmian-Masurian and Kaliningrad regions in the years 1956 – 2006]. Olsztyn 2008. 285 s. [Poland]. Wójcik, Boraczyński, 2015 – Wójcik Zbigniew, Boraczyński Tomasz. Kultura fizyczna mniejszości polskiej w Prusach Wschodnich. [ Physical culture of the Polish minority in East Prussia]. W: Rozprawy Naukowe 2015, Nr 50. Wrocław 2015. S 16 – 23. [Poland]. Zapasy, 1972 – Zapasy. Olsztyniak B. Andryszczyk – mistrzem Polski. [Inventories. Olsztyniak B. Andryszczyk - the champion of Poland]. W: Głos Olsztyński 1972, Nr 50. S. 4. [Poland].

The formation of the competition system in professional golf began in the second half of the 19th century. First, tournaments were founded, which later began to be combined into tours. At the same time, the so-called majors remain the pinnacle of both the men's and women's golf calendar. Among men, in particular, there is the so-called Championship of the Professional Golf Association (PGA Championship), which is held exclusively for professional golfers. Accordingly, it has its own characteristic features, which were formed over a long historical period. The purpose of the study was to characterize the historical features of the formation of the Championship of the Professional Golf Association and its current state. Materials and methods: analysis and synthesis, historical method, systematic approach, theoretical interpretation and explanation. Results and conclusion. A key date in the history of the Championship of the Professional Golf Association is 1916, when the tournament was founded by the Professional Golf Association of America and it entered into the Championship of the Professional Golf Association Tour. The tournament is held annually and during the entire history only in 1917, 1918 and 1943, it did not take place due to the World Wars. During 1916-1958, the Championship of the Professional Golf Association was held in the format of match play (play in pairs for the elimination of one of the participants). Since 1958 until today, professional golfers play for the championship in the so-called “stroke play” format (a game for counting the number of strokes on each hole, the participant with the least number of strokes wins). The format of the playoff round, which is held on the condition that the participants in the final are equal in points, also changed during the development of the tournament. Thus, at first, the playoff took place on additional holes until one of the participants won, and today its format involves playing on three mandatory holes. In 1998, the Championship of the Professional Golf Association became a part of the Championship of the Professional Golf Association European Tour, another of golf's most prestigious tours. Today, the prize pool of the tournament is $15 million, which is the second largest award in the majors. At the same time, there have been no significant changes in the format of the Championship of the Professional Golf Association and its calendar in the last twenty years. For a long time, the tournament starts in May and is the second major among the Championship of the Professional Golf Association Tour calendar. At the same time, in 2020 and 2021, the tour experienced a decrease in total revenues as a result of measures caused by the COVID pandemic

This article is based on my personal reminiscences about the early days of computer chess tournaments, describing not only how different the technology was, but also that progress was steady and continues today in the broader field of Artificial Intelligence. The author was a participant in the 1st ACM computer chess championship (1970) and continued to compete well into the 1980s. Speaking for myself, I learned how to play chess in Junior High School (actually King Charles 1 Grammar School in Kidderminster, UK), but now only remember losing in a simultaneous game with C.H.O’D. Alexander (the UK Chess Champion) in 1950. In High School (Preston Grammar School) I played for the school’s chess team, who were undefeated in the 1954–55 school year. Naturally I played for the University of Nottingham (where I was studying Mathematics), and later for the Bedfordshire County team, before leaving to join Boeing, Seattle, in 1962. That said, I don’t think I was ever better than a Class A player. Basically, I have played chess all my life, and it has helped develop my problem-solving skills.

The aim of the paper is to present the discipline of football in the provinces of Stanisławów and Ternopil in the years 1920-1939. The area of Stanisławów and Ternopil provinces was mainly inhabited by the Poles, Ukrainians and Jews. In the years 1920-1939, the number of clubs and sports associations that ran football sections among Polish, Jewish and Ukrainian citizens grew. Initially, those clubs and sports associations belonged to Lviv Regional Football Association (OZPN). In mid 20s and in the 30s of the 20th century, football organizational structures were created: sub-region of Stanisławów, sub-region of Ternopil and Stanisławów OZPN. The football players of Rewera Stanisławów, Pogoń Stryj and Strzelec Górka Stanisławów became successful all over Poland. In the years 1934-1939, the footballers from the province of Stanisławów – as representatives of Stanisławów OZPN – took part in playoffs to get promoted to the national league. Junior football players of Rewera Stanisławów and Strzelec Górka Stanisławów took part in final tournaments of Polish junior championships in the years 1936-1939.

Wrestling became an interest in Poland only at the end of the 19th century. However, in the Olsztyn Province, among other reasons due to historical conditions, this was a much later development. The first propaganda fights took place only in 1950. Shortly afterwards, the national team of the Olsztyn voivodeship participated in the nationwide tournament ‘For the City Cup’. However, a professional section was only established seven years later. Then, Lt. Zenon Rydziński initiated the training process at RKS “Budowlani” Olsztyn. It resulted in subsequent numerous sports successes. In 1964, thanks to the efficiency of activists from the People’s Sports Teams, young people from the Giżycko province also wrestled. The most die-hard players then set up further sections in the cities they came from

After World War II, Germany was split into four occupation zones, from which two states arose in 1949: West Germany (officially called FRG) and East Germany (officially GDR). East Germany was under Soviet control until 1989. In both states, computer chess and chess computers followed interesting, but rather different paths. We give an overview of East German developments: on commercial chess computers, problem chess programs, the book of 1987, the Serfling tournaments, and correspondence chess pioneer Heinrich Burger. There exist important interrelations between topics. The starting point is a short description of the Cold War situation with its harsh economic consequences for the socialist states, including East Germany.

The present study aimed to report different level games in terms of their external game loads, using data collected from GPS performance indicators in Brazilian soccer teams. We used measures of 464 performances of professional soccer athletes during the National Tournament (NT=265), State Tournament (ST=89), National Cup (NC=44), and the International Tournament (IT=66). The performance analysis included the assessment of Total (meters) and Relative (meters/minutes) distances; running (>14km/h), and sprinting (>18km/h) distance; the number of sprints (>18km/h and >24km/h); accelerations (above three m/s2), deceleration (less than three m/s2) and jumps (>30 cm); Total and Relative load – per minute. There were differences (p<0.05) in terms of relative distance between NT and ST (102.2 ±9.5 vs. 98.1± 10.3) and between ST and NC (98.1± 10.3 vs. 103.4 ±9.6). In sprints >18km/h NT differed from ST (60.4 ±5.9 vs 52.7 ±19.9). In sprints >24km/h differences could be found between NT and ST (10.7 ±5.9 vs 8.7 ±5.4). In Total Load NT differed with respect to ST (908.6 ±141.5 vs. 852.7 ±138.5) In Relative Load differences were reported between NT and ST (10 ±1.2 vs. 9.3 ±1.4) and IT (10 ±1.2 vs. 9.4 ±1.4), and between ST and NC (9.3 ±1.4 vs. 10.0 ±1.4). Finally, concerning deceleration, NT differed when compared to ST (36.1 ±9.9 vs. 32 ±11) as well as ST differed from IT (32 ±11 vs. 37.5 ±9.7). The present results make it possible to create specific training games according to tournament level associated with the predominant activities performed during the competition.

Some of the most exciting contests in US professional basketball are the win-or-gohome, game seven’s in the playoffs. The National Basketball Association has instituted a play-in tournament for the 2021 and 2022 playoffs consisting solely of one-game series, which has sparked considerable controversy among the league’s executives and players. To understand the effect of the play-in tournament on playoff participation, we developed a model to determine the home-court advantage in elimination games. Various solution techniques—including the log-binomial and robust Poisson regression models—are used to estimate the model parameters using elimination-game data from the 1955–2019 playoffs. These models are appropriate alternatives to logistic regression as probabilistic classifiers with dichotomous response variables and provide risk ratios (in terms of probabilities) that are easier to interpret for someone unfamiliar with odds ratios. Results indicate that the home-court advantage for equally matched teams would be in the 0.50 to 0.55 range; when considering the games are played at the home arena of the team with the better regular-season record, the home team is expected to win 65 per cent of elimination playoff games. These models can be used to estimate the likelihood of each play-in participant making the playoffs.

The long-term work of organizations, the creation of an economic competitive environment gave impetus to the formation and establishment of a number of competitions in professional football in Europe. This requires clarification of the factors influencing its development. The purpose is to find out the peculiarities of the formation and development of professional football competitions (on the example of the UEFA Europa League). Methods: theoretical analysis and generalization, systemic analysis, historical and logical, abstraction, comparison, formalization, modeling. The results. The UEFA Europa League is the second most prestigious competition in professional football among European clubs. The tournament was started in 1971, but it was preceded by another – the Inter-Cities Fairs Cup (1955-1971). During its existence, these professional competitions have seen a number of changes in the format of their holding. The most characteristic, in our opinion, relate to the 2008/09, 2009/10 and 2021/22 seasons (current stage). Despite the changes in the format of the competition, the quantitative indicators of the sports clubs involved in the competition were constantly growing. In the first season of 1971/72, 64 teams from 31 national associations took part in the tournament, in the 1994/95 UEFA season – 113 and in the 1996/97 season – 117 teams. In 1999, after the merger of two major competitions – the UEFA Cup Winners’ Cup and the UEFA Cup, the number of participating clubs expanded to 142 teams, and already in the 2005/06 season, their number was increased to 157. Now due to the scaling of the football competitions Europa League in the 2019/20 season 213 teams from 55 associations took part in the tournament. As of the 2022/23 season, 57 teams from all 55 associations are participating in the Europa League due to the appearance of another competition – the UEFA Conference League. Conclusions. The formula for the team’s participation in the various rounds of the Europa League (UEFA Cup) tournament has undergone several systemic changes. These changes the most reflected in the competition as of the 2008/09 season, (starting from the 2009/10 season) and the modern version (starting from the 2021/22 season years).

The presented article deals with the participation of Czechoslovak sportsmen in Inter-Allied Games. This great sports action, which was mainly organized by the YMCA, took place in Paris in 1919 to celebrate the victorious states of WWI. From the newly founded Czechoslovakia the wrestlers, tennis players, football players, fencers and rowers took part. The Czechoslovak sportsmen achieved a lot of great results, for example the first place in football tournament. Except from comparison of results of Czechoslovak and foreign sportsmen the Inter-Allied Games had a great impact for the development of physical education and sport in interwar Czechoslovakia. The Czechoslovakian participants started to cooperate with the American team coach – the Czech-American Josef Amos Pipal, who contributed to sports development in Czechoslovakia in early 1920s.

The purpose of this research is to find a solution to the problem of low learning outcomes and the level of student activeness which is 60% still below KKM and has not been completed for fraction material. The learning method used is the Teams Games Tournament (TGT) type learning model. This research is part of Classroom Action Research (PTK), which uses two cycles, namely cycle I and cycle II to assess the application of TGT. Planning, implementing, observing, and reflecting on the learning process are part of each cycle. Students who acted as subjects of grade V students of SDN Kleco 1 Surakarta amounted to 28 students. Data were collected by observation, tests and documentation. Data analysis used descriptive, qualitative, and comparative. The data shows that the increase in student involvement and learning outcomes can be done by using a cooperative learning model with the Teams Games Tournament (TGT) format. grade V SDN Kleco 1 Surakarta the level of student activeness increased by 19.9% in cycle I 68.4% increased in cycle II to 88.3%. The class average score for students in grade V increased along with their learning outcomes in math. In cycle I 59.1 and cycle II 82.5, Regarding learning completeness, the percentage of students who are complete (80%) has been in accordance with the estimated performance indicators. The improvement in learning outcomes occurred because before learning in groups, the teacher presented the roles to each student and emphasized to them the importance of collaborating to achieve a common goal.

Competitiveness of sporting contests is key to attract fan interest. However, limited research compared levels of competitiveness in men’s and women’s sports. This study focuses on the evolution of intra-match competitive balance (IMCB) and competitive intensity (IMCI) in the UEFA Men’s and Women’s Champions League (UMCL and UWCL). Data were initially collected for 3299 games over 2001–2019 (2314 in UMCL; 985 in UWCL) to analyse the evolution within and between each tournament. In addition, 989 matches played in UMCL over 1955–1973 were added to compare both competitions in their early stages. Results show a deterioration in IMCB and IMCI between 2001–2009 and 2009–2019 for the UMCL. Conversely, the UWCL benefitted from an increase in IMCB but not in IMCI, except for the final. The UWCL is still less competitive than the UMCL. This result holds true even when comparing the early stages of both competitions, i.e., replacing 2001–2019 by 1955–1973 for the UMCL. However, the UWCL has become closer to the UMCL in terms of IMCB and IMCI over time, a result linked to the development of women’s football. From a theoretical perspective, this article advances knowledge of IMCB and IMCI, appropriate for competitions with knockout stages. It underlines the role of the pool of players as an explanatory factor for the gap in competitiveness between European men’s and women’s football.

Three Black women pose for a photograph mid play, a golf course stretching out behind them. With slight smiles, they squint in the sun at the camera, taking a break from the meditative intensity of the game. Two women wear skirts, or maybe one is sporting a culotte, bobby socks, and at least one of them seems to be wearing a regulation cleated shoe. A breeze blows fabric against legs. Each holds her club atop a golf ball, their bodies and the flagstick casting shadows on the putting green (see Figure 1). They are members of the Par-Links Black Women's Golf Club, formed in California's East Bay in 1958. Advertising for new members in the Oakland Black newspaper, the California Voice, the club held its first tournament the following year at Tilden Park Golf Course in Berkeley. “… challenge or be challenged,” the group cheered: “Your place on the ladder depends on your win.”

This study examined and discussed the historical significance of the developmental aspects of the Kodokan Judo in the process of inflow of Kodokan Judo by forced suppression after the establishment of YMCA Judo in 1906 in Korea with an objective perspective and drew conclusions. The establishment of Judo Korea was officially established on November 22, 1917 by the forced suppression of the Chosun Judo Department in the YMCA Hwangseong Christian Youth Association in 1906. This group was a group by political means of the Chosun Governor-General and the Japanese imperialists.,On the other hand, the Judo part of the Joseon Dynasty formed a momentum for the commercial spirit in the Judo part of the YMCA Hwangseong Christian Youth Association for the sake of national revival. In other words, with the claim of Lee Sang-jae, a teacher of Vietnam, who is training 100 people in the terrible times of the Japanese colonial rule, the national leaders did not spare all physical support to inspire the business spirit through Judo first, and the indifference of the drama in the emerging military schools became the starting point for the independence movement. In addition, the first Judo tournament was held on October 19, 1929, with five organizations participating, but the last tournament was abolished by Japan on October 12, 1935, as the 7th meeting. However, Lee Sun-gil won the championship and runner-up in 1930s and 1940s, and Seok Jin-kyung not only won the solo exhibition of the Judo Championship in July 1933, but also the Chosun Judo re-defeated Japan and gave a national spirit of business as a country. Thus, it will be possible to present the historical value that achieved the grandeur through the national thought of Judo in Korea during the Japanese colonial period and the academic plan of Judo history education.

Many factors influence the Somatotype of the human body. In addition to genetics, there are also environmental factors and cultural differences. This study aimed to find out the somatotype Profile of Gorkha soccer players based on their playing position and also to determine which anthropometric type is the most distinctive. The study sample consisted of 30 National-level Soccer players from different academies or clubs who participated in the National Level Championships Tournament will be selected purposively as subjects and aged 18-25 years, including Striker (N=10), Midfielder (N=10) and Defender (N=10). Heath and Carter’s (1990) equations for decimal anthropometry (ISAK) measurements were used. Body density percentage was calculated according to the equation of Durnin and Womersley (1974). Then, the amount of body fat was determined using the Siri (1956) equation. The results indicated that most of the players showed a body type that was ectomorphic mesomorph, which is the most important component in all positions. Therefore, the study concluded that a body type with a strong ectomorph and slight mesomorph advantage would benefit soccer players at the elite level.

The behavior of birds in a group represents a different level of interaction, competition between individuals in the composition of animals located in limited areas. The hierarchical relationships of individuals are explored by monitoring various interactions, mostly "negative". The paper uses an analysis-experiment of behavior in competitive situations. Using methods - behavioral characteristics in birds (K. Lorenz, 1930), pecking order (T. Schelderup-Ebbe, 1922), community organization (McBride, 1959) - a study was conducted on the interaction of chickens of the Avicolor breed. In the study, "tournament tables" were compiled based on ethograms, in which the number of pecking of chickens among themselves for a specific period of time was noted. Next, we form a table that will show the number of pecks of the chicken that hit other members of the group - a vertical column, and the number of blows that this chicken received from other participants - a horizontal column. In this study, an analysis is presented for the behavior of chickens, which was a linear hierarchy, where K was the dominant individual, in which the newly introduced individual T ranked seventh. After the removal of the dominant (individual K) from the group for a certain period of time, the individual T occupies the first rank position, and after the return, the individual K occupies a dominant position. It is assumed that the hierarchical ranking that singles out the most capable individuals gives them preferential success in the process of natural selection.

In the summer of 1998, in order to conduct field research, I visited Colonia Okinawa, an agricultural settlement of Okinawan immigrants established in 1954 in the Santa Cruz region of Bolivia.1 I tried to make interview appointments with issei, or the first-generation settlers, and suggested that I visit them around noon, a time of the day I thought would be easy for them to accommodate. The first few I approached, however, asked me to see them at a different time of the day, reasoning that they might be sleeping around noon. Sleeping? At noon? My confusion was soon cleared up when I found out that many issei woke up in the middle of the night to watch the Sumo Grand Tournament telecast by the Nihon Hμsμ Kyμkai (NHK), or Japan Broadcasting Company, and then went back to sleep. A nisei, or second-generation, child of one of my issei interviewees who was an avid Sumo fan told me that he often heard cheers and grunts from his father in the middle of the night, while everybody else in the house was sleeping.

Chinese Women’s Super League (CWSL for short) has a comparatively short history. Initiated in 1997, it represented the highest level of Chinese Football. Because of Covid-19, the Chinese Women’s Super League changed into a tournament system and audiences were only allowed to watch online games. The purpose of the study was to help CWSL promote its notability under the circumstance of Covid-19 by using Neil Borden’s marketing mix theory of 4Ps developed in 1950. SWOT analysis was used throughout the study. The result showed that the Chinese Women’s Super League had difficulties improving its match quality and fan engagement online due to Covid-19 and its internal operation. Specific advice to improve the league’s notability was listed below, including but not limited to opening clubs’ official websites and players’ official accounts, making sports videos, collaborating with well-known anchors, implanting a lottery system into the live broadcast, affiliating all women teams to men football clubs, increase the number of women teams and matches, and sell season tickets. Future studies will focus on specific online promotion strategies. In addition, after Covid-19 ends, future studies will generate new market strategies for all Chinese Women’ Football leagues.

Context Basketball has remained a popular sport for players and spectators in the United States since before the first National Collegiate Athletic Association men's championship tournament in 1939. Background Routine examinations of men's basketball injuries are important for identifying emerging temporal patterns. Methods Exposure and injury data collected in the National Collegiate Athletic Association Injury Surveillance Program during 2014–2015 through 2018–2019 athletic seasons were analyzed. Injury counts, rates, and proportions were used to describe injury characteristics, and injury rate ratios were used to examine differences in injury rates. Results The overall injury rate was 7.28 per 1000 athlete exposures, with competition rates twice those of practices (injury rate ratio = 2.07; 95% CI = 1.93, 2.22). Injuries to the ankle (22.2%), knee (13.0%), head/face (11.3%), and hand/wrist (10.1%) accounted for most reported injuries, with sprains (30.4%), contusions (14.3%), and strains (13.9%) most commonly reported. Ankle sprain rates initially trended upward and decreased between 2017–2018 and 2018–2019; concussion rates remained relatively stable during 2014–2015 through 2018–2019. Conclusions Findings suggest that common injury rates are trending downward relative to previous study findings.

Sport mega-events were very important for Brazil in 2007. The 15th Pan American Games took place in Rio de Janeiro. It was the largest international tournament held in Brazil since the 1950 World Cup and the 1963 Pan American Games. The latter were held in São Paulo. In 2007, 5000 athletes and 60,000 tourists were expected from the 42 participating countries. Despite being a developing country, Brazil does have a sizable middle class, but in Rio de Janeiro there are also lots of favelas (slums), where millions of poor people live. Despite vast differences in wealth, power and social status, these socially and culturally distinct groups nonetheless utilize common public spaces. We see this social confrontation as a major question for the analyses of sport mega-events and we would like to demonstrate its consequences on a local level . This social tension was such that the Organizing Committee actually constructed a ‘big wall’ around the stadiums which turned them into islands of excellence to be shown on television, thus hiding the unsightly parts of the city, that is, poor neighborhoods and favelas. This wall could be seen as the BRIC-way of organizing mega-events.

In 1949 the Irish branch of the Women’s League of Health and Beauty travelled to Stockholm, Sweden to take part in the second annual Lingiad Festival. Created the previous decade to celebrate the gymnastic system of Per Henrik Ling established in the early nineteenth-century, the Festival was a multisporting cultural event open to groups from around the world. One such group was the Women’s League of Health and Beauty. Founded in London in 1930 by the Irish-born Mary Bagot Stack, the League marked the decade’s most expansive form of exercise for women. Owing to the League’s Irish connection, the first League branch came to Belfast in 1930 and was followed by a Dublin branch some years later. Open to women across the life cycle, the League was targeted at both the working woman and the stay-at-home mother. Where previous studies have examined the creation of the League in Ireland, this piece focuses on the League’s appearance at the 1949 Lingiad. Despite numerous appeals for government funding, the League was forced to raise its own funds for the trip, a point which rankled many journalists both before and after the tournament. There was an inherent tension in the League’s involvement. On the one hand, it offered new opportunities for female exercise and provided a fillip for further engagement. That withstanding, the ongoing difficulties experienced by the League in actually making it to Lingiad highlighted the secondary, and often forgotten, nature of women’s exercise in Ireland at this time. Using memoirs, film and newspaper articles, the piece positions the League’s Lingiad trip as symbolic of both the advances and restrictions inherent in women’s exercise in mid twentieth-century Ireland.

The article is devoted to discussing the likely prototypes of the figure of Luzhin - the protagonist of V. Nabokov's novel The Defense. Studying the biographical and chess contexts, analyzing the plot components of the novel related to the game, and taking into account the psychological aspects of the early XX century chess history, the authors prove that the versions of the main character's prototypes presented in previous studies of Nabokov's works are controversial. Among these prototypes are the chess players famous at different periods of the past, sharing only one thing with Nabokov's hero – a mental disorder at the end of his life. The authors of the article present and summarize new facts, not considered before, which are somehow reflected in the text of the novel, and the circumstances of the chess history and the world around it taking place at that time. This data became the basis for a new version that one of the prototypes of the protagonist's “chess impersonation” in the novel The Defense could be the Russian (and later Danish – by new citizenship) chess grandmaster Alexander Nimtsovich, whose life path crossed Nabokov's more than once. The famous chess opening “The Nimtsovich Defense” finds compositional and motif parallels in the corresponding scenes of the novel, and the narrator's reflection (close to the hero's reflection) on the specifics of playing chess is quite consistent with Grandmaster Nimtsovich's chess ideas, summarized by him in his book My System (1925). One of Nimzowitsch's biggest successes was winning the tournament in Karlovy Vary (Czechoslovakia) in July-August 1929 – at the very time when Nabokov was busy working on the text of his novel The Defense.

FR. S’appuyant sur les outils des sciences du texte, cet article s’attache à décrire la textualisation de la compétition sportive dans la presse. Pour ce faire, le corpus servant de base à la description des caractéristiques du compte rendu est extrait de la presse généraliste nationale, considérée comme une forme médiane sur les plans formels et thématiques. A été sélectionnée une compétition d’un empan sociétal suffisamment important pour être traitée dans la PQR, et dont les relations intergroupes permettent de faire jouer les logiques d’opposition structurales caractéristiques des discours sur le spectacle sportif, i.e. les parcours européens des clubs français de football. Sont analysées les 10 saisons de 7 clubs français (de 1955 à 2018), ayant atteint la finale, choix permettant de traiter de la feuilletonnisation complète de la compétition. Cette approche syntagmatique est doublée d’un traitement paradigmatique (thématiques et poétique des comptes rendus). Le corpus, travaillant les permanences, est abordé sous les angles rhétoriques (mécanismes et formes du discours épidictique, contenus topiques), argumentatifs (justification et jeux sur les valeurs) permettant de construire une macro-narration (logiques de feuilletonnisation et rappels mémoriels). La presse ne constituant pas tant un moyen de découvrir les matches, qui sont retransmis par les médias audiovisuels, qu’un lieu d’accès à leur analyse, il est montré que cette configuration donne une fonctionnalité autre au compte rendu : rééquilibrer les chances des adversaires afin de susciter l’envie de voir les rencontres à venir. En effet, le dispositif de couverture des campagnes footballistiques semble davantage être une textualisation de celles-ci qu’une textualisation du/des journée(s) du calendrier sportif. Il s’agit de mettre en place une tension narrative permettant au ressort émotionnel de jouer, comme de justifier, au regard du principe de pertinence médiatique, la narration du match. *** EN. Resorting to the tools of textual sciences, the article aims at describing the textualization of sports competition in the press. The text corpus from which we establish the characteristics of the sports accounts was extracted from national mainstream press, considered as middle ground in terms of forms and themes featured. Selected narratives deal with one championship with sufficient societal importance to be covered by the regional daily press, and whose inter-group relations bring to light the structural oppositional dynamics characteristic of discourses on the sporting show, i.e. the careers of French clubs on the European soccer scene. In order to observe the serialization of the championship, the reports of 10 seasons played by 7 French clubs who reached the finals between 1955 and 2018 were analyzed. This syntagmatic approach is coupled with a paradigmatic analysis, taking into consideration the themes and poetics of the sporting reports. The corpus, building on permanencies, was approached from the angles of rhetoric (mechanisms and forms of the epideictic discourse, topical contents) and of argumentation (justification and play on values), allowing the construction of a macro-narrative (logics of serialization and memorial reminders). Since the sports events are broadcast by audiovisual media, the press is not consulted as a means to follow the scores. Rather, it gives game analysis details. Such a configuration gives another functionality to the reports, by rebalancing the chances of the opponents in order to spur desire of supporters to watch the forthcoming matches. The coverage of soccer tournaments seems indeed to be more a textualization of the latter than a textualization of the day(s) of the sports event. The goal is rather to set up a narrative tension which plays as much on the emotional cord as it justifies, with regard to the principle of media relevance, the account of the game. *** PT. Com base nas ferramentas das ciências textuais, este artigo tenta descrever a textualização da competição esportiva na imprensa. Para tal, o corpus que serve de base à descrição das características da reportagem é retirado da imprensa nacional em geral, considerada como mediana a nível formal e temático. Foi seleccionada uma competição com âmbito societário suficientemente grande para ser tratada no PQR, e cujas relações intergrupais permitem pôr em prática a lógica de oposição estrutural característica do discurso sobre o entretenimento desportivo, ou seja, os percursos europeus de clubes franceses de futebol. São analisadas as 10 temporadas de 7 clubes franceses (de 1955 a 2018), tendo chegado à final, permitindo tratar da serialização completa da competição. Esta abordagem sintagmática está associada a um tratamento paradigmático (temático e poético das reportagens). O corpus, ao trabalhar as permanências, é abordado desde ângulos retóricos (mecanismos e formas do discurso epidítico, conteúdo tópico), argumentativos (justificativas e jogos de valores) permitindo a construção de uma macro-narração (lógica da serialização e de lembretes de memória). A imprensa não constituindo tanto um meio de descoberta dos jogos, que são veiculados pelos meios audiovisuais, como um local de acesso às suas análises, mostra-se que esta configuração confere uma funcionalidade diferente à reportagem: reequilibrar as possibilidades dos adversários, a fim de despertar o desejo de ver os próximos encontros. Na verdade, a cobertura das campanhas de futebol parece mais uma textualização delas do que uma textualização do(s) dia(s) do calendário esportivo. Trata-se de estabelecer uma tensão narrativa que permita que as competências emocionais joguem, bem como justifiquem, no que diz respeito ao princípio da relevância mediática, a narração do jogo. ***

Covid 19 – living the experience As I sit at my desk at home in suburban Brisbane, following the dictates on self-isolation shared with so many around the world, I am forced to contemplate the limits of human prediction. I look out on a world which few could have predicted six months ago. My thoughts at that time were all about 2020 as a metaphor for perfect vision and a plea for it to herald a new period of clarity which would arm us in resolving the whole host of false divisions that surrounded us. False, because so many appear to be generated by the use of polarised labelling strategies which sought to categorise humans by a whole range of identities, while losing the essential humanity and individuality which we all share. This was a troublesome trend and one which seemed reminiscent of the biblical tale concerning the tower of Babel, when a single unified language was what we needed to create harmony in a globalising world. However, yesterday’s concerns have, at least for the moment, been overshadowed by a more urgent and unifying concern with humanity’s health and wellbeing. For now, this concern has created a world which we would not have recognised in 2019. We rely more than ever on our various forms of electronic media to beam instant shots of the streets of London, New York, Berlin, Paris, Hong Kong etc. These centres of our worldly activity normally characterised by hustle and bustle, are now serenely peaceful and ordered. Their magnificent buildings have become foregrounded, assuming a dignity and presence that is more commonly overshadowed by the mad ceaseless scramble of humanity all around them. From there however the cameras can jump to some of the less fortunate areas of the globe. These streets are still teeming with people in close confined areas. There is little hope here of following frequent extended hand washing practices, let alone achieving the social distance prescribed to those of us in the global North. From this desk top perspective, it has been interesting to chart the mood as the crisis has unfolded. It has moved from a slightly distant sense of superiority as the news slowly unfolded about events in remote Wuhan. The explanation that the origins were from a live market, where customs unfamiliar to our hygienic pre-packaged approach to food consumption were practised, added to this sense of separateness and exoticism surrounding the source and initial development of the virus. However, this changed to a growing sense of concern as its growth and transmission slowly began to reveal the vulnerability of all cultures to its spread. At this early stage, countries who took steps to limit travel from infected areas seemed to gain some advantage. Australia, as just one example banned flights from China and required all Chinese students coming to study in Australia to self-isolate for two weeks in a third intermediate port. It was a step that had considerable economic costs associated with it. One that was vociferously resisted at the time by the university sector increasingly dependent on the revenue generated by servicing Chinese students. But it was when the epicentre moved to northern Italy, that the entire messaging around the event began to change internationally. At this time the tone became increasingly fearful, anxious and urgent as reports of overwhelmed hospitals and mass burials began to dominate the news. Consequently, governments attracted little criticism but were rather widely supported in the action of radically closing down their countries in order to limit human interaction. The debate had become one around the choice between health and economic wellbeing. The fact that the decision has been overwhelmingly for health, has been encouraging. It has not however stopped the pressure from those who believe that economic well-being is a determinant of human well-being, questioning the decisions of politicians and the advice of public health scientists that have dominated the responses to date. At this stage, the lives versus livelihoods debate has a long way still to run. Of some particular interest has been the musings of the opinion writers who have predicted that the events of these last months will change our world forever. Some of these predictions have included the idea that rather than piling into common office spaces working remotely from home and other advantageous locations will be here to stay. Schools and universities will become centres of learning more conveniently accessed on-line rather than face to face. Many shopping centres will become redundant and goods will increasingly be delivered via collection centres or couriers direct to the home. Social distancing will impact our consumption of entertainment at common venues and lifestyle events such as dining out. At the macro level, it has been predicted that globalisation in its present form will be reversed. The pandemic has led to actions being taken at national levels and movement being controlled by the strengthening and increased control of physical borders. Tourism has ground to a halt and may not resume on its current scale or in its present form as unnecessary travel, at least across borders, will become permanently reduced. Advocates of change have pointed to some of the unpredicted benefits that have been occurring. These include a drop in air pollution: increased interaction within families; more reading undertaken by younger adults; more systematic incorporation of exercise into daily life, and; a rediscovered sense of community with many initiatives paying tribute to the health and essential services workers who have been placed at the forefront of this latest struggle with nature. Of course, for all those who point to benefits in the forced lifestyle changes we have been experiencing, there are those who would tell a contrary tale. Demonstrations in the US have led the push by those who just want things to get back to normal as quickly as possible. For this group, confinement at home creates more problems. These may be a function of the proximity of modern cramped living quarters, today’s crowded city life, dysfunctional relationships, the boredom of self-entertainment or simply the anxiety that comes with an insecure livelihood and an unclear future. Personally however, I am left with two significant questions about our future stimulated by the events that have been ushered in by 2020. The first is how is it that the world has been caught so unprepared by this pandemic? The second is to what extent do we have the ability to recalibrate our current practices and view an alternative future? In considering the first, it has been enlightening to observe the extent to which politicians have turned to scientific expertise in order to determine their actions. Terms like ‘flattening the curve’, ‘community transmission rates’, have become part of our daily lexicon as the statistical modellers advance their predictions as to how the disease will spread and impact on our health systems. The fact that scientists are presented as the acceptable and credible authority and the basis for our actions reflects a growing dependency on data and modelling that has infused our society generally. This acceptance has been used to strengthen the actions on behalf of the human lives first and foremost position. For those who pursue the livelihoods argument even bigger figures are available to be thrown about. These relate to concepts such as numbers of jobless, increase in national debt, growth in domestic violence, rise in mental illness etc. However, given that they are more clearly estimates and based on less certain assumptions and variables, they do not at this stage seem to carry the impact of the data produced by public health experts. This is not surprising but perhaps not justifiable when we consider the failure of the public health lobby to adequately prepare or forewarn us of the current crisis in the first place. Statistical predictive models are built around historical data, yet their accuracy depends upon the quality of those data. Their robustness for extrapolation to new settings for example will differ as these differ in a multitude of subtle ways from the contexts in which they were initially gathered. Our often uncritical dependence upon ‘scientific’ processes has become worrying, given that as humans, even when guided by such useful tools, we still tend to repeat mistakes or ignore warnings. At such a time it is an opportunity for us to return to the reservoir of human wisdom to be found in places such as our great literature. Works such as The Plague by Albert Camus make fascinating and educative reading for us at this time. As the writer observes Everybody knows that pestilences have a way of recurring in the world, yet somehow, we find it hard to believe in ones that crash down on our heads from a blue sky. There have been as many plagues as wars in history, yet always plagues and wars take people equally by surprise. So it is that we constantly fail to study let alone learn the lessons of history. Yet 2020 mirrors 1919, as at that time the world was reeling with the impact of the Spanish ‘Flu, which infected 500 million people and killed an estimated 50 million. This was more than the 40 million casualties of the four years of the preceding Great War. There have of course been other pestilences since then and much more recently. Is our stubborn failure to learn because we fail to value history and the knowledge of our forebears? Yet we can accept with so little question the accuracy of predictions based on numbers, even with varying and unquestioned levels of validity and reliability. As to the second question, many writers have been observing some beneficial changes in our behaviour and our environment, which have emerged in association with this sudden break in our normal patterns of activity. It has given us the excuse to reevaluate some of our practices and identify some clear benefits that have been occurring. As Australian newspaper columnist Bernard Salt observes in an article titled “the end of narcissism?” I think we’ve been re-evaluating the entire contribution/reward equation since the summer bushfires and now, with the added experience of the pandemic, we can see the shallowness of the so-called glamour professions – the celebrities, the influencers. We appreciate the selflessness of volunteer firefighters, of healthcare workers and supermarket staff. From the pandemic’s earliest days, glib forays into social media by celebrities seeking attention and yet further adulation have been met with stony disapproval. Perhaps it is best that they stay offline while our real heroes do the heavy lifting. To this sad unquestioning adherence to both scientism and narcissism, we can add and stir the framing of the climate rebellion and a myriad of familiar ‘first world’ problems which have caused dissension and disharmony in our communities. Now with an external threat on which to focus our attention, there has been a short lull in the endless bickering and petty point scoring that has characterised our western liberal democracies in the last decade. As Camus observed: The one way of making people hang together is to give ‘em a spell of the plague. So, the ceaseless din of the topics that have driven us apart has miraculously paused for at least a moment. Does this then provide a unique opportunity for us together to review our habitual postures and adopt a more conciliatory and harmonious communication style, take stock, critically evaluate and retune our approach to life – as individuals, as nations, as a species? It is not too difficult to hypothesise futures driven by the major issues that have driven us apart. Now, in our attempts to resist the virus, we have given ourselves a glimpse of some of the very things the climate change activists have wished to happen. With few planes in the air and the majority of cars off the roads, we have already witnessed clearer and cleaner air. Working at home has freed up the commuter driven traffic and left many people with more time to spend with their family. Freed from the continuing throng of tourists, cities like Venice are regenerating and cleansing themselves. This small preview of what a less travelled world might start to look like surely has some attraction. But of course, it does not come without cost. With the lack of tourism and the need to work at home, jobs and livelihoods have started to change. As with any revolution there are both winners and losers. The lockdown has distinguished starkly between essential and non-essential workers. That represents a useful starting point from which to assess what is truly of value in our way of life and what is peripheral as Salt made clear. This is a question that I would encourage readers to explore and to take forward with them through the resolution of the current situation. However, on the basis that educators are seen as providing essential services, now is the time to turn to the content of our current volume. Once again, I direct you to the truly international range of our contributors. They come from five different continents yet share a common focus on one of the most popular of shared cultural experiences – sport. Unsurprisingly three of our reviewed papers bring different insights to the world’s most widely shared sport of all – football, or as it would be more easily recognised in some parts of the globe - soccer. Leading these offerings is a comparison of fandom in Australia and China. The story presented by Knijnk highlights the rise of the fanatical supporters known as the ultras. The origin of the movement is traced to Italy, but it is one that claims allegiances now around the world. Kniijnk identifies the movement’s progression into Australia and China and, in pointing to its stance against the commercialisation of their sport by the scions of big business, argues for its deeper political significance and its commitment to the democratic ownership of sport. Reflecting the increasing availability and use of data in our modern societies, Karadog, Parim and Cene apply some of the immense data collected on and around the FIFA World Cup to the task of selecting the best team from the 2018 tournament held in Russia, a task more usually undertaken by panels of experts. Mindful of the value of using data in ways that can assist future decision making, rather than just in terms of summarising past events, they also use the statistics available to undertake a second task. The second task was the selection of the team with the greatest future potential by limiting eligibility to those at an early stage in their careers, namely younger than 28 and who arguably had still to attain their prime as well as having a longer career still ahead of them. The results for both selections confirm how membership of the wealthy European based teams holds the path to success and recognition at the global level no matter what the national origins of players might be. Thirdly, taking links between the sport and the world of finance a step further, Gomez-Martinez, Marques-Bogliani and Paule-Vianez report on an interesting study designed to test the hypothesis that sporting success within a community is reflected in positive economic outcomes for members of that community. They make a bold attempt to test their hypothesis by examining the relationship of the performance of three world leading clubs in Europe - Bayern Munich, Juventus and Paris Saint Germain and the performance of their local stock markets. Their findings make for some interesting thoughts about the significance of sport in the global economy and beyond into the political landscape of our interconnected world. Our final paper comes from Africa but for its subject matter looks to a different sport, one that rules the subcontinent of India - cricket. Norrbhai questions the traditional coaching of batting in cricket by examining the backlift techniques of the top players in the Indian Premier league. His findings suggest that even in this most traditional of sports, technique will develop and change in response to the changing context provided by the game itself. In this case the context is the short form of the game, introduced to provide faster paced entertainment in an easily consumable time span. It provides a useful reminder how in sport, techniques will not be static but will continue to evolve as the game that provides the context for the skilled performance also evolves. To conclude our pages, I must apologise that our usual book review has fallen prey to the current world disruption. In its place I would like to draw your attention to the announcement of a new publication which would make a worthy addition to the bookshelf of any international sports scholar. “Softpower, Soccer, Supremacy – The Chinese Dream” represents a unique and timely analysis of the movement of the most popular and influential game in the world – Association Football, commonly abbreviated to soccer - into the mainstream of Chinese national policy. The editorial team led by one of sports histories most recognised scholars, Professor J A Mangan, has assembled a who’s who of current scholars in sport in Asia. Together they provide a perspective that takes in, not just the Chinese view of these important current developments but also, the view of others in the geographical region. From Japan, Korea and Australia, they bring with them significant experience to not just the beautiful game, but sport in general in that dynamic and fast-growing part of the world. Particularly in the light of the European dominance identified in the Karog, Parim and Cene paper this work raises the question as to whether we can expect to see a change in the world order sooner rather than later. It remains for me to make one important acknowledgement. In my last editorial I alerted you to the sorts of decisions we as an editorial and publication team were facing with regard to ensuring the future of the journal. Debates as to how best to proceed while staying true to our vision and goals are still proceeding. However, I am pleased to acknowledge the sponsorship provided by The University of Macao for volume 42 and recognise the invaluable contribution made by ISCPES former president Walter Ho to this process. Sponsorship can provide an important input to the ongoing existence and strength of this journal and we would be interested in talking to other institutions or groups who might also be interested in supporting our work, particularly where their goals align closely with ours. May I therefore commend to you the works of our international scholars and encourage your future involvement in sharing your interest in and expertise with others in the world of comparative and international sport studies, John Saunders, Brisbane, May 2020

Abstract The FIFA Men’s World Cup tournament is the most popular sporting event in the world. Scholars have identified several flaws in the organization of the World Cup causing competitive imbalance. We empirically assess competitive imbalance between groups for the World Cup tournaments from 1954 through 2022. We average the Elo ratings of a team’s opponents in the group stage to calculate their group opponents rating. In every World Cup, the range in group opponents rating exceeds 118 Elo rating points – the difference between an average participant and an average semifinalist. Using logistic regression, we find that for an average participant in a 32-team World Cup, an increase in group opponents rating of only 88 Elo rating points can reduce the probability of reaching the quarterfinal from 0.174 to 0.081, which is a decrease of more than 50 %. None of the five seeding systems used by FIFA during 1954–2022 lessened the negative impact of group opponents rating on the probability of reaching the quarterfinal. We close with seven policy recommendations to restore competitive balance at the World Cup.

AbstractA tournament is an orientation of a graph. Each edge is a match, directed towards the winner. The score sequence lists the number of wins by each team. In this article, by interpreting score sequences geometrically, we generalize and extend classical theorems of Landau (Bull. Math. Biophys. 15, 143–148 (1953)) and Moon (Pac. J. Math. 13, 1343–1345 (1963)), via the theory of zonotopal tilings.

PurposeThis paper argues that decentralization reforms in Colombia, implemented since the 1980s, have led to the decentralization of political clientelism rather than its demise. Clientelism is a system of political and economic institutions that turns every local democracy into an extractive political institution. The authors theoretically demonstrate that an increase in public resources will increase corruption.Design/methodology/approachThe authors develop and test a subnational public choice model, where clientelism in elections and corruption in public administration constitute a stable long-term institutional equilibrium. The model comprises two linked subgames: electoral tournament and corruption in public policy. The model makes two predictions that currently oppose predominant approaches: (1) increasing the severity of jail sentences to electoral crimes increases their price and the predominance of machine politics, instead of improving the quality of electoral tournaments and (2) increasing local governments' public finance increases clientelism in elections and corruption in public administration.FindingsThe authors find evidence in favor of the theoretical model of curse of public resources, using difference-in-differences estimation with a database 2016–17 of Colombia's 1,034 municipalities. This country is well-suited for our analysis because it has a long-term commitment to formal democratic processes (since 1958), while plagued by endemic corruption and clientelism problems.Originality/value(1) The theoretical approach is innovative and disruptive of current models on the problem, (2) the model builds upon the Colombian situation, a country with prominent corruption and political violence problems regardless of its relatively long-term commitment with free elections (since 1958) and (3) the theoretical discussion is tested using a comprehensive set of difference-in-differences estimations.

Understanding that the history lesson is rote learning resulted in a greater emphasis on verbal. Under these circumstances researchers offered the implementation of cooperative learning model type Time Game Tournament, which is a cooperative learning model in which there are elements of the game academic or weekly tournament to replace the individual test, so students do not feel bored because there is an element of the tournament. This research is a classroom action research conducted with 3 cycles. Each cycle consists of two meetings. It can be concluded: (1) The application of cooperative learning model TGT can be executed properly if the teacher can plan learning activities with good (2) Problems encountered in general can be overcome if the teacher has the willingness and ability to develop the profession (3) The application of the model TGT cooperative learning can enhance students' motivation is measured by ARCS motivational strategies that attention (attention), relevance (relevant), confidence (confidence) and satisfaction (satisfaction).Key words: History lesson, cooperative learning, Time game tournament, learning achievement

Abstract Background Over 1 million people traveled to Qatar and surrounding countries during the World Cup 2022 soccer tournament, a mass gathering that could enhance transmission of SARS-CoV-2 variants. Minimal information about circulating variants in World Health Organization (WHO) Eastern-Mediterranean region (EMRO) which includes Qatar, United Arab Emirates, and Saudi Arabia were available from global data bases (GISAID). The Traveler-based Genomic Surveillance (TGS) program samples arriving international travelers to detect new variants and fill surveillance gaps. Monitoring of flights from EMRO was increased during the tournament. Methods Travelers at six US airports volunteered to provide nasal swabs that were pooled by flight origin and sent to laboratories for SARS-CoV-2 reverse transcription polymerase chain reaction. Positives underwent whole genome sequencing. Pool positivity and variant frequencies were compared for travelers from EMRO vs. other regions. Chi-square tests were used to determine statistical significance. Results During November 20, 2022–January 2, 2023, 2050 sample pools from 16,595 travelers were collected. Of these, 100 pools (703 travelers) were from EMRO and 1950 pools (15,892 travelers) were from other regions. Pool positivity from EMRO was 28% (28/100) vs. 25% (489/1950) in other regions (p=0.51). Regionally detected variant proportions were: EMRO (n=25) XBB (40%), BQ.1 (20%), BQ.1.1 (20%); Europe (n=166) BQ.1.1 (48%), BQ.1 (20%), XBB (9%); Western Pacific (n=51) BA.5 (24%), BN.1 (22%), XBB (18%); South-East Asia (n=21) BQ.1.1 (33%), XBB (29%), BA.2 (10%), BA.5 (10%), XBB.1.5 (10%); and Africa (n=15) BQ.1.1 (53%), BA.5 (27%), XBB (20%). The proportion of XBB in EMRO was significantly higher than Europe and Western Pacific regions (p&lt; 0.05). Conclusion During World Cup 2022, SARS-CoV-2 positivity was similar for travelers from EMRO compared to all other regions. Variant proportions differed among regions, with EMRO having the highest proportion of XBB, a recombinant lineage associated with higher transmissibility. TGS fills gaps in SARS-CoV-2 surveillance and can be surged during mass gathering events. Disclosures Benjamin Rome, MBA, Ginkgo Bioworks, Inc.: Employee|Ginkgo Bioworks, Inc.: Stocks/Bonds Robert C. Morfino, MBA, Ginkgo Bioworks Inc.: I am an employee|Ginkgo Bioworks Inc.: Stocks/Bonds

Per Jørgensen: Danish national identity and the media at the Olympic Games 1908-1960It has often been said that sport, and not least soccer, plays an important role in the construction of national identity. This is also the case in Denmark. This paper examines how the subject of Danish national consciousness, national feelings and nationalism, in the article collectively called »Danishness«, was culturally expressed through sport journalism in the period 1908-1960. The subject matter is the soccer- tournaments in those specific Olympic Games where Denmark took part. The discourse of the sport journalism in the paper »Politiken« has been hermeneutically analyzed. Research on how nationalism is expressed in one country requires international comparisons to allow theoretical generalizations. Therefore a minor study of the sport journalism of the Swedish newspaper »Dagens Nyheter« has been carried out regarding selected soccer-matches with Swedish participation in the Olympic Games in 1912, 1948 and 1952. Many of the characteristics of present day society referred to as »Danishness« are also explicit in the period 1908-1960 in the newspaper »Politiken«. A comparison between »Politiken« and »Dagens Nyheter« seems to show that the Danish discourse has distinctively Danish characteristics.

Abstract Context Flag football is promoted as a safer alternative to tackle football. This may be one reason why participation rates have risen by 39% over the past three years. Despite rising participation, there remains a lack of epidemiologic research on sport-specific injuries and associated relative risk. Objective To prospectively document epidemiology of injury in youth flag football. Design Descriptive Epidemiology Study Setting Regional and National youth flag football tournaments Patients or Other Participants 1939 (1744 boys; 195 girls) athletes, ages 5 to 12 years. An athletic trainer prospectively monitored athletes for sport-related injury and exposures. Main Outcome Measure(s) Athlete risk of injury and injury rates were calculated overall and by gender. Injury characteristics were reported for the total population and by gender. Results 47 injuries to unique individuals were recorded in 1,939 athletes with a total of 9,228 athlete exposures (AEs). The overall risk of injury was 2.4% (95%CI 1.8, 3.2), overall injury rate 5.1 per 1000 AE (95% CI 3.7, 6.8). Of the 47 injuries, 36 occurred in males (8,365 AE) and 11 in females (863 AE). There was a statistically significant higher risk in girls as evidenced by both Injury Risk Ratio 2.73 (95% CI 1.41, 5.3) and Injury Rate Ratio 2.96 (95% CI 1.51, 5.82). The most common injury sites were Head/Face/Neck (n=15; 31.9%) followed by Ankle/Foot (n=9; 19.1%); most common types of injury were contusion (55.3%), sprain/subluxation (14.9%), and general trauma (10.6%); 74.5% of all injuries resulted from direct impact. Conclusion While the competition injury rate for youth flag football was lower than studies reporting comparable tackle football data, frequencies by body part, type and mechanism were similar. Given that most injuries were related to some form of impact and predominantly contusions, adopting minimal protective equipment or padding may reduce the number of these reported injuries.

Handball in the name of ChristianityIn the further development of industrial society that took place during the 20th century, a need soon made itself felt for cultural activity other than that provided by religion. One result was that sport became popular among young people. In the Christian KFUM-associations they began discussing the advantages of offering sport as part of their program. Sport could be used to capture youth and thereby make converts to Christianity. On the other hand, there was the dangerous possibility of sport leading youth away from Jesus. In Fredericia members of KFUM began playing handball in 1926. It soon turned out that the sceptics were right. KFUM gained more new members, but they did not come from Christian societies, and they didn’t allow themselves to bee converted to Christianity. In fact they would rather play handball than spend their time with the Bible. This lead to internal difficulties within Fredericia KFUM, where Christian leaders of the sports sectionn tried to put a stop to this »unfortunate« development. First they forbade members to join non-Christian clubs as long they were members of KFUM, then they forbade the teams to join »non« KFUM tournaments and finally they placed a missionary on the board of directors of the sports section to »keep an eye on people.« In the meantime KFUM’s sports section was hit by the phenomenon of secularisation, – in popular terms, a process whereby the impact of Christianity on society in general was gradually decreasing. Secularisation hit Fredericia KFUM so forcefully that during the 1950’s and 60’s members and leaders chose to spent all their time on handball at the expense of proclaiming the Christian message. When in the 1960’s the number of handball players had risen to the point that it was necessary to play matches on Sunday, the church suddenly began to block handball activities. The handball players of KFUM were prepared to play during times intended for church services but a number of leaders were of a different opinion. In the end the handball players had it their way and the church service lost its sacred status.

The Palestinian sport in general and women sport in particular in Gaza Strip was at the height of its time in the fifties, which was considered as the golden period in which several factors combined and helped of its success. The researcher felt the important role that exerted by the Egyptian administration, which governed Gaza Strip, through its support of Palestinian sport, the dispatch of instructors and trainers of sports teams for both sexes, the training of trainers, preparation of the Palestinians for all the games, the exchange of sports delegations, and the interest of the military ruler, "yusef Agroudi", the struggler "Ahmed Alshoqairy" and the Supreme Council for Youth and Sports to sports activities. The researcher reached to a significant result confirms that Gaza Strip during the reign of the Egyptian administration was able to preserve the Palestinian identity to represent Palestine in the Arab and international forums under the guarantee of the Palestine Liberation Organization. The researcher also, concluded that women's sport at that time seemed to be encouraged from parents and the community. The view of male towards the girls didn’t prevent them from the participation of girls in the world championships in China and Sweden, as well as the Arab sports tournaments. Habits and traditions did not pose any obstacle to the participation of girls in the sports arena at the time when Gaza strip has the sort of a large social stability, as well as the fact that the leaders of sport work had the confidence of the community. The researcher however, found that the people who interested in sports are those people who represented Palestine in the most exterior sports arenas and known of their patriotic affiliation, and they interested in raising the girl patriotically to pride Palestine, such as Haj Salem Shurafa, Muammar Bseiso, Yousra Albrairi and Yusuf Alhashwa. This shows that, the player of the Palestinian team table tennis, Aida Salama was the first Palestinian girl threw a bomb on the Israeli army at the Central Post in Shojaeya area western of Gaza City. The researcher found those girls participations overseas, either with Arab or international fulfilled political achievements more than sports because they represented the issue of Palestine, which was and still the issue of public opinion, where the sympathy, the warm welcome and good dealing had been. The researcher believes that, women's sport in the period between 1994-2008 experienced a situation between the tide and the reflow, and has not seen that activity and the evolution of sports in the previous phases. Most of the sports activities in that period were limited to males, and the activities of women that were in that period were feminist individual cases and personal efforts. Most of the activities of women's sports did not continue because of its lack of continuity, attention and the moral and material support. For example, a volleyball team in the Palestinian Ahly club, the basketball team in the Gaza Sports Club, and the YMCA. By contrast, in the beginning of the third millennium the Federation of football formed a football feminist team that represented Palestine in the Arab First Championship for women's football, but stopped specifically in Gaza Strip after such participation in 2006 because of the circumstances that Gaza strip was facing, and then women's soccer was limited only for the governorates of the West Bank because of the easy movement and travel. Athletics had the largest chance of continuity where the famous of hostilities were in Gaza, two of them are two sisters who play in the women team's soccer called Sanae and the Wesam Bakhit. The Individual games were fast-spreading and multi in Gaza Strip where the participations of girls, as well as the most famous karate player was in Gaza Strip, who continued her sports activity till she got a black belt in the game and she is now the trainer of girls. كانت الرياضة الفلسطينية عامة، والنسوية خاصة، في قطاع غزة في أوج عصرها في فترة الخمسينات؛ والتي تُعتبر مرحلةً ذهبيةً تضافرت فيها عدة عوامل ساعدت على نجاحها، ولمست الباحثة مدى الدور الهام الذي بذلته الإدارة المصرية التي كانت تحكم قطاع غزة آنذاك، من خلال دعمها للرياضة الفلسطينية في القطاع، وإيفاد مدربين ومدربات للفرق الرياضية للجنسين، وتدريب وإعداد مدربين فلسطينيين لكافة الألعاب، وتبادل الوفود الرياضية، ومدى اهتمام الحاكم العسكري آنذاك "يوسف العجرودي" والمناضل "أحمد الشقيري" والمجلس الأعلى للشباب والرياضة بالأنشطة الرياضية. وتوصلت الباحثة إلى نتيجة هامة تؤكد أن قطاع غزة خلال فترة حكم الإدارة المصرية استطاع أن يحافظ على الهوية الفلسطينية بتمثيله فلسطين في المحافل العربية والدولية تحت مظلة "منظمة التحرير الفلسطينية". واستنتجت الباحثة أن الرياضة النسوية في ذلك الوقت لاقت رواجاً وتشجيعاً من الأهل والمجتمع، ولم تكن تلك النظرة الذكورية تجاه الفتاة تمنع من مشاركة الفتيات في بطولات عالمية في الصين والسويد، إلى جانب الدورات الرياضية العربية، فالعادات والتقاليد لم تشكل أي عائق أمام مشاركة الفتاة في الحقل الرياضي في ذلك الوقت؛ لما كان القطاع يتمتع بنوعٍ كبيرٍ من الاستقرار الاجتماعي، إلى جانب كون قادة العمل الرياضي كانوا محل ثقة المجتمع. ووجدت الباحثة أن القائمين على الرياضة هم ذات الأشخاص الذي مثّلوا فلسطين أيضا في معظم المحافل الرياضية الخارجية، وعُرفوا ببراعتهم وانتمائهم الرياضي والوطني، وهم أيضا المناضلون الذي اهتموا بتنشئة الفتاة تنشئةً رياضيةً وطنيةً لتشرّف فلسطين خارجياً، مثل الحاج "سالم الشرفا" و"معمر بسيسو" و"يسرى البربري" و"يوسف الحشوة". ويبين هذا أن لاعبة المنتخب الفلسطيني لكرة الطاولة "عايدة سلامة" هي أول فتاة فلسطينية تلقي قنبلةً على الجيش الإسرائيلي عند البريد المركزي بمنطقة الشجاعية غرب مدينة غزة. توصلت الباحثة إلى أن مشاركات الفتيات الخارجية سواء الدولية منها أو العربية حققت إنجازاتٍ سياسيةً أكثر منها رياضية؛ كونهن يمثلن قضية فلسطين التي كانت، ولازالت، قضية رأي عام، حيث كان التعاطف والاستقبال الحافل والمعاملة الحسنة. ترى الباحثة أن الرياضة النسوية في فترة ما بين 1994-2008 مرت بحالة ما بين المد والجذر، ولم تشهد ذلك النشاط والتطور الذي شهدته الرياضة في المراحل السابقة. معظم الأنشطة الرياضية في تلك الفترة كانت مقتصرةً على الذكور، وما تم من نشاطٍ نسويٍ كان عبارةً عن حالاتٍ فرديةٍ وجهودٍ شخصية. معظم الأنشطة الرياضية النسوية لم يُكتب لها الاستمرارية؛ لافتقارها إلى الدعم المعنوي والمادي والاهتمام اللازم. من الأمثلة على ذلك فريق كرة الطائرة في "النادي الأهلي الفلسطيني" وفريق كرة السلة في "نادي غزة الرياضي" و"جمعية الشبان المسيحية". في المقابل؛ وفي بداية الألفية الثالثة؛ تم تشكيل فريق كرة قدم نسوي من قبل "اتحاد كرة القدم" ومثّل فلسطين في بطولة العرب الأولى لكرة القدم النسوية، لكنه توقف تحديداً في قطاع غزة بعد هذه المشاركة في العام 2006؛ نظراً للظروف التي يمر بها القطاع، واقتصرت مشاركات كرة القدم النسوية على محافظات الضفة الغربية؛ لسهولة التنقل والسفر. ألعاب القوى كان لها النصيب الأكبر من الاستمرارية؛ حيث يوجد في غزة أشهر العدّاءات الفلسطينيات؛ منهن اثنتان تلعبان في المنتخب النسوي لكرة القدم؛ وهما الشقيقتان: "سناء" و"وسام بخيت". الألعاب الفردية كانت سريعة الانتشار ومتعددة في قطاع غزة من حيث مشاركات البنات، إضافة إلى وجود أشهر لاعبة كاراتيه فلسطينية في قطاع غزة والتي استمرت في نشاطها الرياضي إلى أن حصلت على الحزام الأسود في اللعبة، وأصبحت الآن مدربةً تدرب الفتيات.

Lincolnshire, England. The crowd cheer when the ball breaks loose. From one end of the field to the other, the players chase, their snouts hovering just above the grass. It’s not a case of four legs being better, rather a novel way to attract customers to the Woodside Wildlife and Falconry Park. During the matches, volunteers are drawn from the crowd to hold goal posts at either end of the run the pigs usually race on. With five pigs playing, two teams of two and a referee, and a ball designed to leak feed as it rolls (Stevenson) the ten-minute competition is fraught with tension. While the pig’s contributions to “the beautiful game” (Fish and Pele 7) have not always been so obvious, it could be argued that specific parts of the animal have had a significant impact on a sport which, despite calls to fall into line with much of the rest of the world, people in Australia (and the US) are more likely to call soccer. The Football Precursors to the modern football were constructed around an inflated pig’s bladder (Price, Jones and Harland). Animal hide, usually from a cow, was stitched around the bladder to offer some degree of stability, but the bladder’s irregular and uneven form made for unpredictable movement in flight. This added some excitement and affected how ball games such as the often violent, calico matches in Florence, were played. In the early 1970s, the world’s oldest ball was discovered during a renovation in Stirling Castle, Scotland. The ball has a pig’s bladder inside its hand-stitched, deer-hide outer. It was found in the ceiling above the bed in, what was then Mary Queens of Scots’ bedroom. It has since been dated to the 1540s (McGinnes). Neglected and left in storage until the late 1990s, the ball found pride of place in an exhibition in the Smiths Art Gallery and Museum, Stirling, and only gained worldwide recognition (as we will see later) in 2006. Despite confirmed interest in a number of sports, there is no evidence to support Mary’s involvement with football (Springer). The deer-hide ball may have been placed to gather and trap untoward spirits attempting to enter the monarch’s sleep, or simply left by accident and forgotten (McGinnes in Springer). Mary, though, was not so fortunate. She was confined and forgotten, but only until she was put to death in 1587. The Executioner having gripped her hair to hold his prize aloft, realised too late it was a wig and Mary’s head bounced and rolled across the floor. Football Development The pig’s bladder was the central component in the construction of the football for the next three hundred years. However, the issue of the ball’s movement (the bounce and roll), the bladder’s propensity to burst when kicked, and an unfortunate wife’s end, conspired to push the pig from the ball before the close of the nineteenth-century. The game of football began to take its shape in 1848, when JC Thring and a few colleagues devised the Cambridge Rules. This compromised set of guidelines was developed from those used across the different ‘ball’ games played at England’s elite schools. The game involved far more kicking, and the pig’s bladders, prone to bursting under such conditions, soon became impractical. Charles Goodyear’s invention of vulcanisation in 1836 and the death of prestigious rugby and football maker Richard Lindon’s wife in 1870 facilitated the replacement of the animal bladder with a rubber-based alternative. Tragically, Mr Lindon’s chief inflator died as a result of blowing up too many infected pig’s bladders (Hawkesley). Before it closed earlier this year (Rhoads), the US Soccer Hall of Fame displayed a rubber football made in 1863 under the misleading claim that it was the oldest known football. By the late 1800s, professional, predominantly Scottish play-makers had transformed the game from its ‘kick-and-run’ origins into what is now called ‘the passing game’ (Sanders). Football, thanks in no small part to Scottish factory workers (Kay), quickly spread through Europe and consequently the rest of the world. National competitions emerged through the growing need for organisation, and the pig-free mass production of balls began in earnest. Mitre and Thomlinson’s of Glasgow were two of the first to make and sell their much rounder balls. With heavy leather panels sewn together and wrapped around a thick rubber inner, these balls were more likely to retain shape—a claim the pig’s bladder equivalent could not legitimately make. The rubber-bladdered balls bounced more too. Their weight and external stitching made them more painful to header, but also more than useful for kicking and particularly for passing from one player to another. The ball’s relatively quick advancement can thereafter be linked to the growth and success of the World Cup Finals tournament. Before the pig re-enters the fray, it is important to glance, however briefly, at the ball’s development through the international game. World Cup Footballs Pre-tournament favourites, Spain, won the 2010 FIFA World Cup, playing with “an undistorted, perfectly spherical ball” (Ghosh par. 7), the “roundest” ever designed (FIFA par.1). Their victory may speak to notions of predictability in the ball, the tournament and the most lucrative levels of professional endeavour, but this notion is not a new one to football. The ball’s construction has had an influence on the way the game has been played since the days of Mary Queen of Scots. The first World Cup Final, in 1930, featured two heavy, leather, twelve-panelled footballs—not dissimilar to those being produced in Glasgow decades earlier. The players and officials of Uruguay and Argentina could not agree, so they played the first half with an Argentine ball. At half-time, Argentina led by two goals to one. In the second half, Uruguay scored three unanswered goals with their own ball (FIFA). The next Final was won by Italy, the home nation in 1934. Orsi, Italy’s adopted star, poked a wildly swerving shot beyond the outstretched Czech keeper. The next day Orsi, obligated to prove his goal was not luck or miracle, attempted to repeat the feat before an audience of gathered photographers. He failed. More than twenty times. The spin on his shot may have been due to the, not uncommon occurrence, of the ball being knocked out of shape during the match (FIFA). By 1954, the Federation Internationale de Football Association (FIFA) had sought to regulate ball size and structure and, in 1958, rigorously tested balls equal to the demands of world-class competition. The 1950s also marked the innovation of the swerving free kick. The technique, developed in the warm, dry conditions of the South American game, would not become popular elsewhere until ball technology improved. The heavy hand-stitched orb, like its early counterparts, was prone to water absorption, which increased the weight and made it less responsive, particularly for those playing during European winters (Bray). The 1970 World Cup in Mexico saw football progress even further. Pele, arguably the game’s greatest player, found his feet, and his national side, Brazil, cemented their international football prominence when they won the Jules Rimet trophy for the third time. Their innovative and stylish use of the football in curling passes and bending free kicks quickly spread to other teams. The same World Cup saw Adidas, the German sports goods manufacturer, enter into a long-standing partnership with FIFA. Following the competition, they sold an estimated six hundred thousand match and replica tournament footballs (FIFA). The ball, the ‘Telstar’, with its black and white hexagonal panels, became an icon of the modern era as the game itself gained something close to global popularity for the first time in its history. Over the next forty years, the ball became incrementally technologically superior. It became synthetic, water-resistant, and consistent in terms of rebound and flight characteristics. It was constructed to be stronger and more resistant to shape distortion. Internal layers of polyutherane and Syntactic Foam made it lighter, capable of greater velocity and more responsive to touch (FIFA). Adidas spent three years researching and developing the 2006 World Cup ball, the ‘Teamgeist’. Fourteen panels made it rounder and more precise, offering a lower bounce, and making it more difficult to curl due to its accuracy in flight. At the same time, audiences began to see less of players like Roberto Carlos (Brazil and Real Madrid CF) and David Beckham (Manchester United, LA Galaxy and England), who regularly scored goals that challenged the laws of physics (Gill). While Adidas announced the 2006 release of the world’s best performing ball in Berlin, the world’s oldest was on its way to the Museum fur Volkerkunde in Hamburg for the duration of the 2006 FIFA World Cup. The Mary Queen of Scot’s ball took centre spot in an exhibit which also featured a pie stand—though not pork pies—from Hibernian Football Club (Strang). In terms of publicity and raising awareness of the Scots’ role in the game’s historical development, the installation was an unrivalled success for the Scottish Football Museum (McBrearty). It did, however, very little for the pig. Heads, not Tails In 2002, the pig or rather the head of a pig, bounced and rolled back into football’s limelight. For five years Luis Figo, Portugal’s most capped international player, led FC Barcelona to domestic and European success. In 2000, he had been lured to bitter rivals Real Madrid CF for a then-world record fee of around £37 million (Nash). On his return to the Catalan Camp Nou, wearing the shimmering white of Real Madrid CF, he was showered with beer cans, lighters, bottles and golf balls. Among the objects thrown, a suckling pig’s head chimed a psychological nod to the spear with two sharp ends in William Golding’s story. Play was suspended for sixteen minutes while police tried to quell the commotion (Lowe). In 2009, another pig’s head made its way into football for different reasons. Tightly held in the greasy fingers of an Orlando Pirates fan, it was described as a symbol of the ‘roasting’ his team would give the Kaiser Chiefs. After the game, he and his friend planned to eat their mascot and celebrate victory over their team’s most reviled competitors (Edwards). The game ended in a nil-all draw. Prior to the 2010 FIFA World Cup, it was not uncommon for a range of objects that European fans might find bizarre, to be allowed into South African league matches. They signified luck and good feeling, and in some cases even witchcraft. Cabbages, known locally for their medicinal qualities, were very common—common enough for both sets of fans to take them (Edwards). FIFA, an organisation which has more members than the United Nations (McGregor), impressed their values on the South African Government. The VuVuZela was fine to take to games; indeed, it became a cultural artefact. Very little else would be accepted. Armed with their economy-altering engine, the world’s most watched tournament has a tendency to get what it wants. And the crowd respond accordingly. Incidentally, the ‘Jabulani’—the ball developed for the 2010 tournament—is the most consistent football ever designed. In an exhaustive series of tests, engineers at Loughborough University, England, learned, among other things, the added golf ball-like grooves on its surface made the ball’s flight more symmetrical and more controlled. The Jabulani is more reliable or, if you will, more predictable than any predecessor (Ghosh). Spanish Ham Through support from their Governing body, the Real Federación Española de Fútbol, Spain have built a national side with experience, and an unparalleled number of talented individuals, around the core of the current FC Barcelona club side. Their strength as a team is founded on the bond between those playing on a weekly basis at the Catalan club. Their style has allowed them to create and maintain momentum on the international stage. Victorious in the 2008 UEFA European Football Championship and undefeated in their run through the qualifying stages into the World Cup Finals in South Africa, they were tournament favourites before a Jabulani was rolled into touch. As Tim Parks noted in his New York Review of Books article, “The Shame of the World Cup”, “the Spanish were superior to an extent one rarely sees in the final stages of a major competition” (2010 par. 15). They have a “remarkable ability to control, hold and hide the ball under intense pressure,” and play “a passing game of great subtlety [ ... to] patiently wear down an opposing team” (Parks par. 16). Spain won the tournament having scored fewer goals per game than any previous winner. Perhaps, as Parks suggests, they scored as often as they needed to. They found the net eight times in their seven matches (Fletcher). This was the first time that Spain had won the prestigious trophy, and the first time a European country has won the tournament on a different continent. In this, they have broken the stranglehold of superpowers like Germany, Italy and Brazil. The Spanish brand of passing football is the new benchmark. Beautiful to watch, it has grace, flow and high entertainment value, but seems to lack something of an organic nature: that is, it lacks the chance for things to go wrong. An element of robotic aptitude has crept in. This occurred on a lesser scale across the 2010 FIFA World Cup finals, but it is possible to argue that teams and players, regardless of nation, have become interchangeable, that the world’s best players and the way they play have become identikits, formulas to be followed and manipulated by master tacticians. There was a great deal of concern in early rounds about boring matches. The world’s media focused on an octopus that successfully chose the winner of each of Germany’s matches and the winner of the final. Perhaps, in shaping the ‘most’ perfect ball and the ‘most’ perfect football, the World Cup has become the most predictable of tournaments. In Conclusion The origins of the ball, Orsi’s unrepeatable winner and the swerving free kick, popular for the best part of fifty years, are worth remembering. These issues ask the powers of football to turn back before the game is smothered by the hunt for faultlessness. The unpredictability of the ball goes hand in hand with the game. Its flaws underline its beauty. Football has so much more transformative power than lucrative evolutionary accretion. While the pig’s head was an ugly statement in European football, it is a symbol of hope in its South African counterpart. Either way its removal is a reminder of Golding’s message and the threat of homogeneity; a nod to the absence of the irregular in the modern era. Removing the curve from the free kick echoes the removal of the pig’s bladder from the ball. The fun is in the imperfection. Where will the game go when it becomes indefectible? Where does it go from here? Can there really be any validity in claiming yet another ‘roundest ball ever’? Chip technology will be introduced. The ball’s future replacements will be tracked by satellite and digitally-fed, reassured referees will determine the outcome of difficult decisions. Victory for the passing game underlines the notion that despite technological advancement, the game has changed very little since those pioneering Scotsmen took to the field. Shouldn’t we leave things the way they were? Like the pigs at Woodside Wildlife and Falconry Park, the level of improvement seems determined by the level of incentive. The pigs, at least, are playing to feed themselves. Acknowledgments The author thanks editors, Donna Lee Brien and Adele Wessell, and the two blind peer reviewers, for their constructive feedback and reflective insights. The remaining mistakes are his own. References “Adidas unveils Golden Ball for 2006 FIFA World Cup Final” Adidas. 18 Apr. 2006. 23 Aug. 2010 . Bray, Ken. “The science behind the swerve.” BBC News 5 Jun. 2006. 19 Aug. 2010 http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/magazine/5048238.stm>. Edwards, Piers. “Cabbage and Roasted Pig.” BBC Fast Track Soweto, BBC News 3 Nov. 2009. 23 Aug. 2010 . FIFA. “The Footballs during the FIFA World Cup™” FIFA.com. 18 Aug. 2010 .20 Fish, Robert L., and Pele. My Life and the Beautiful Game. New York: Bantam Dell, 1977. Fletcher, Paul. “Match report on 2010 FIFA World Cup Final between Spain and Netherlands”. BBC News—Sports 12 Jul. 2010 . Ghosh, Pallab. “Engineers defend World Cup football amid criticism.” BBC News—Science and Environment 4 Jun. 2010. 19 Aug. 2010 . Gill, Victoria. “Roberto Carlos wonder goal ‘no fluke’, say physicists.” BBC News—Science and Environment 2 Sep. 2010 . Hawkesley, Simon. Richard Lindon 22 Aug. 2010 . “History of Football” FIFA.com. Classic Football. 20 Aug. 2010 . Kay, Billy. The Scottish World: A Journey into the Scottish Diaspora. London: Mainstream, 2008. Lowe, Sid. “Peace for Figo? And pigs might fly ...” The Guardian (London). 25 Nov. 2002. 20 Aug. 2010 . “Mary, Queen of Scots (r.1542-1567)”. The Official Website of the British Monarchy. 20 Jul. 2010 . McBrearty, Richard. Personal Interview. 12 Jul. 2010. McGinnes, Michael. Smiths Art Gallery and Museum. Visited 14 Jul. 2010 . McGregor, Karen. “FIFA—Building a transnational football community. University World News 13 Jun. 2010. 19 Jul. 2010 . Nash, Elizabeth. “Figo defects to Real Madrid for record £36.2m." The Independent (London) 25 Jul. 2000. 20 Aug. 2010 . “Oldest football to take cup trip” 25 Apr. 2006. 20 Jul. 2010 . Parks, Tim. “The Shame of the World Cup”. New York Review of Books 19 Aug. 2010. 23 Aug. 2010 < http://nybooks.com/articles/archives/2010/aug/19/shame-world-cup/>. “Pig football scores a hit at centre.” BBC News 4 Aug. 2009. August 20 2010 . Price, D. S., Jones, R. Harland, A. R. “Computational modelling of manually stitched footballs.” Proceedings of the Institution of Mechanical Engineers, Part L. Journal of Materials: Design & Applications 220 (2006): 259-268. Rhoads, Christopher. “Forget That Trip You Had Planned to the National Soccer Hall of Fame.” Wall Street Journal 26 Jun. 2010. 22 Sep. 2010 . “Roberto Carlos Impossible Goal”. News coverage posted on You Tube, 27 May 2007. 23 Aug. 2010 . Sanders, Richard. Beastly Fury. London: Bantam, 2009. “Soccer to become football in Australia”. Sydney Morning Herald 17 Dec. 2004. 21 Aug. 2010 . Springer, Will. “World’s oldest football – fit for a Queen.” The Scotsman. 13 Mar. 2006. 19 Aug. 2010 < http://heritage.scotsman.com/willspringer/Worlds-oldest-football-fit.2758469.jp >. Stevenson, R. “Pigs Play Football at Wildlife Centre”. Lincolnshire Echo 3 Aug. 2009. 20 Aug. 2010 . Strang, Kenny. Personal Interview. 12 Jul. 2010. “The Execution of Mary Queen of Scots February 8, 1857”. Tudor History 21 Jul. 2010 http://tudorhistory.org/primary/exmary.html>. “The History of the FA.” The FA. 20 Jul. 2010 “World’s Oldest Ball”. World Cup South Africa 2010 Blog. 22 Jul. 2010 . “World’s Oldest Soccer Ball by Charles Goodyear”. 18 Mar. 2010. 20 Jul. 2010 .

Introduction Since the early 2000s, and especially since the onset of COVID-19 and long periods of lockdown, board games have seen a revival in popularity. The increasing popularity of board games are part of what Julie Lennett, a toy industry analyst at NPD Group, describes as the “nesting trend”: families have more access to entertainment at home and are eschewing expensive nights out (cited in Birkner 7). While on-demand television is a significant factor in this trend, for Moriaty and Kay (6), who wouldn’t “welcome [the] chance to turn away from their screens” to seek the “warmth and connection you get from playing games with live human family and friends?” For others, playing board games can simply be about nostalgia. Board games have a long history not specific to one period, geography, or culture. Likely board games were developed to do two things – teach and entertain. This remains the case today. Historically, miniature versions of battles or hunts were played out in what we might recognise today as a board game. Trade, war, and science impacted on their development, as did the printing press, which allowed for the standardisation of rules. Chess had many variations prior to the fifteenth century. Similarly, the Industrial Revolution allowed for the mass production of board games, boosting their popularity across nations, class, and age (Walker 13). Today, regardless of or because of our digital lives, we are in a “board game renaissance” (Booth 1). Still played on rainy days, weekends, and holidays, we now also play board games in dedicated game board cafés like the Haunted Game Café in America, the Snakes and Lattes in Canada, or the Mind Café in Singapore. In the board game café Draughts in the UK, customers pay £5 to select and play one of 800 board games, including classics like Monopoly and Cluedo. These cafes are important as they are “helping manufacturers to understand the kind of games that appeal to the larger section of players” (Atrizton). COVID-19 caused board game sales to increase. The global market was predicted to increase by US$1 billion in 2021, compared to 2020 (Jarvis). Total sales of board games in Australia are expected to reach AU$86 million in 2023, an almost 10 per cent increase from the preceding year (Statista "Board Games – Australia"). The emergence of Kickstarter, a global crowdfunding platform which funds new board games, is filling the gap in the contemporary board game market, with board games generating 20 per cent of the total funding raised (Carter). Board games are predicted to continue to grow, with the global market revenue record at US$19 billion dollars in 2022, a figure that is expected to rise to US$40 billion within 6 years (Atrizton). If the current turn towards board games represents a desire to escape from the digital world, the Internet is also contributing to the renaissance. Ex-Star Trek actor Wil Wheaton hosts the popular Web series TableTop, in which each episode explains a board game that is then played, usually with celebrities. The Internet also provides “communities” in which fans can share their enthusiasm, be it as geek culture or cult fandom (Booth 2). Booth provides an eloquent explanation, however, for the allure of face-to-face board games: “they remind us of our face-to-face past, and recall a type of pre-digital luddism where we can circle around the ‘campfire’ of the game board” (Booth 1-2). What makes a board game successful is harder to define. Phillip Orbanes, an American game designer and former vice-president of research and development at Parker Brothers, has attempted to elucidate the factors that make a good board game: “make the rules simple and unambiguous … don’t frustrate the casual player … establish a rhythm … focus on what’s happening off the board … give ‘em chances to come from behind … [and] provide outlets for latent talents” (Orbanes 52-55). Orbanes also says it is important to understand that what “happens off the board is just as important to the experience as the physical game itself” (Orbanes 51). Tristan Donovan contends that there are four broad stages of modern board games, beginning with the folk era when games had no fixed author, their rules were mutable, and local communities adapted the game to suit their sensibilities. Chess is an example of this, with the game only receiving the fixed rules we know today when tournaments and organisations saw the need for a singular set of rules. Mass production of games was the second stage, marking “the single biggest shift in board game history – a total flip in how people understood, experienced and played board games. Games were no long[er] malleable objects owned by the commons, but products created usually in the pursuit of profit” (Donovan 267). An even more recent development in game boards was the introduction of mass produced plastics, which reduced the cost of board game construction and allowed for a wider range of games to be produced. This was particularly evident in the post-war period. Games today are often thought of as global, which allows gamers to discover games from other regions and cultures, such as Catan (Klaus Teuber, 1995), a German game that may not have enjoyed its immense success if it were not for the Internet. Board game players are broadly categorised into two classes: the casual gamer and the hobby or serious gamer (Rogerson and Gibbs). The most popular game from the mass production era is Monopoly, the focus of this article. The History of Monopoly Monopoly was designed and patented by American Elizabeth Magie (1866-1948) in 1902, and was originally called The Landlord’s Game. The game was based on the anti-monopoly taxation principles of Henry George (1839-1897), who argued that people should own 100 per cent of what they make and the land should belong to everyone. Land ownership, considered George, only benefitted land owners, and forces working people to pay exorbitant rent. Magie’s original version of the game was designed to demonstrate how rents enrich property owners and impoverish tenants. Renters in Australia’s property market today may recognise this side of ruthless capitalism. In 1959 Fidel Castro thought Monopoly “sufficiently redolent of capitalism” that he “ordered the ­destruction of every Monopoly set in Cuba” (McManus). Magie, however, was not credited with being the original inventor of Monopoly: rather, this credit was given to Charles Darrow. In 2014, the book The Monopolist: Obsession, Fury, and the Scandal behind the World's Favorite Board Game by Mary Pilon re-established Magie as the inventor of Monopoly, with her role and identity unearthed by American Ralph Anspach (1926-2022), an Adam Smith economist, Polish-German refugee, and anti-Vietnam protestor. According to Pilon, Magie, a suffragette and progressive economic and political thinker, was a Georgist advocate, particularly of his anti-monopolist policies, and it was this that informed her game’s narrative. An unmarried daughter of Scottish immigrants, she was a Washington homeowner, familiar with the grid-like street structure of the national capital. Magie left school at 13 to help support her family who were adversely impacted upon by the Panic of 1873, which saw economic collapse because of falling silver prices, railroad speculation, and property losses. She worked as a stenographer and teacher of Georgist single tax theory. Seeking a broader platform for her economic ideas, and with the growing popularity of board games in middle class homes, in 1904 Magie secured a patent for The Landlord’s Game, at a time when women only held 1 per cent of US patents (Pilon). The original game included deeds and play money and required players to earn wages via labour and pay taxes. The board provided a circular path (as opposed to the common linear path) in which players circled through rental properties and railroads, and could acquire food, with natural reserves (oil, coal, farms, and forests) unable to be monopolised. However, she created two sets of rules – the monopoly rules familiar to today’s players, and anti-monopoly rules in which tensions over human greed and altruism could be played out by participants. Magie started her own New York firm to manufacture and distribute the game, continued the struggle for women’s equality, and raged against wealthy monopolists of the day such as Andrew Carnegie (Pilon). By the late 1920, the game, mostly referred to as the ‘monopoly’ game, was popular, but many who played the game were playing handmade versions, likely unaware of the original Landlord’s Game. In 1931, mass-produced versions of the game, now titled Finance, began to appear, with some changes, including the ability to purchase properties, along with rule books. Occurring at the same time as the emergence of fixed-price goods in large department stores, the game, which now included chance cards, continued to be popular. It was Charles Darrow who sold Monopoly to Parker Brothers, even if he did not invent it. Darrow was introduced to one of the variants of the game and became obsessed with the game, which now featured the Community Chest and Free Parking, but his version did not have a set of rules. An unemployed ex-serviceman with no college education, Darrow struggled to provide for his family. By 1932, America was in the grip of the Great Depression, with housing prices collapsing and squatting common in large American cities. Befriending an artist, Darrow sought to provide a more dynamic and professional version of the game and complete it with a set of rules. In 1933, Darrow marketed his version of the game, titled Mr Monopoly, and it was purchased by Parker Brothers for US$7,000 in 1935. Magie received just US $500 (Farzan). Monopoly, as it was rebranded, was initial sold for $2 a game, and Parker Brothers sold 278,000 games in the first year. In 1936, consumers purchased 1.7 million editions of the game, generating millions of dollars in profits for Parker Brothers, who prior to Monopoly were on the brink of collapse (Pilon). Mary Pilon’s The Monopolists also reveals the struggle of Ralph Anspach in the 1970s to sell his Anti-Monopoly board games, which Parker Brothers fought in the courts. Anspach’s game sought to undermine the power of capitalist monopolies, which he had witnessed directly and negatively impact on fuel prices in America in the early 1970s. Hence the aim was to produce a game with an anti-monopolist narrative grounded in the free-market thinking of Adam Smith. Players were rewarded by breaking monopoly ownerships of utilities such as railroads and energy and metal reserves. In preparing his case against Parker Brothers, Anspach “accidentally discovered the true history of the game”, which began with Magie’s Landlord’s Game. Magie herself had battled with Parker Brothers in order to be “credited as the real originator of the game” and, like Anspach, reveal how Parker Brothers had changed the anti-capitalist narrative of the game, making it the “exact opposite” of its original aims (Landlordsgame). Anspach’s court room version of his battle with Parker Brothers was published in 2000, titled Monopolygate: During a David and Goliath Battle, the Inventor of the Anti-Monopoly® Game Uncovers the Secret History of Monopoly®. Monopoly Today Monopoly is now produced by Hasbro. It is the highest selling board game of all time, with an estimated 275 million units of Monopoly sold (Lee). Fan bases are clearly large too: the official Monopoly Facebook accounts report 9.9m likes (Facebook), and 68% of American households report owning a version of Monopoly (Statista "Which"). At the end of the twentieth century it was estimated that 550 million, or one in 12 people worldwide, had played the game (Guinness World Records "Most Popular"). Today it is estimated that Monopoly has been played by more than one billion people, and the digital Monopoly version has had over 100 million downloads (Johnson). The ability to play beloved board games with a computer opponent or with other players via the Internet arguably adds to the longevity of classic board games such as Monopoly. Yet research shows that despite Monopoly being widely owned, it is often not played as much as other games in people’s homes (d'Astous and Gagnon 84). D’Astous and Gagnon found that players in their study chose Monopoly to play on average six times a year, less than half the times they played Cluedo (13 times a year) or Scrabble (15 times). As Michael Whelan points out, Magie’s original goal was to make a statement about capitalism and landlords: a single player would progress round the board building an empire, whilst the others were doomed to slowly descend into bankruptcy. It was “never meant to be fun for anyone but the winner” (Whelan). Despite Monopoly’s longevity and impressive sales record, it is perhaps paradoxical to find that it is not a particularly popular or enjoyed game. Board Game Geek, the popular board game Website, reports in 2023 that the average rating for Monopoly by over 33,000 members is just 4.4 out of 10, and is ranked the 23,834th most popular game on the site (Board Game Geek). This is mirrored in academic studies: for example, when examining Orbane’s tenets for a good board game, d’Astous and Gagnon (84) found that players' appreciation of Monopoly was generally low. Not only is appreciation low for the game itself, it is also low for player antics during the game. A 2021 survey found that Monopoly causes the most fights, with 20% of households reporting “their game nights with friends or family members are often or always disrupted by competitive or unfriendly behaviour”, leading to players or even the game itself being banned (Lemore). Clearly Orbane’s tenet that the game “generates fun” is missing here (Orbanes 52). Commentators ask why Monopoly remains the best-selling board game of all time when the game has the “astonishing ability to sow seeds of discord” (Berical). Despite the claims that playing Monopoly causes disharmony, the game does allow for player agency. Perhaps more than any other board game, Monopoly is subjected to ‘house rules’. Buzzfeed reported 15 common house rules that many people think are official rules. In 2014 the official Monopoly Facebook page posted a video claiming that “68% of Americans have never read the official game rules” and that “49% of Americans had admitted to playing with their own ‘house rules’”. A look through these rules reveals that players are often trying to restore the balance of power in the game, or in other words increase the chance that a player can win. Hasbro has embraced these rules by incorporating some of them into the official rules. By incorporating players' amendments to the game, Hasbro can keep the Monopoly relevant. In another instance, Hasbro asked fans to vote on new tokens, which led to the thimble token being replaced with a Tyrannosaurus Rex. This was reversed in 2022 when nostalgic fans lobbied for the thimble’s return. Hasbro has also been an innovator by creating special rules for individual editions: for example, the Longest Game Ever edition (2019) slows players down by using only a single dice and has an extended game board. This demonstrates that Hasbro is keen to innovate and evolve the game to meet player expectations. Innovation and responsiveness to fans is one way that Hasbro has maintained Monopoly’s position as highest-selling board game. The only place the original Monopoly rules seem to be played intact are at the official competitions. Collecting and Nostalgia The characteristics of Monopoly allow for a seemingly infinite number of permutations. The places on the board can be real or fictional, making it easily adaptable to accommodate different environments. This is a factor in Monopoly’s longevity. The number of Monopoly editions are endless, with BoardGameGeek listing over 1,300 versions of the game on its site. Monopoly editions range from collector and commemorative editions to music, television, and film versions, actor-based editions, sports club editions, editions tied to toy franchises, animal lover editions, country editions, city editions, holiday editions, car brand editions, motor bike editions, as well as editions such as Monopoly Space, editions branded to popular confectionary, Ms Monopoly, and Go Green Monopoly. Each of these contain their own unique modifications. The Go Green version includes greenhouses, dice are made from FSC-certified wood from well-managed forests, tokens are made with plant-based plastic derived from sugarcane, a renewable raw material, and players can vie to have monopolistic control over renewable energy firms, solar farms, and bike paths. Licencing agreements allows Hasbro to leverage two sets of popular culture fans and collectors simultaneously: fans of Monopoly and its different versions, and fans of the Monopoly branded collectable, such as the Elvis Collector’s edition and Breaking Bad Monopoly. Apart from licencing, what else explains the longevity of Monopoly? Fred Davis demonstrates that nostalgia is an important sociological phenomenon, allowing consumers to re-imagine the past via iconic items including toys. Generation Y, also known as Millennials or digital natives, a cohort born between 1982 and 1994 who have grown up with technology as part of their everyday lives, are particularly interested in ‘heritage-inspired’ goods (Marchegiani and Phau). These consumers enjoy the past with a critical eye, drawn by the aesthetic properties of nostalgic goods rather than a direct personal connection (Goulding 575). Popular culture items are a site of widespread collecting behaviour (Geraghty 2). Belk argues that our possessions are used to construct our social selves. Collectors are a special kind of consumer: where consumers use and discard goods as needed, collectors engage with goods as special objects to be maintained and preserved (Belk 254), which is often achieved through ritualistic behaviour (McCracken 49). This is not to say that items in a collection are removed from use entirely: often being used in the normal manner, for example, clothing collectors will wear their items, yet take care of them in the a way they see akin to conservatorship (Hackett). Collections are often on display, often using the flexibility of the Internet as showground, as is the case with Neil Scallon’s world record collection of Monopoly’s 3,554 different versions of the game (World of Monopoly). Monopoly has low barriers to entry for a collector, as many sets retail at a low price-point, yet there are a few sets which are very expensive. The most expensive Monopoly set of all time retailed for US$2 million, and the cost was mainly borne out of the luxurious materials used: “the board is made from 23 carat gold, rubies and sapphires top the chimneys of the solid gold houses and hotels and the dice have 42 full cut diamonds for spots” (Guinness World Records "Most Expensive"). Conclusion The recent resurgence in board game popularity has only served to highlight Monopoly’s longevity. Through clever marketing and leveraging of nostalgia and popular culture fandoms, Hasbro has managed to retain Monopoly’s position as the number one board game, in sales figures at least. Despite its popularity, Monopoly suffers from a reputation as a conduit for poor player behaviour, as one person triumphs at the downfall of the other players. The game dynamics punish those whom fortune did not reward. In this regard, Elizabeth Magie’s initial aim of teaching about the unfairness of capitalism can be considered a resounding success. In re-establishing her role as a feminist and inventor at the turn of the century, embraced by progressive left-wingers of the 1930s, her story as much as that of Monopoly is a valuable contribution to modern popular culture. References Atrizton. Board Games Market – Global Outlook & Forecast 2023-2028. 2023. Belk, Russell W. "Collectors and Collecting." Handbook of Material Culture. Eds. Christopher Tilley et al. London: Sage, 2006. 534-45. Berical, Matt. "Monopoly Is a Terrible Game. Quit Playing It." Fatherly 4 Mar. 2020. Birkner, Christine. "Get on Board." Adweek 3-10 Apr. 2017: 7. Board Game Geek. "Monopoly." 2023. Booth, Paul. Game Play: Paratextuality in Contemporary Board Games. Bloomsbury, 2015. Buzzfeed. "15 Monopoly Rules That Aren't Actually Rules: Settled That 'Free Parking' Debate." Buzzfeed 27 Mar. 2014. Carter, Chase. "Tabletop Games Have Made over $1.5 Billion on Kickstarter." Dicebreaker 13 Dec. 2022. D'Astous, Alain, and Karine Gagnon. "An Inquiry into the Factors That Impact on Consumer Appreciation of a Board Game." Journal of Consumer Marketing 24.2 (2007): 80-89. Davis, Fred. Yearning for Yesterday: A Sociology of Nostalgia. New York: Free Press, 1979. Donovan, Tristan. "The Four Board Game Eras: Making Sense of Board Gaming’s Past." Catalan Journal of Communication & Cultural Studies 10.2 (2018): 265-70. Facebook. "Monopoly." 1 Mar. 2023. Farzan, Antonia Noori. "The New Monopoly ‘Celebrates Women Trailblazers,’ But the Game’s Female Inventor Still Isn’t Getting Credit." Washington Post 11 Sep. 2019. Geraghty, Lincoln. Cult Collectors. Routledge, 2014. Goulding, Christina. "Romancing the Past: Heritage Visiting and the Nostalgic Consumer." Psychology and Marketing 18.6 (2001): 565-92. Guinness World Records. "Most Expensive Board Game of Monopoly." 30 Jan. 2023. ———. "Most Popular Board Game." 30 Jan. 2023. Hackett, Lisa J. "‘Biography of the Self’: Why Australian Women Wear 1950s Style Clothing." Fashion, Style and Popular Culture 9.1-2 (2022). Johnson, Angela. "13 Facts about Monopoly That Will Surprise You." Insider 27 June 2018. Landlordsgame. "Landlord's Game History, Monopoly Game History." 2021. Lee, Allen. "The 20 Highest Selling Board Games of All Time." Money Inc 11 Mar. 2023. Lemore, Chris. "Banned from Game Night: ‘Monopoly’ Leads to the Most Fights among Family, Friends." Study Finds 2021. Marchegiani, Christopher, and Ian Phau. "Personal and Historical Nostalgia—a Comparison of Common Emotions." Journal of Global Marketing 26.3 (2013): 137-46. McCracken, Grant. Culture and Consumption: New Approaches to the Symbolic Character of Consumer Goods and Activities. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1988. McManus, James. "Do Not Collect $200." New York Times, 2015. 10. Moriarity, Joan, and Jonathan Kay. Your Move: What Board Games Teach Us about Life. Sutherland House, 2019. Orbanes, Phil. "Everything I Know about Business I Learned from Monopoly." Harvard Business Review 80.3 (2002): 51-131. Pilon, Mary. The Monopolists: Obsession, Fury, and the Scandal Behind the World's Favorite Board Game. Bloomsbury, 2015. Rogerson, Melissa J., and Martin Gibbs. "Finding Time for Tabletop: Board Game Play and Parenting." Games and Culture 13.3 (2018): 280-300. Statista. "Board Games – Australia." 25 Mar. 2023. ———. "Which of These Classic Board Games Do You Have at Home?" Statista-Survey Toys and Games 2018 (2018). Walker, Damian Gareth. A Book of Historic Board Games. Lulu.com, 2014. Whelan, Michael. "Why Does Everyone Hate Monopoly? The Secret History behind the World's Biggest Board Game." Dicebreaker 26 Aug. 2021. World of Monopoly. "Neil Scallan's World Record List of Official Monopolu Items." 2016.

Introduction The Disney brand has become synonymous with magic through its numerous depictions of spells, curses, prophecies, and pixie dust. Thus, it is ironic that in 2023, the 100th anniversary of the Walt Disney Studio’s founding (“Disney History”), the final film released during Walt Disney’s life, The Sword in the Stone (celebrating its 60th anniversary) remains stuck in obscurity (Aronstein 129) despite being steeped in magic and wizardry. The Sword in the Stone is regarded as “one of the most obscure [films] in the Disney animated canon” (Booker 38). Although it performed moderately well during its debut in 1963, its 1983 re-release and home video sales failed to renew public interest. To date, The Sword in the Stone has no games, comic series, or even Disneyland merchandise (Aronstein 129). The film is hardly a technical marvel; its sketchy animation style and blue-slate backgrounds create a dingy, unfinished look (Beck 272), while its simplistic storyline and anachronistic humour have been criticised for being ill-matched with its Arthurian subject matter (Gossedge 115). Despite these flaws, The Sword in the Stone offers the studio’s most fully rendered representation of Disney magic as benevolent forces sourced in learning and discipline that enable good-hearted protagonists to prepare for future leadership roles. By approaching the film as a didactic text separate from its Arthurian origins, I will demonstrate how The Sword in the Stone defines magic, not by nebulous spells or hexes, but by its facilitation of societal advancement and transformative powers via the educated mind. Young Arthur’s Humble Beginnings Based loosely on T.H. White’s 1938 novel of the same name (Valle 224), The Sword in the Stone takes place in medieval Europe, with most of its action occurring in a rotting castle and surrounding wolf-infested forests. In this threatening world, magic takes many forms, from powerful acts of “sorcery” to comical displays of “Latin business”. The first allusion to magic occurs during the film’s opening song, which establishes its setting (“when England was young”) and primary conflict (“the good king had died, and no one could decide who was rightful heir”). Without a ruler, England will be destroyed by civil war unless miraculous forces intervene on its behalf. This ‘miracle’ is the eponymous sword in the stone that the rightful ruler of England will free. The sword is destined for King Arthur, but as he is only an orphaned child living in obscurity at the film’s beginning, no one manages to retrieve the sword in his stead, and so the ‘miracle’ seemingly fails. The film’s off-screen narrator describes this leaderless period as “a dark age … where the strong preyed upon the weak”. As a force that trumps brute strength, magic is prized by those who can wield it, particularly the wizard Merlin. Magic is regarded with suspicion by the majority who cannot practice it (Valle 234), though they still recognise its legitimacy. Even Arthur’s practical stepfather, Sir Ector, begs Merlin not to practice any “black magic” on his family after Merlin creates an indoor “wizard blizzard” to prove his seriousness in tutoring Arthur. Merlin is a far cry from the mysterious soothsayer of Arthurian legend. He has been Disneyfied into a caricature of the famed wizard, appearing more like an eccentric academic than an all-seeing mystic (Beck 272). Susan Aronstein describes him as “the reification of Disney’s post-World War II rebranding of itself as a leader in education in the wake of a postwar shift in American child rearing” (130)—a playful pedagogue who makes learning fun for Arthur and audiences. After meeting Arthur in the woods near his home, Merlin becomes determined to rectify the boy’s educational deficiencies. It is not yet clear whether Merlin knows who Arthur is or will become; Merlin merely repeats to his owl companion, Archimedes, that the boy needs an education—specifically, a modern education. In addition to presenting Arthur with evidence of his travels to the future, such as helicopter models, Merlin rattles off a litany of subjects common to twentieth-century American curricula (English, science, mathematics) but hardly the sort of fare pages of Arthur’s status would study in fifth-century England. Because Arthur’s royal lineage is unknown to him, he aspires to be a squire for his soon-to-be-knighted stepbrother and so must learn the rules of jousting and horsemanship when not otherwise preoccupied with page duties. These include scrubbing pots and pans, cleaning floors, and fetching anything his stepfather requests. While Arthur is not resistant to Merlin’s attempts to teach him, he struggles to balance Merlin’s demands on his time with Sir Ector’s (Pinsky 85). Young Arthur’s gangly stature conveys how stretched the boy is between his indentured servitude to Ector and Merlin’s insistence upon his liberation through education. Arthur is constantly in motion, scurrying from one task to the next to please all parties involved and often failing to do so. Each time Merlin’s instruction causes the boy to miss Sir Ector’s call, Arthur is punished with additional duties (Holcomb et al.). Merlin’s Instructive Magic Merlin uses magic to bridge the gap between Arthur’s responsibilities to his present and his future. The word “magic” is spoken fifteen times in the film, six by Merlin himself. The wizard first utters the word after packing his entire house (furniture and all) into a carpet bag. Arthur is impressed, but Merlin warns him that magic is no panacea: “don’t you get any foolish ideas that magic will solve all your problems”. Even Merlin struggles to convince Sir Ector to let him tutor Arthur and to prevent predatory animals from killing the boy during their adventures together. Magic has limits. It cannot penetrate the minds of humans nor quell the instincts of wild animals. Its impact seems restricted to the physical world. Merlin primarily uses magic for physical transformation; his lessons centre on changing Arthur into different animals to enable the future king to experience life from others’ perspectives. Merlin turns Arthur into a fish, a squirrel, and a bird, with each animal’s situation representing increasingly complex problems that Arthur must overcome. Each lesson also corresponds with one or more levels of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs: (1) safety and survival, (2) love and belonging, and (3) self-esteem and self-actualisation (Lester 15). As a perch swimming around the castle moat, Arthur learns to use his intellect to evade a toothy pike that nearly eats him alive. As a squirrel, Arthur observes the heartbreak of unrequited love, foreshadowing his complicated love triangle with Guinevere and Lancelot (Grellner 125). In avian form, Arthur experiences a much-needed boost in his self-worth after Sir Ector strips him of his squire-in-training status. In flight, Arthur seems most in his element. After struggling with the logistics of swimming as a fish and navigating trees as a squirrel, Arthur soars over the countryside, even showing off his acrobatics to Archimedes flying alongside him. Although Arthur relishes these experiences, he does not seem to grasp their broader implications. He describes his first magical lesson as “so much fun” (despite having nearly died) and pauses only momentarily at the end of his second lesson to reflect on the emotional damage he causes a heartbroken female squirrel who falls madly in love with him. Still, Arthur faces mortal danger with each lesson, so one could argue that by transforming the young boy into different animals, Merlin is honing Arthur’s problem-solving skills (Holcomb et al.). Madam Mim’s Destructive Magic When Arthur is turned into a bird, his third lesson takes an unexpected turn. After narrowly escaping a hawk, Arthur flies into the forest and falls down the chimney of a rival magician named Mad Madam Mim. After introducing herself, Mim insists to Arthur that she has far more magic “in one little finger” than Merlin possesses in his entire repertoire. She displays her powers by killing plants, changing sizes, and making herself monstrous or lovely according to her whims. Mim’s demonstrations suggest a breezy familiarity with magic that Merlin lacks. Whereas Merlin sometimes forgets the “Latin business” needed to invoke spells, Mim effortlessly transitions from one transformation to another without any spell use. The source of her power soon becomes apparent. “Black sorcery is my dish of tea”, she croons to Arthur. Compared to Merlin’s Latin-based magic, Mim’s “black sorcery” is easier to master and well-suited to her undisciplined lifestyle. Mim’s cottage is filthy and in disrepair, yet she is playing solitaire (and cheating) when Arthur stumbles into her fireplace. This anachronism (since playing cards would not be introduced to Europeans until the fourteenth century; DeBold) characterises, through visual shorthand, Mim’s idle hands as the Devil’s workshop; she also possesses a modern dartboard that she throws Arthur against. Unlike Merlin’s domicile, Mim’s cottage contains no books, scientific instruments, or other props of study, indicating that there is no deeper understanding behind her magic. As Latin is the root language of science and law, it seems fitting that Latin is not part of Mim’s repertoire. She simply points a finger at an unfortunate subject, and it bends to her will—or dies. Efficient though Mim’s magic may be, its power is fleeting. Mim briefly changes herself into a beautiful young woman. But she concedes that her magic is “only skin deep” and turns herself back into “an ugly old creep”. Evidently, her magic’s potency does not last long, nor is it capable of improving her situation, as she continues living in her broken-down cottage as a bored, friendless hermit. Her black magic may be easy to master but cannot impart meaningful change. And so, while Merlin can use his magic to improve Arthur’s life, Mim’s magic can only serve the status quo described at the film’s beginning: the strong preying upon the weak. Although Mim lives outside the feudal social hierarchy, she uses her magic to terrorise any unfortunate creatures who wander into her clutches, including Arthur. When Arthur (still in bird form) states that he prefers the benevolence and usefulness of Merlin’s magic, an infuriated Mim transforms herself into a hungry cat and chases Arthur around the cottage until Merlin arrives to save the boy. Merlin then challenges Mim to a wizard’s duel, during which he and Mim attack each other in animal forms ranging from foxes and caterpillars to tigers, goats, and elephants. Each time Mim transforms, she does so seamlessly, requiring no momentary pause to recall a spell, unlike Merlin, who stumbles across the Latin phrases necessary to change himself into something faster or bigger. But after Merlin transforms into a walrus and squashes a clucking chicken Mim, the momentum shifts in his favour. Her magic becomes tinged with rage that causes her to make mistakes, including biting herself as a snake and ramming herself into a tree in rhinoceros form. Merlin’s disciplined playing style is nearly errorless. Although he becomes frightened when Mim transforms into a fire-breathing dragon, Merlin continues to play sensibly and courageously. His final winning move is to transform himself into a measle-like germ that incapacitates Mim with violent sneezing and cold flashes (Perciaccante and Coralli 1171). Arthur is astonished by the brilliant manoeuvring of his mentor, who manages to win the duel fairly “by dint of his knowledge and study” (Pinsky 86). After stating the lesson’s summative point for Merlin—“knowledge and wisdom is the real power”—Arthur vows to redouble his efforts to complete his education. Education: The Film’s Real Magic The lesson for viewers is simple enough: an education has a magical impact on one’s life. Put more succinctly, education is magic. Merlin defeats Mim because of his greater knowledge and cleverer use of spells. Arthur will overcome his low social status and ascend to the throne by becoming literate and sharpening his intellect. But as with Merlin’s acquisition of magical knowledge through intense study, Arthur’s royal ascension must be earned. He must learn the literal ABCs of language acquisition to gain others’ shared knowledge, as illustrated by a scene in which Archimedes painstakingly teaches Arthur how to write the alphabet in preparation for reading an enormous stack of books. Merlin cannot magically impart such knowledge to the future king; Arthur must learn it through sustained effort. He also must learn to make informed decisions rather than respond to panic or anger as Mim does during her duel with Merlin. Herein lies the distinction between Mim’s and Merlin’s magic: transformative impact. Mim’s black magic has locked her into her chosen fate. By using her powers to amuse herself or cause others harm, Mim perpetuates her outcast status as the stereotypical witch to be feared (Valle 234). While her cottage contains anachronistic elements such as playing cards (suggesting that she, like Merlin, has time-travelled), it contains no evidence of the modern advances that Merlin shares with Arthur, like aeroplane models, nor anything that might improve their feudal society. Merlin’s magic, by contrast, facilitates immediate changes to Arthur’s world and offers the promise of technological advancements in the centuries to come. To reduce the boy’s workload, for instance, Merlin magically conjures up a factory-style assembly line of brushes, tubs, and mops to wash dishes and scrub kitchen floors. Merlin also shares his knowledge of humankind’s future achievements with Arthur to advance his education, providing him with models, maps, globes, and hundreds of books. To become a proper king, Arthur must learn how to use such information to others’ advantage, not just his own. As Caroline Buts and Jose Luis Buendia Sierra observe of magic’s paradox, “using the wand without knowing properly the rules may sometimes lead to catastrophic situations” (509). This point is reaffirmed in the film’s final sequence, which takes place in London on New Year’s Day at a jousting tournament, the winner of which will be crowned king of England. Arthur, now a squire to his recently knighted stepbrother, forgets to bring his stepbrother’s sword to the tournament grounds. He attempts to replace the missing weapon with the sword in the stone when he spots the aging relic in a nearby churchyard. As Arthur pulls out the sword, angelic choral music swells, signalling that the rightful ruler of England has fulfilled the prophecy. After some scepticism from the assembled masses, Sir Ector and the other knights and spectators bow to the befuddled twelve-year-old. The film’s final scene shows a panic-stricken Arthur conceding that he does not know how to rule England and crying out for Merlin. When the wizard blows in from his most recent trip to the twentieth century, he confirms that he has known all along who Arthur is and assures the boy that he will become a great king. Arthur seems ready to put in the work, recognising that his knowledge and wisdom will improve the lives of England’s inhabitants. Conclusion Magic is thus portrayed as an intervening force that either facilitates or stymies societal progress. Good magic ensures that intelligent, educated individuals such as Arthur become great leaders, while those who would attain positions of power through brute force are thwarted from doing so. At the film’s conclusion, Arthur has not been fully transformed into a great leader because his education is far from finished; he has only learned enough to realise that he knows too little to rule effectively. Yet, from the Socratic perspective, such self-awareness is the germination for attaining true wisdom (Tarrant 263). Arthur also already knows that he will not be able to learn how to rule well through trickery or shortcuts, even with a powerful magician by his side. But the film’s closing scene reiterates this point with Merlin promising Arthur that he will succeed. “Why, they might even make a motion picture about you!” he exclaims in a clever fourth-wall joke (Gellner 120). The Sword in the Stone’s mere existence proves that Arthur will acquire the knowledge and wisdom necessary to become a truly great monarch. The fledgling pupil will live long and rule well, not because of pixie dust or magic spells, but because of his willingness to learn and to be transformed by his education into a wise and fair ruler. References Aronstein, Susan. “‘Higitus Figitus!’ Of Merlin and Disney Magic.” It’s the Disney Version! Popular Cinema and Literary Classics. Eds. Douglas Brode and Shea T. Brode. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. 129-139. Beck, Jerry. The Animated Movie Guide. Chicago: A Capella, 2005. Booker, M. Keith. Disney, Pixar, and the Hidden Messages of Children's Films. Santa Barbara: ABC-CLIO, 2010. Buts, Caroline, and Jose Luis Buendia Sierra. “The Sword in the Stone.” European State Aid Law Quarterly 16.4 (2017): 509-511. 10 June 2023 <https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.2307/26694185>. DeBold, Elizabeth. “Fortune’s Fools: Early Tarot Cards.” The Collation: Folger Shakespeare Library 2 Feb. 2021. 5 June 2023 <https://www.folger.edu/blogs/collation/fortunes-fools-early-tarot-cards/>. “Disney History.” D23, 2023. <https://d23.com/disney-history/>. Gossedge, Rob. “The Sword in the Stone: American Translatio and Disney’s Antimedievalism.” The Disney Middle Ages: A Fairy-Tale and Fantasy Past. Eds. Tison Pugh and Susan Aronstein. Palgrave Macmillan: 2012. 115–131. Grellner, Alice. “Two Films That Sparkle: The Sword in the Stone and Camelot.” Cinema Arthuriana: Twenty Essays. Rev. ed. Ed. Kevin J. Harty. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2010. 118-126. Holcomb, Jeanne, Kenzie Latham, and Daniel Fernandez-Baca. “Who Cares for the Kids? Caregiving and Parenting in Disney Films.” Journal of Family Issues 36.14 (2015): 1957–81. DOI: 10.1177/0192513X13511250. Lester, David. “Measuring Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs.” Psychological Reports: Mental & Physical Health 113.1 (2013): 15-17. 20 May 2023 <https://doi.org/10.2466/02.20.PR0.113x16z1>. Perciaccante, Antonio, and Alessia Coralli. “The Virus Defeating Madam Mim.” American Journal of Infection Control 45.10 (2017): 1171. 1 June 2023 <http://doi.org/10.1016/j.ajic.2017.07.017>. Pinsky, Mark I. The Gospel According to Disney: Faith, Trust, and Pixie Dust. Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2004. The Sword in the Stone. Dir. Wolfgang Reitherman. Perf. Karl Swenson and Rickie Sorensen. Buena Vista, 1963. Tarrant, Harold. “Socratic Method and Socratic Truth.” A Companion to Socrates. Eds. Sara Ahbel-Rappe and Rachana Kamtekar. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2006. 254-272. Valle, Maria Luiza Cyrino. "The New Matter of Britain: T.H. White's The Sword in the Stone." Estudos Germânicos 5.1 (1984): 224-265.