Page:Football, The Association Game.djvu/50

 spying out any gaps in the enemy's ranks, or any weak points in the defence, which may give him a favourable chance of arriving at the coveted goal. To see some players guide and steer a ball through a circle of opposing legs, turning and twisting as occasion requires, is a sight not to, be forgotten; and this faculty or aptitude for guiding the ball often places a slow runner on an equal footing with one much speedier of foot. Speed is not an indispensable ingredient in the formation of a 'good dribbler,' though undoubtedly fleetness of foot goes far to promote success. Skill in dribbling, though, necessitates something more than a go-ahead, fearless, headlong onslaught on the enemy's citadel; it requires an eye quick at discovering a weak point, and 'nous' to calculate and decide the chances of a successful passage."

The footballer of to-day will bear with us, it is to be hoped, in the attempt to portray, for the benefit of posterity, a type of the old school—"a poor player," to use Macbeth's phrases, "that struts and frets his hour upon the stage, and then is heard no more." The quotation just given from the "Football Annual" will show that even then, when the seventies were on the wane, the dribbler's occupation was rapidly going, and that he was steadily undergoing a process of absorption in the general reconstruction of the football field.

An important alteration in the rules, enacting that the ball ought to be thrown out from touch in any direction instead of, as hitherto, thrown out straight, carried in 1877, marked a new era in the history of Association football. Mention is made incidentally of this change, because, though it did not become law without strenuous opposition all along the line, it tended to make the game so much faster, that it really, in some measure, helped to expedite the material revolution that was taking place in the Association game. It