Wray

This volume argues for a more quantitative, economic and theoretical approach to sports history. The author notes that sport can have peculiar economics as in no other industry do rival businesses hav

Australia is often seen as a sport-obsessed nation, its people besotted with watching and playing sport. This book is an exciting survey of Australia's sporting life since white settlement. It deals comprehensively with the history of a range of individual sports in Australia, including cricket, horse-racing, netball, rowing, tennis, lawn bowls, swimming and surfing and the various football codes. Leading sports historians look at the impact of professionalization and commercialization on many sports, the link between sport and nationalism, the successes of Australian sport in the international arena and the effect of the communications revolution on sport. The book shows that class prejudice, sexual segregation and racial discrimination have permeated Australia's sporting history, arguing that sport in Australia has not taken place on a level playing field. Sport in Australia demonstrates the central role of sport in Australian popular culture and shows the ways in which sport reflect

Based on a vast range of club and association records, Pay Up and Play the Game, first published in 1988, presents a systematic economic analysis of the emergence of mass spectator sport during the years prior to World War I. It explores the tensions behind an increasingly commercialised activity that was nonetheless suffused with 'gentlemanly' values at many levels, and highlights the retreat of the latter as working-class consumption and participation became predominant, symbolised most dramatically by the celebrated victory of proletarian Blackburn Olympic over the Old Etonians in the FA Cup final of 1883. Wray Vamplew examines the linkages between sport, gambling, crime and spectator violence, and concludes that many supposedly 'recent' developments (notably football hooliganism) in fact have their origins in this, the 'Golden Age' of sport in Britain.

Based on a vast range of club and association records, Pay Up and Play the Game, first published in 1988, presents a systematic economic analysis of the emergence of mass spectator sport during the years prior to World War I. It explores the tensions behind an increasingly commercialised activity that was nonetheless suffused with 'gentlemanly' values at many levels, and highlights the retreat of the latter as working-class consumption and participation became predominant, symbolised most dramatically by the celebrated victory of proletarian Blackburn Olympic over the Old Etonians in the FA Cup final of 1883. Wray Vamplew examines the linkages between sport, gambling, crime and spectator violence, and concludes that many supposedly 'recent' developments (notably football hooliganism) in fact have their origins in this, the 'Golden Age' of sport in Britain.