Sport

During the 2016-2017 Premier League season, the largest stadium belonged to Manchester United, whose Old Trafford ground had a capacity of 75,643.

The club with the second largest stadium capacity was Arsenal with their impressive north London home, the Emirates Stadium, which can hold up to 60,260 fans.

The Gunners bitter north London rivals Tottenham Hotspur are currently having their White Hart Lane ground redeveloped and as such, the capacity for this season is a mere 36,284.

For the 2017-2018 season, Spurs have been allowed to play their home games at Wembley stadium, which boasts a capacity of 90,000.

Interestingly, Tottenham Hotspur can boast to currently having the smallest Premier League pitch.

Other large stadiums in the Premier League are Liverpool’s Anfield which boasts an impressive 54,167 and the Etihad Stadium, home of Manchester City which can accommodate a crowd of 55,097.

At the other end of the scale however are AFC Bournemouth, whose Dean Court ground (commercially known as the Vitality Stadium) holds just 11,464 – which incidentally is the smallest Premier League ground in history.

The only Welsh football team in the Premier League, Swansea City, lay claim to having the 2nd smallest stadium in the Premier League, as their Liberty Stadium home has a capacity of 21,088 fans.

In Rome, Italy in 1960, the first Paralympic games were held and there were 400 athletes competing from 23 different countries. Followed by the 1976 Paralympics Winter games in Örnsköldsvik, Sweden.

Although sports for atheletes that had suffered an impairment have been around for more than 100 years, it was not until after the second World War that a more comepetitive form of events existed.

The purpose of introducing the competition was to help the recovery, mentally and physically, of the large number of injured veterans and civilians hurt during the years of war.

In 1944, the British Government requested Dr.Ludwig Guttmann open a spinal injury centre at the Stoke Mandeville Hospital in London. During this time the rehabilitation of the injured and impaired patients moved on from being purely recreational sports to that of competitive sports.

On 29th July 1948, which was the opening ceremony day of the London Olympics, Dr Guttmann organised the first wheelchair bound atheletes competition, which was then known as the Stoke Mandeville Games.

During these games 16 injured servicemen and women took part in an archery event this was followed in 1952 by a Dutch ex-servicemen joining in the Movement. Thereafter, the International Stoke Mandeville Games was founded.

Since the 1988 Olympic Games of Seoul, Korea and the 1992 Winter Games in Albertville, France, all Olympic and Paralympic Games have taken place in the same cities and venues, as an agreement was reached between the IPC (International Paralympic Committee) and IOC (International Olympic Committee).

Also back in 1960, the collective groups of the World Federation of ex-servicemen, and the International Working Group on Sport for the Disabled joined forces. These groups were set up to explore problems that people with an impairment might suffer in joining in, and being affiliated to, the International Stoke Mandeville Games.

In 1964, these two groups formed one corperation which was known as the International Sport Organisation for the Disabled (ISOD). They offered opportunities for athletes who could not automatically be affiliated to the International Stoke Mandeville Games: like the visually impaired, persons with cerebral palsy, amputees, and paraplegics.

At the beginning, just 16 countries were affiliated to ISOD, but they encouraged the event to include blind and amputee athletes into the 1976 Toronto Paralympics. After that they pushed to have athletes with cerebral palsy in 1980 paralympics in Arnhem.

The aim of the committee was to include all physically impairmed atheles, and with many other organisations being formed, this made the ISOD’s job easier.

Disability oriented groups like the Cerebral Palsy International Sports and Recreation Association (CPISRA) and International Blind Sports Federation (IBSA) were founded in 1978 and 1980 respectively, and this helped push their causes forward.

Finally in 1982 the “International Co-coordinating Committee Sports for the Disabled in the World” (ICC) was formed and the four international organisations experienced a great united benefit in coordinating the furture of the Paralympic Games.

The ICC was consisted of the four presidents of CPISRA, IBSA, ISMGF and ISOD, with the general secretaries and an additional member (which happened to be the Vice-President, followed by the Technical Officer).

With tthe International Committee of Sport for the Deaf (CISS) and International Sports Federations for Persons with an Intellectual Disability (INAS-FID) joining in 1986. However the deaf still maintained their own separate organisation, with the member nations demanding a more national and regional representation within the organisation.

The International Paralympic Committee was founded on 22 September 1989, in Dusseldorf, Germany as an international non-profit organisation and they became the main global governing body for the Paralympic Movement.

The Paralympic Games are now the second biggest sporting event in the world.

We all believe that womens football started to become popular in Britain with ladies in the lead up to the London Olympics in 2012.

Well, think again! Women’s football history dates back towards the end of the 19th century in Scotland.

In 1881, an International womens football match was played in Edinburgh where Scotland beat England 3-0. However, when another game was played in Glasgow, a huge riot broke out and subsequently women were banned from playing football.

Following the ban, Helen Graham Matthews moved to England and set up the “Lady Footballers”. But then in 1894, the medical professionals in the UK called for girls and women to stop playing football due to the physical damage they were doing to their bodies.

But the following year Nettie Honeyball founded the British Ladies Football Club and the sport grew in popularity throughout the first World War.

Again though in 1921, the Football Association (FA) barred all ladies teams playing on FA grounds, so that the difficulties of organising training and matches made it impossible to continue to playing and therefore the sport petered out.

Roll on a few years and following on from England’s 1966 World Cup victory, women’s football began to re-ermerge. In 1969 the Women’s Football Association was founded but it took two further years for an order from UEFA to force the FA to remove the restrictions against women playing on their grounds.

Since 1971 the number of women football players and teams keeps increasing and now is at a record high of 2.89 female footballers.

The Ashes are a series of five test matches in cricket which are played between England and Australia at least once every four years.

When Australia won the test series in 1882, a satirical obituary was put in ‘The Sporting Times’ by a cricket journalist who stated “The body (English Cricket) will be cremated and the ashes taken to Australia”. That is where the term “the Ashes” originated from.

Thereafter, the ashes became associated with the following years series which were played in Australia, especially as the English Captain Ivo Bligh vowed to “regain thoses ashes” as they went on tour. Consequently, the British media dubbed the England Cricket Club’s tour as the quest to regain the Ashes.

England went on to win two out of the three tests that year and were presented with a small urn by a group of Melbourne woman, one of whom became Bligh’s wife.

The urn was said to contain the ashes of a wooden ball and was jokingly described as “the ashes of Australian cricket”

Over the years, Australia has won 32 series, England 31 and they have drawn five series.