“Like Old Times”

Abstract

As the war continued into 1917, when casualties increased to unimagined levels, and as the military situation worsened in March 1918, with the German breakthrough, patriots continued to challenge football clubs, players and supporters over the morality of the game’s continuance in wartime. This chapter traces how, despite this negative situation, the game began to slowly resurrect itself. The defeat of conscription undoubtedly relieved some pressure on football as did the government’s ambivalence toward it, but above all the war had become a normal, if highly objectionable, part of peoples’ lives and football offered itself as quite a logical and normal pastime to pursue despite the pressures of the global conflict.