How It All Began

The following was submitted by BlueWolf.

It was the late 19th century – 1880 to be exact – and the City of Manchester was a grimy grease-hole where law and order was best described as 'not done very well'. The Industrial Revolution that had begun in the city, and spread Worldwide had put Manchester firmly on the map¹, resulting in many to come to this place to find employment at some degrading and unfilling workplace (not at all like today).

Trouble was that there were many that arrived that had the common sense and skill of a cabbage, and so for these men, their days were spent drinking, wandering around aimlessly, picking random fights and rogering anything that moved (again, not at all like today).

This turn of events had however not gone unnoticed by a certain Anna Connell of St. Mark's Church in West Gorton, who had taken it upon herself to propose that the local men needed something better to do, than beating ten tons of shit out of each other. She even pointed to the passage of scripture in Thessalonians 1, ch5, v7, that states: “For they that sleep sleep in the night; and they that be drunken are drunken in the night; and they that are buggered up the jacksie will more than likely be relatively upset during the night”.

Suggesting to the Church Warden, William Beastow, she surmised that the men's daily routine would be better served via the church organising games in the manner of a new and upcoming sport called 'football'.
And so it became so; the first and only club to have been formed by a woman – yes, I know! I find it as hard to believe as you do, but that's what history says. So the next time your woman complains about you watching the game, you just remind her of ol' Anna. Put that in your pipe and smoke it! And while you're at it, make me some dinner woman, I'm hungry.

Anyway, the team was named St. Mark's (wonder how long it took her to come up with that name), and the men finally had something to do. The first game was set-up and went off without much fuss, until they realised upon arriving that there was no-one to play with and that they would actually need some opponents; something that Anna had failed to realise initially (silly cow).

Once the confusion that had occured during their first game had been solved, the men that signed up for the team of St. Mark's spent their days practising this so-called football, and being preached to about the error of their ways. So successful was Ms Connell's approach, that it was reported that sexual assualt in the area dropped by a staggering 37%, although there were some that attributed this to the fact that the men were too knackered to 'get it up', due to the intensive short-passing and 4-3-3-1 system she had introduced.

It is worthy to note that from 1875 up until the incarnation of the St. Mark's football team, the church had played cricket, which of course they had been ridiculed by the nearby St. Peter's for playing a game fit for pansies. To this day, St. Peter's still holds their annual tiddly-winks tournament, and they are very proud of it, thank you very much.

¹ This was the first time that Manchester had actually accomplished anything noteworthy since 1439, when Horace Bogshaw had declared himself the reincarnation of a hamster, and successor to the throne of England.

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