The boom came in the early Victorian era and, as David Winner demonstrates in <Those Feet>, was rooted in the idea that the Empire was in decline and that moral turpitude was somehow to blame. Team sports, it was thought, were to be promoted, because they discouraged solipsism, and solipsism allowed masturbation to flourish, and there could be nothing more debilitatingthan that. The Reverend Edward Thring, headmaster of Uppingham School, for instance, insisted in a sermon that it would lead to‘ early and dishonored graves’. Football was seen as the perfect antidote, because as E.A.C. Thompson would write in <The Boys’ Champion Story Paper> in 1901, ‘There is no more manly sport than football. It is so peculiarly and typically British, demanding pluck, coolness and endurance.’