England and Wales will play their 104th match in Qatar. And most often (as many as 89 times) they met at the British Home Championship. Surprised? We will tell you what kind of tournament it is and why it was really important in the middle of the last century.
It was first held at the end of the 19th century. It took 50 years for the tournament to have a trophy
The confrontation between England and Scotland began exactly 150 years ago on November 30, 1872. The match in Glasgow ended without goals, but soon the games became regular, they were held every year.
In 1876, Wales became the rival of the Scots for the first time, and three years later the British played their debut game with the Welsh. In the early 1880s, the turn came to the Irish, who were then entirely mostbet-az90-giris.com (that is, without division into northern and republican parts) were part of the United Kingdom.
Combine a series of friendly matches into a full-fledged tournament were thought of a few years later. Today, 1884 is considered the year of the first draw of the International Championship (as the British Home Championship was originally called). But contemporaries hardly realized the significance of those meetings: no one made the standings, did not count the points and did not announce the winner of the tournament. 1884 only became a reference point because of the participation of all four teams (England, Scotland, Wales and Ireland), who played one game for the first time.
It was not until the 1890s that newspapers printed the standings , focusing on the regulations of the English League: 2 points for a win, 1 for a draw. At the same time, the concept of the International Championship, which was opposed to the club one, became viral. And at the beginning of the 20th century, all meetings since 1884 were included in the statistics of the tournament, for which tables were also compiled retroactively. It turned out that in the first seasons in Britain the Scots dominated, and the British caught up with them in the number of titles only by 1901, 10 victories each. In 1903, three teams at once scored the same number of points, so England, Scotland and Ireland shared the first line. Three years later, Wales finally celebrated, and the Irish won the pre-war season-1913/1914
The next draw started only in 1919 under the brand and Victory International in honor of the victory over Germany in the First World War (same the same applies to the 1945/1946 season). During the interwar years, the British Home Championship first had a trophy. In 1935, King George V celebrated his 70th birthday, a cup was made in honor of the anniversary, and a year later it was presented to the Scottish team as the best British team of that season.
England got to the World Cup for the first time through the Home Championship. Then four Irishmen took part in two qualifications at the same time
The tournament gained additional meaning thanks to FIFA. England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland did not qualify for the World Cup before World War II. The first tournament they were able to enter was the 1950 World Cup in Brazil. FIFA allowed two of the strongest British teams to go to it following the results of the Home Championship. As a result, the British became the best, and their neighbors from the north came second. The Scots warned in advance that they would go to South America only if they took first place. The promise was kept, so they made their debut at the World Championships only four years later in Switzerland.
Before the 1954 tournament, the scheme remained the same: the British Home Championship replaced the national selection. According to its results, the Scots again let the British go ahead, but this time they did not disdain to go to the World Cup. And since the 1958 World Cup, the British participate in the qualification on an equal basis with everyone else. So the Home Championship again became a purely domestic event.
The main incident associated with the tournament happened just before the 1950 World Cup. Since the 1920s, there have been two football organizations on the island: the FAI (Football Association of Ireland) was based in Dublin and the IFA (Irish Football Association) in Belfast. The first did not send the national team to the British Home Championship, even at a time when the territory under its control was the dominion of the United Kingdom (from 1921 to 1937). The second one regularly prepared the team for the tournament, and, by the way, for a long time it was also called the Irish team (and not, as it is now, the Northern Ireland team).