Scots invented beautiful game

From the Scotsman:

"SCOTLAND may not be at the World Cup, but the country can at least lay claim to having invented football, following the translation of a book written almost 400 years ago.

In 1633, more than 200 years before the Football Association was formed in England, David Wedderburn, a poet and teacher at Aberdeen Grammar School, described a match in his pocket-sized tome Vocabula.

While there are older descriptions of ball games involving kicking, historians say the Scottish manuscript, written in Latin, is the first to report on players passing the ball forward and attempting to score past a goalkeeper. A section of the book marks the kick-off: "Let's pick sides. Those who are on the outside, come over here. Kick off, so that we can begin the match ... Pass it here.""

So there. We may have invented a game only to be routinely humped by other countries that take it up - but if you're English, you'll be able to empathise with this problem.