Royal Ashbourne Shrovetide Football, is a sport that has been played in the small town of Ashbourne, England for the last 350 years, making it the longest running continuous sporting event on earth and the game that most pundits consider to be the pre-cursor to modern, football, rugby and soccer. The playing field is the entire town of Ashbourne, and the athletes are its inhabitants, divided into teams by the river which cuts the town in two. In this game, anything goes. Teams of up to three hundred fight and claw their way through the rivers, streets, and fields in a competition whose rulebook allows everything short of manslaughter.
