 "When I started the club we played friendlies against other churches," recalls Peter. "That became very successful, so we formed a league. The boys met with lot of ridicule and it was actually quite barbed. It wasn't necessarily good-natured. "It is not cool to go to church nowadays. The boys heard comments such as, 'church leagues don't count, you're all soft, bet you use Bibles for goalposts'. As a result I had to build street-cred for the youngsters." Peter, who has a gallery in his home dedicated to the early days of football, was helped by sympathetic players and coaches. Since its formation, about 30 churches from both sides of the river have been involved in this under-17s league, open to all denominations. However, Peter's great coup was booking Prenton Park, home of Tranmere Rovers, for their League Cup Final. Longcroft won in 1998 when they beat Greasby Methodists 2-0. In 2002, they won the League Cup Final again, beating AC Mitchell (a team from the Liverpool City Mission), the Championship and the Fair Play League. To Peter, that was the most important award. Football had been played under various rules, or no rules at all, until 1863 when eleven clubs in the London area agreed on a unified code, calling their game Association Football. "Many clergymen in the 1870s, products of the public school system, transmitted the values they had learned on the games field to the young people in the parishes," said Peter. "The result was a rapid spread of church cricket and football clubs throughout the country." In 1877, cries of "how's that, sir" were heard in Stanley Park in the Everton district of Liverpool, from voices more accustomed to reading from the scriptures. Members of the Young Men's Bible Class at the new St Domingo Methodist Chapel, were playing cricket, much to the delight of their minister, Benjamin Swift Chambers, a keen player himself. But what should the young men do in winter? Football was the answer agreed by the Rev Chambers and Alfred Wade, youngest son of the coachbuilder Joseph Wade, who had laid the foundation stone at the chapel. So in 1878, they began the St Domingo Football Club, from which would develop both Everton and Liverpool (see panel). Well, much has changed in the past 128 years. Football is a huge global business. The finest players are deified by millions of admirers, their images pasted on walls like the icons of old. But the seed is always a little boy learning to kick a ball, whether it be in the slums of Naples or the lush lawns of an English public school. | 
