Melvyn Bragg has come out with a list of the top dozen books ever. He kept to English ones and his criteria were a book’s influence on the world. Nine were predictable: Magna Carta (1215); King James Bible (1611); Shakespeare’s First Folio (1623); Isaac Newton’s Principia Mathematica (1687); Richard Arkwright’s Spinning Machine (1769); Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations (1776); William Wilberforce’s Abolition of the Slave Trade (1789); Michael Faraday’s Electricity Research (1839) and Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species (1859). But two surprises: Mary Wollstonecroft’s Vindication of the Rights of Women (1792) which demanded women’s equality and Marie Stopes’ Married Love (1918) with its assertion of the right of women to control and enjoy their sex and family lives.

I was in Martyn Channons looking at socks when I heard from a fellow shopper the astonishing news that Rahul Dravid and Sachin Tendulkar had gone shortly after lunch. After that India’s second innings collapsed to 100 all out to give England their first test win in India for 20 years and square the three-game series 1-1.

It has been an astonishing few weeks in the Indian sub-continent for the English Cricket Team. England saved their greatest stuff for the times of their greatest misfortune. In Bombay they had only six players from the Ashes winning summer...and three were filling different roles. The team was unrecognisable, desperately short of experience and with an untried captain. Yet this series has been remarkable for Flintoff’s almost complete lack of doubt. My favourite bad birdwatcher Simon Barnes felt moved to wax lyrical today in the sports pages of The Times. Here he is.

In India one thinks of Kipling and today it is particularly appropriate to see to what extent Flintoff passes the If test. One of the hardest requirements of that most exacting poem is the bit about defeat…if you can lose and start again at your beginning. Flintoff captained England to a closely fought draw in Nagpur and then a deeply distressing defeat in Mohali, in which England did many good things but were ultimately outplayed. England gave everything and lost. To come back from that to win in Bombay required copious qualities of the very toughest If virtues. And over the course of the past five days England and Flintoff, having learnt in Mohali that giving everything simply wasn’t enough, proceeded to give more. Flintoff won in Bombay because he gave more than everything.

Later the same day Chelsea ground out another one-goal victory beating Newcastle United 1-0 at Stamford Bridge in the quarter finals of the FA Cup which keeps them in with a chance of a league and cup double. I only gave you eleven of Melvyn Bragg’s top dozen books. The twelfth was released in 1863 by a bunch of upper class English toffs and goes by the name of the Book Of Rules of Association Football. This choice is not as silly as it might seem.

This short book made it possible for everyone everywhere to play the same game. Without this book ‘the beautiful game’...as the great Brazilian footballer Edson Arantes do Nascimento called it...would not have kicked off. Because of this book and the proselytising enthusiasm of British sailors, merchants and adventurers on their expeditions around the globe it is now estimated that this year eight out of ten people in the world will watch something of the World Cup in Germany.

Football is played world-wide by more than one and a half million teams and three hundred thousand clubs…not including the hundreds and thousands of schools and youth cubs. It has become part of the national consciousness of almost every country in the world. It drives television channels, radio stations and newspapers from the local to the national…a form of universal language.

The game has been around a while. Football is complained of regularly in medieval chronicles. In his pamphlet The Anatomy of Abuses in 1583 Philip Stubbs said of the players that ‘sometime their necks are broken, sometime their backs, sometime their legs, sometime their arms; sometime one part is thrust out of joint, sometime another.’

The Times in 1842 reports: ‘The Poor have been dispossessed of their games, their amusements and their mirth.’ Football when played at all became much toned down, the number of players and even the space involved limited.

But help and salvation were at hand…from English public schools like Charterhouse, Rugby and Eton. Here what was once disorder, mayhem and a threat to public peace became a way to train the gilded youth who would lead and expand a nation. My old alma mater Cambridge can take the credit for starting the process that resulted in the book of rules. Here it was agreed that fourteen players from different schools should frame a set of rules.

The Cambridge Rules were superseded only a few days after their formulation on 26th October 1863 at the Freemasons’ Tavern in Lincoln Inn Fields. On that Monday representatives from a dozen London and suburban clubs met to sort it out once and for all.

By the end of the afternoon it was announced that ‘the clubs represented at this meeting now form themselves into an association to be called the Football Association.’ It took another half-dozen meetings to classify and codify what eventually became known as the Football Association Laws.