Despite the importance of context as an aid to interpreting sport, ‘historians rarely
discuss what [this] involves’.
The general consensus is that context establishes patterns that share relationships beyond a temporal juxtaposition.
Well-constructed contexts are successful,
Thompson said, because they show a coherent and internally consistent set of relationships between all the parts in a cultural or social system;
in contradistinction, many historical relationships are insignificant, ‘muddled’ and
‘pretentious’.