Editing Bandy (section)

===Background===
The earliest origin of the sport is debated. Though many Russians see their old countrymen as the creators of the sport – reflected by the unofficial title for bandy, "Russian hockey" (русский хоккей) – Russia,<ref>Bandyns historia http://www.skiro-navelsjo.se/ (in Swedish; read on 2 December 2017)</ref> Sweden, medieval Iceland,<ref>{{Cite web |last=Molzberger |first=Ansgar |date=20 September 2024 |title=A special issue presenting a thematically wide-ranging interim status of research on Sámi sport |url=https://idrottsforum.org/molans_lidstrom-pedersen240920/ |website=idrottsforum.org |publisher=Malmö University}}</ref> the Netherlands, England, and Wales each had pastimes, such as [[bando (sport)|bando]], which can be seen as forerunners of bandy.<ref name="tebbutt">{{cite web|url=https://archive.org/details/skatings00heatrich|title=Skating|first1=John Moyer|last1=Heathcote|first2=C. G.|last2=Tebbutt|first3=Henry A.|last3=Buck|first4=John|last4=Kerr|first5=Ormond|last5=Hake|first6=T. Maxwell|last6=Witham|date=9 January 1892|publisher=London : Longmans, Green and Co.|via=Internet Archive}}</ref> The mid-eighteenth-century ''[[Devonshire Dialogue]]'' collection lists Bandy as "a game, like that of Golf, in which the adverse parties endeavour to beat a ball (generally a knob or gnarl from the trunk of a tree,) opposite ways... the stick with which the game is played is crook'd at the end".<ref>{{cite book |last1=Palmer |first1=Mary (Reynolds) |last2=Palmer |first2=James Frederick |title=A dialogue in the Devonshire dialect |date=1837 |publisher=London, Longman, Rees, Orme, Brown, Green and Longman |url=https://archive.org/details/adialogueindevo00palmgoog/page/n40}}</ref>

The sport's first published set of organized rules was codified in 1882 by [[Charles Goodman Tebbutt]] of the [[Bury Fen Bandy Club]]. When the international federation was founded in 1955, it came about after a compromise between Russian and English rules, in which more of the English rules prevailed.

Since association football was already popular in England, the codified bandy rules took after much of the football rules. Like association football, games are normally two 45 minute halves and there are 11 players per side. Players sticks are curved like large field hockey sticks and the [[bandy ball]] is roughly the size of a tennis ball with a cork core and hard plastic coating. Bandy balls were originally usually red but are now either orange or more commonly [[cerise (color)|cerise]].