Inverting the Pyramid: The History of Football Tactics (3 page)

There may not have been a culture of passing in Sheffield, but it does seem they would punt the ball long to clear their lines. In
The World Game
, Geoffrey Green notes that when Sheffield players arrived in London for an exhibition match in 1875 and began ‘butting the ball with their heads’, the crowd regarded it as ‘something for amusement rather than admiration’. In a pure dribbling game, of course, there would have been no need for the ball ever to leave the ground, other - perhaps - than to lift it over a challenging foot. Only if the ball were played a significant distance in the air would heading have been necessary.

The Scottish Football Association annual’s report of an 1877 match between Glasgow and Sheffield makes the point clearly: ‘That the game was a very well contested one, and victory has rested with the best side, no one will deny; but that it was a pretty game, abounding in fine displays of combined dribbling, which has frequently distinguished a Scottish team above all others, few will admit… The fact cannot be hidden … that the tactics pursued by the Sheffield team on Saturday were partially responsible for this inasmuch as they play a different set of rules from those of the English and Scottish Associations, and to them our “off-side” rule is next to a dead letter. In this manner, long kicking was largely indulged in on Saturday on their side; and in order to meet the same style of play, the Glasgow men actually lost that united action which had led them on to victory in many a harder fought field.’

The spread of passing itself - that ‘united action’ - can be traced back to one game, football’s first international, played between England and Scotland at Hampden Park, Glasgow, in 1872. England’s line-up comprised a ‘goal’, a ‘three-quarter back’, a ‘halfback’, a ‘fly-kick’, four players listed simply as ‘middle’, two as ‘left side’ and one as ‘right side’, which, to try to apply modern notation, sounds like something approximating to a lop-sided 1-2-7. ‘The formation of a team as a rule…’ Alcock noted, ‘was to provide for seven forwards, and only four players to constitute the three lines of defence. The last line was, of course, the goalkeeper, and in front of him was only one full-back, who had again before him but two forwards, to check the rushes of the opposing forwards.’

Scotland were represented by the Queen’s Park club, which, until the foundation of the Scottish FA in 1873, governed the Scottish game - functioning much like the MCC in cricket or the Royal and Ancient in golf. Crucially, they were over a stone per man lighter than England. It is indicative of the physicality of early football that most pundits seemed to have expected that weight advantage would give England a comfortable victory, but what it actually did was to stimulate the imagination. Although direct evidence is sketchy, it seems probable that, as Richard McBrearty of the Scottish Football Museum argues, Queen’s Park decided they had to try to pass the ball around England rather than engage in a more direct man-to-man contest in which they were likely to be out-muscled, and their formation was very definitely a 2-2-6. The ploy paid off. England, with a more established tradition and a far larger pool of players from which to select, were firm favourites, but were held to a goalless draw. ‘The Englishmen,’ the report in the
Glasgow Herald
said, ‘had all the advantage in respect of weight, their average being about two stones heavier than the Scotchmen [a slight exaggeration], and they also had the advantage in pace. The strong point with the home club was that they played excellently well together.’

First International: Scotland 0 England 0, 30 November 1872, Partick

That success may have confirmed the notion of passing as superior to dribbling - north of the border at least - but it could never have worked had passing not been part of the game in Scotland almost from the start. When the Queen’s Park club was established in 1867, the version of the offside law they adopted held that a player was infringing only if he were both beyond the penultimate man and in the final 15 yards of the pitch. That, clearly, was legislation far more conducive to passing than either the FA’s first offside law or its 1866 revision. Queen’s Park accepted the three-man variant when they joined the FA on 9 November 1870, but by then the idea of passing was already implanted. In Scotland the ball was there to be kicked, not merely dribbled, as H.N. Smith’s poem celebrating Queen’s Park’s victory over Hamilton Gymnasium in 1869 suggests:

The men are picked - the ball is kicked,
High in the air it bounds;
O’er many a head the ball is sped…

Equally, it was the prevalence of dribbling upon which Robert Smith, a Queen’s Park member and Scotland’s right-winger in that first international, remarked after playing in the first of the four matches Alcock arranged between England and a team of London-based Scots that were the forerunners to proper internationals. ‘While the ball was in play,’ he wrote in a letter back to his club, ‘the practice was to run or dribble the ball with the feet, instead of indulging in high or long balls.’

One of Queen’s Park’s motivations in joining the English association was to try to alleviate the difficulties they were having finding opponents who would agree to play by a standard set of rules. In the months leading up to their acceptance into the FA, they played games of ten-, fourteen-, fifteen- and sixteen-a-side, and in 1871-72, they managed just three games. ‘The club, however,’ Richard Robinson wrote in his 1920 history of Queen’s Park, ‘never neglected practice.’ Their isolation and regular matches among themselves meant that idiosyncrasies became more pronounced - as they would for Argentina in the thirties - and so the passing game was effectively hot-housed, free from the irksome obstacle of
bone fide
opponents.

‘In these [practice] games’, Robinson went on, ‘the dribbling and passing,’ ‘which raised the Scottish game to the level of fine art, were developed. Dribbling was a characteristic of English play, and it was not until very much later that the Southerners came to see that the principles laid down in the Queen’s Park method of transference of the ball, accompanied by strong backing up, were those that got the most out of the team. Combination was the chief characteristic of the Queen’s Park’s play. These essentials struck Mr C.W. Alcock and in one of his earlier Football Annuals formed the keynote for a eulogium on Scottish players, accompanied by earnest dissertations advocating the immediate adoption by English players of the methods which had brought the game to such a high state of proficiency north of the Tweed.’

Alcock, in fact, was nowhere near as convinced as that. Although he professed himself intrigued by the ‘combination game’ - and for all the prowess he had shown at Sheffield - he expressed doubt in that annual of 1879 as to whether ‘a wholesale system of passing pays’. Passing, he evidently felt, was all very well as an option, but should never be allowed to supplant the dribbling game.

Nonetheless, it quickly spread, particularly in Scotland, where the influence of Queen’s Park was all-encompassing, leading ultimately to the highly romanticised ‘pattern-weaving’ approach, characterised by strings of short passes zigzagging between the forward- and half-lines. Queen’s Park organised the Scotland side for the first two internationals, and even after the foundation of the Scottish Football Association remained a powerful voice in shaping the sport. They acted as evangelists, travelling across the country to play exhibition games. Records of a match against Vale of Leven, who became one of the early powerhouses of Scottish football, describe the game being stopped at regular intervals so the rules and playing methods could be described, while a game in Edinburgh in 1873 kick-started football in the capital. It is perhaps indicative of the impact of those matches that the Borders remain a rugby stronghold: a missionary game Queen’s Park were scheduled to play there had to be cancelled because of FA Cup commitments, so football’s seeds were never sown. As McBrearty points out, Scotland’s demographics, with the majority of the population living in the central belt between the Glasgow and Edinburgh conurbations, made it far easier for one particular style to take hold than it was in England, where each region had its own idea of how the game should be played.

Queen’s Park’s tactics in the first international raised eyebrows in England, but the southward spread of the passing game can be attributed largely to two men: Henry Renny-Tailyour and John Blackburn, who played for Scotland in their victory over England in the second international. Both were lieutenants in the army, and both played their club football for the Royal Engineers, carrying the Scottish style with them to Kent. ‘The Royal Engineers were the first football team to introduce the “combination” style of play,’ W.E. Clegg, a former Sheffield player, wrote in the
Sheffield Independent
in 1930. ‘Formerly the matches Sheffield played with them were won by us, but we were very much surprised that between one season and another they had considered “military football tactics” with the result that Sheffield was badly beaten by the new conditions of play.’

The passing approach was implanted in schools football by the Reverend Spencer Walker, as he returned as a master to Lancing College, where he had been a pupil, and set about turning ‘a mere bally-rag into a well-ordered team’. ‘The first thing I fell upon,’ he wrote, ‘was the crowding of all the forwards on the leading forward. They crowded round him wherever they went. So I made Rule 1: Fixed places for all the forwards, with passing the ball from one to the other. You should have seen the faces of our first opponents, a sort of “Where do we come in?” look.’

For all Alcock’s scepticism, it gradually became apparent that passing was the future. The Old Carthusians side that beat the Old Etonians 3-0 in the 1881 FA Cup final was noted for its combinations, particularly those between E.M.F. Prinsep and E.H. Parry, while the following year the Old Etonian goal that saw off Blackburn Rovers, the first northern side to reach the final, stemmed, Green wrote in his history of the FA Cup, from ‘a long dribble and cross-pass’ from A.T.B. Dunn that laid in W.H. Anderson. Still, the Etonians were essentially a dribbling side.

The final flourish of the dribbling game came in 1883. For the first time the Cup received more entries from outside London than within, and for the first time the Cup went north as Blackburn Olympic beat Old Etonians in the final. The amateur era - at least in terms of mindset - was over; something acknowledged two years later when the FA legalised professionalism.

All the Olympic side had full-time jobs, and it caused something of a stir when their half-back and
de facto
manager, Jack Hunter, took them to Blackpool for a training camp before the final. This was very evidently not the effortless superiority to which the amateurs aspired. Early in the game, injury reduced the Etonians to ten men, but it is doubtful anyway whether they would have been able to cope with Olympic’s unfamiliar tactic of hitting long sweeping passes from wing to wing. The winning goal, scored deep in extra-time, was characteristic of the game as a whole: a cross-field ball from Tommy Dewhurst (a weaver) on the right found Jimmy Costley (a spinner) advancing in space on the left, and he had the composure to beat J.F.P. Rawlinson in the Etonian goal.

In Scotland, the superiority of passing was old news. ‘Take any club that has come to the front,’ the columnist ‘Silas Marner’ wrote in the
Scottish Umpire
in August 1884, ‘and the onward strides will be found to date from the hour when the rough and tumble gave place to swift accurate passing and attending to the leather rather than the degraded desire merely to coup an opponent.’ Not that everybody was convinced. Two months later, after Jamestown Athletics had been beaten 4-1 in the Scottish Cup by Vale of Leven, ‘Olympian’ was scathing of their combination game in his ‘On the Wing’ column in the
Umpire
. ‘“Divide and Conquer” was a favourite dictum of the great Machiavelli when teaching princes how to govern…. What shall I say of the Jamestown’s attempt to, I suppose, verify the truth of the aphorism. Their premises were right, but then they went sadly wrong with the conclusion. They made the grave mistake of dividing
themselves
instead of their opponents and so paid the penalty. And what a penalty! Tell it not in Gath. Publish it not in Askelon. Strategy can never take the place of eleven good pairs of nimble legs.’

Wrexham 1 Druids 0, Welsh Cup final, Acton, 30 March 1878