Inverting the Pyramid: The History of Football Tactics (4 page)

Well, it can, and it did and, to the consternation of traditionalists in both England and Scotland, it meant one of the two centre-forwards - who, it was found, tended to replicate each other’s role in a passing game - slipping back into a deeper position, eventually becoming, over the course of the 1880s, a centre-half in a 2-3-5 formation: the Pyramid. There is a widespread belief as expressed by, for instance, the Hungarian coach Árpád Csanádi in his immense and influential coaching manual
Soccer
, that the 2-3-5 was first played by Cambridge University in 1883, but there is evidence to suggest they may have been using the system as much as six years before that. Nottingham Forest, equally, were enthusiastic advocates of the system by the late 1870s, inspired in their experiments by their captain Sam Widdowson, who also invented the shinpad.

Certainly Wrexham were employing a centre-half when they faced Druids in the Welsh Cup final in 1878; their captain and full-back Charles Murless, a local estate agent, deciding to withdraw E.A. Cross from the forward line, seemingly because he felt that the pace of the centre-forward who remained, John Price, was sufficient to cover for any resulting shortfall in attack. He was vindicated as James Davies settled a tight game with the only goal two minutes from time.

The gradual spread of the 2-3-5 meant that the centre-half soon became the fulcrum of the team, a figure far removed from the dour stopper he would become. He was a multi-skilled all-rounder, defender and attacker, leader and instigator, goal-scorer and destroyer. He was, as the great Austrian football writer Willy Meisl put it, ‘the most important man on the field’.

Intriguingly, the
Sheffield Independent
, in its report on the first floodlit game - an exhibition between the ‘Reds’ and the ‘Blues’ played in October 1878 - listed each team with four backs, a half, and five forwards. There is, though, no other evidence of any side playing with any more than two defenders for another three decades, so it seems probable that what is actually being described is a 2-3-5, with the wing-halves, whose job it would become to pick up the opposing inside-forwards, listed not as halves but as backs.

A sense of the outrage prompted by even the idea of defending is given by a piece in the
Scottish Athletic Journal
of November 1882 condemning the habit of ‘certain country clubs’ of keeping two men back 20 yards from their own goal, there merely, the writer tartly suggests, ‘to keep the goalkeeper in chat’. Similarly, Lugar Boswell Thistle, a club from Ayrshire, were deplored for attacking with a mere nine men. The reactionaries, though, were fighting a losing battle, and it was with a 2-3-5 that Dumbarton beat Vale of Leven in the Scottish Cup final in 1883.

It was the success of Preston North End in the 1880s that confirmed the pre-eminence of the 2-3-5. Initially a cricket and rugby club, they played a ‘one-off’ game under association rules against Eagley in 1878. No positions were recorded for that game, but in November the following year, they met Halliwell, with a team listed in the classic 2-2-6: that is, with two full-backs, two half-backs, two right-wingers, two left-wingers and two centre-forwards. Preston joined the Lancashire Football Association for the 1880-81 season and, although they initially struggled, the arrival of a host of Scottish players - professionals in all but name - transformed the club. By 1883 the team-sheets were for the first time showing Preston lining up in a 2-3-5 system. Exactly whose idea that was is unclear, but it is known that James Gledhill, a teacher and doctor from Glasgow, gave a series of lectures ‘showing by blackboard what might be done by a team of selected experts’, as David Hunt put it in his history of the club. It was with that system that Preston went on to win the first two Football League titles, the first of them, in 1887-88, without losing a game.

England played a 2-3-5 for the first time against Scotland in 1884 and, by October that year, the system was common enough that when Notts County went north for a friendly against Renfrewshire, the
Umpire
listed their team in 2-3-5 formation without comment. The Scotland national side first used a pyramid in 1887, prompting much grumbling about their aping of what was initially an English tactic. The tone of a profile of Celtic’s James Kelly, published in the
Scottish Referee
in 1889, though, makes clear that by the end of the decade the debate was over. ‘There are many people who believe that when Scotland adopted the centre half-back position she sacrificed much of her power in the game,’ it read. ‘We do not share altogether this opinion, and if the players who fill this space in our clubs were men of Mr Kelly’s calibre there would be no difference of opinion on the matter, nor would we have any cause to regret having followed England in this matter.’

The pyramid would remain the global default until the change in the offside law in 1925 led to the development, in England, of the W-M. Just as the dribbling game and all-out attack had once been the ‘right’ - the only - way to play, so 2-3-5 became the touch-stone.

Chapter Two

The Waltz and the Tango

∆∇ It wasn’t only Britain that found football irresistible; almost everywhere the British went in search of trade and commerce they left the game, and that didn’t just include parts of the Empire. There was money to be made from exporting copper from Chile, guano from Peru, meat, wool and hide from Argentina and Uruguay and coffee from Brazil and Colombia, and there was banking to be done everywhere. By the 1880s, 20 percent of Britain’s foreign investment was in South America, and by 1890 there were 45,000 Britons living in the Buenos Aires area, along with smaller, but still significant, communities in São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, Montevideo, Lima and Santiago. They ran their businesses, but they also established newspapers, hospitals, schools and sporting clubs. They exploited South America’s natural resources, and in return they gave football.

In Europe, it was a similar story. If there was a British community - whether centred on diplomacy, banking, trade or engineering - football soon followed. The first Budapest club was Újpest, established at a gymnasium in 1885, and MTK and Ferencváros soon followed. Vienna was the centre of the British presence in central Europe, and football, having initially been played among the staff of the embassy, banks and various trading and engineering companies, soon took hold. The first match in Austria took place on 15 November 1894, between the Vienna Cricket Club and gardeners from Baron Rothschild’s estate, but local interest was so great that by 1911 the Cricket Club had become Wiener Amateure. Among Czechs, football had to compete with Sokol, a local variant of Turnen, the nationalistic gymnastics popular in Germany, but with increasing numbers of young intellectuals in Prague turning to London and Vienna for guidance, the game soon took root there as well. The inauguration of Der Challenge Cup in 1897, open to any side from the Habsburg Empire, prompted a further upsurge in interest.

Anglophile Danes, Dutch and Swedes were equally quick to adopt the game, Denmark proving good enough to take silver at the 1908 Olympics. There was never any sense, though, of trying to do anything different to the British, whether from a tactical or any other point of view. To look at photographs of Dutch sporting clubs of the late nineteenth century is to look at a pastiche of Victorian Englishness, all drooping moustaches and studied indifference. As a participant quoted by Maarten van Bottenburg and Beverley Jackson in
Global Games
put it, the purpose of sport was to play ‘on English grounds, with all their English customs and English strategies … amid the beautiful Dutch landscape’. This was about imitation; invention didn’t come into it.

It was in central Europe and South America, where attitudes to the British were more sceptical, that football began to evolve. The 2-3-5 formation was retained, but shape is only part of the matter; there is also style. Where Britain, despite the acceptance of passing and the spread of 2-3-5, persisted in ruggedness and physicality, others developed subtler forms of the game.

What set football in central Europe apart was the speed at which it was taken up by the urban working class. Although tours by the likes of Oxford University, Southampton, Corinthians, Everton and Tottenham and the arrival of various coaches ensured a British influence remained, those playing the game had not been inculcated in the beliefs of the English public schools, and so had no preconceived notions of the ‘right’ way of doing things.

They were fortunate, also, that it was Scots who made the biggest impression, so ensuring that the focus of the game was on quick, short passing. In Prague, for instance, the former Celtic inside-left John Madden - ‘the ball artist of his day with all the tricks’ according to Jim Craig in
A Lion Looks Back
- coached Slavia between 1905 and 1938, while his compatriot John Dick, once of Airdrieonians and Arsenal, had two spells in charge of Sparta between 1919 and 1933. In Austria, meanwhile, a conscious effort was made to ape the style of the Rangers side that had toured in 1905.

The greatest teacher of the Scottish game, though, was an Englishman of Irish descent: Jimmy Hogan. Born and raised in Burnley in a staunchly Roman Catholic family, in his teens he toyed with the idea of entering the priesthood, but he turned to football and went on to become the most influential coach there has ever been. ‘We played football as Jimmy Hogan taught us,’ said Gusztav Sebes, the coach of the great Hungary side of the early fifties. ‘When our football history is told, his name should be written in gold letters.’

Defying his father’s desire for him to become an accountant, Hogan joined the Lancashire side Nelson as a sixteen year old and, developing into what he described as ‘a useful and studious insideright’ went on to Rochdale and then Burnley. He was, by all accounts, a difficult character, haggling repeatedly for better wages and showing a wholly alien devotion to self-improvement. His team-mates nicknamed him ‘the Parson’ in recognition of his meticulous, almost Puritanical disposition. At one point Hogan and his father devised a primitive exercise bike - essentially a bicycle mounted on a rickety wooden stand - on which he would cycle 30 miles a day until he realised that far from making him quicker, he was merely tightening his calf muscles.

The ideal of effortless superiority may have belonged to the early amateurs, but it carried over into the professional game. Training, as such, was frowned upon. Players were expected to run, perhaps even practise their sprints, but ball-work was seen as unnecessary, possibly even deleterious. Tottenham’s training schedule for 1904, for instance, shows just two sessions a week with the ball, and they were probably more enlightened than most. Give a player a ball during the week, ran the reasoning, and he would not be so hungry for it on a Saturday: a weak metaphor turned into a point of principle.

After one match, in which he had dribbled through a number of challenges to create an opportunity only to shoot disappointingly over the bar, Hogan asked his manager, Spen Whittaker, what had gone wrong. Had the position of his foot been wrong? Had he been off balance? Whittaker was dismissive, telling him just to keep trying, that to score one out of ten was a decent return. Others would have shrugged off the incident but, perfectionist that he was, Hogan dwelt on it. Surely, he thought, such things were not a matter of luck, but depended on technique. ‘From that day I began to fathom things out for myself,’ he said. ‘I coupled this with seeking advice from the truly great players. It was through my constant delving into matters that I became a coach later in life. It seemed the obvious thing, for I had coached myself as quite a young professional.’

Hogan felt frustrated by Burnley’s primitive approach, but it was a financial dispute that finally persuaded him, at the age of twenty-three, to leave Lancashire for the first time, enticed to Fulham by their manager Harry Bradshaw, whom he had known briefly at Burnley. Bradshaw had no playing pedigree and was a businessman and administrator rather than a coach, but he had clear ideas on how football should be played. No fan of kick-and-rush, he employed a series of Scottish coaches schooled in the close-passing game, ensured a hefty Scottish representation among the playing staff and left them to get on with it.

The policy was undeniably successful. Hogan helped Fulham to the Southern League championship in both 1906 and 1907 and, having joined the Second Division of the Football League in 1907-08, they reached the semi-final of the FA Cup, losing to Newcastle United. It was Hogan’s last match for the club. He had been struggling for some time with a knee injury and Bradshaw, business head firmly in place, decided that to retain him was an unjustifiable risk. Hogan briefly joined Swindon Town, before representatives of Bolton Wanderers, having waited for him outside church after evensong one Sunday, persuaded him back to the north-west.

His career there was disappointing, ending in relegation, but a pre-season trip to the Netherlands made Hogan aware of the potential of Europe, and the desire of its players to learn. English football may have dismissed coaching as unnecessary, but the Dutch were begging for it. Following a 10-0 win over Dordrecht, Hogan vowed that one day he would ‘go back and teach those fellows how to play properly’. He also, crucially, became good friends with James Howcroft, an engineer from Redcar who was a leading referee. Howcroft regularly took charge of games overseas and, as a result, knew several foreign administrators. One evening, Howcroft mentioned to Hogan that he had heard that Dordrecht were looking for a new coach, and hoped to employ somebody with an expertise in the British game. The coincidence was remarkable, and the opportunity not to be missed; Hogan applied, and, at the age of twenty-eight, a year after making his vow, he was back in Holland to fulfil it, accepting a two-year contract.

Hogan’s players were amateurs, many of them students, but he began to train them as he felt British professionals should have been trained. He improved their fitness, certainly, but he believed the key was to develop their ball control. He wanted his team, he said, to replicate ‘the old Scottish game’, to play in ‘an intelligent, constructive and progressive, on-the-carpet manner’. Crucially, because many of them came from the universities, his players were keen to study, and Hogan introduced lessons, explaining in chalk on a blackboard how he thought football should be played. Tactics and positioning began to be understood and explained not in an
ad hoc
manner on the pitch, but via diagrams in a classroom.

Hogan was successful and popular enough that he was asked to take charge of the Dutch national side for a game against Germany, which they won 2-1. Still only thirty, though, he felt he had more to give as a player, so, when his contract at Dordrecht was up, he returned to Bolton, who had retained his registration. He played a season there, helping them to promotion, but his future, he knew, lay in coaching. He began looking for work again in the summer of 1912, and again Howcroft proved instrumental, putting him in touch with the great pioneer of Austrian football, Hugo Meisl.

Meisl had been born in the Bohemian city of Maleschau in 1881 to a middle-class Jewish family, who moved to Vienna while he was still very young. He became obsessed by football, and turned out to limited success for the Cricket Club. His father, though, wanted him to go into business, and found him work in Trieste, where he became fluent in Italian and began to pick up other languages. Returning to Austria to perform his military service, he accepted his father’s request that he should secure employment at a bank, but also started working for the Austrian football federation. Initially his job was concerned largely with fund-raising, but Meisl, like Hogan an intelligent inside-forward, had firm ideas on how the game should be played and was determined to shape the future of Austrian football. Slowly, his role expanded until, as the
de facto
head of the Austrian federation, he gave up banking altogether.

In 1912, Austria drew 1-1 against Hungary in a game refereed by Howcroft. Meisl was frustrated by the outcome, and asked Howcroft where his side was going wrong. Howcroft replied that he thought they needed a proper coach, somebody who could develop their individual technique, somebody, in other words, like his old mate Jimmy Hogan. Meisl promptly appointed him on a six-week contract, partly to work with leading Austrian clubs, but mainly to prepare the Austria national squad ahead of the Stockholm Olympics.