Inverting the Pyramid: The History of Football Tactics Read online

  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

  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.