Inverting the Pyramid: The History of Football Tactics Read online

  As he saw it, for he was no less a romantic than his brother, blinkered directors looking no further than their balance sheets had blamed the laws for football’s failings without ever considering that they may be ‘guilty of a wrong approach to the game’. And so they pressed ahead with a policy that ‘might have appeared to the layman a slight revision in the Laws of the Game’ but which ‘turned out to be the crack of a shot that started an avalanche’.

  And here again the divide is reached between those who seek to win, and those who wish simply to play well. These days the debate often feels perfunctory, but in the twenties it was sufficiently alive that the notion of a league itself - ‘an incubus’ roared Brian Glanville - began to be questioned. ‘The average standard of play would go up remarkably if the result were not the all-important end of matches,’ Chapman admitted. ‘Fear of defeat and the loss of points eat into the confidence of players… What it comes to is that when circumstances are favourable, the professionals are far more capable than may be believed, and it seems that, if we would have better football, we must find some way of minimising the importance of winning and the value of points…’ Winning and losing in football, though, is not about morality any more than it is in life. Even those who agree most wholeheartedly with Danny Blanchflower’s dictum that ‘the great fallacy is that the game is first and last about winning; it is … about glory, it is about doing things in style and with a flourish’ would surely not have it decided in the manner of figure-skating, by a panel of judges awarding marks out of ten. It is a simple but unfortunate fact that eventually those who are looking to win games will toy with negativity. After the glorious excesses of la nuestra it came to the Argentinians; and for all the self-conscious aestheticism of the Austrians, it would just have surely have come to them had fascism not got there first. Golden ages, almost by definition, are past: gleeful naivety never lasts for ever.

  The most obvious immediate effect of the change in the offside law was that, as forwards had more room in which to move, the game became stretched, and short passing began to give way to longer balls. Some sides adapted better than others, and the beginning of the 1925-26 season was marked by freakish results. Arsenal, in particular, seemed unable to settle into any pattern of consistency and, after beating Leeds United 4-1 on 26 September, they were hammered 7-0 by Newcastle United on 3 October.

  Charlie Buchan, the inside-right and probably the team’s biggest star, was furious, and told Chapman he was retiring and wanted to stay in the north-east, where he had enjoyed considerable success with Sunderland. This Arsenal, he said, was a team without a plan, a team with no chance of winning anything. Chapman must have seen his life’s project begin to crumble, and Buchan’s words would have had a particular sting because, if nothing else, Chapman was a planner.

  He had been born in Kiveton Park, a small colliery town between Sheffield and Worksop and, but for football, he would have followed his father into mining. He played first for Stalybridge, and then for Rochdale, then Grimsby, Swindon, Sheppey United, Worksop, Northampton Town, Notts County and, finally, Tottenham. He was a journeyman player, good enough to stay out of the pits, but little else, and if that part of his career was notable at all, it was for the pale yellow calf-skin boots he wore in the belief they made him easier for team-mates to pick out, an early indication of the inventiveness that would serve him so well as a manager.

  His managerial career did not exactly begin with a fanfare. He was lying in the bath after playing in a friendly for Tottenham’s reserve side in the spring of 1907 when his team-mate Walter Bull mentioned that he had been approached to become player-manager of Northampton, but wanted to prolong his full-time playing career. Chapman said that he would be interested, Bull recommended him and Northampton, after failing to attract the former Stoke and Manchester City half-back Sam Ashworth, gave him the job.

  A fan, as apparently all those who gave the matter any thought were, of the Scottish passing game, Chapman wanted his side to reproduce the ‘finesse and cunning’ he saw as integral to that conception of football. After a couple of promising early results, though, Northampton faded, and a home defeat to Norwich in November saw them fall to fifth bottom in the Southern League. That was Chapman’s first crisis, and he responded with his first grand idea, a recognition that ‘a team can attack for too long’. He began to encourage his team to drop back, his aim being less to check the opposition forwards than to draw out their defenders and so open up attacking space. By Christmas 1908, Northampton were top of the Southern League; they went on to win the title with a record ninety goals.

  Chapman moved on to Leeds City in 1912 and, in the two seasons before the First World War, took them from second bottom of Division Two to fourth. He also hit upon one of his most notable innovations, instituting team-talks after watching players arguing passionately over a game of cards. The war interrupted their progress there, but just as damaging to Chapman and the club were accusations that the club had made illegal payments to players. He refused to hand over the club’s books, which led to Leeds City being expelled from the league and Chapman being banned from football for life in October 1919.

  Two years later, though, while he was working for the Olympia oil and cake works in Selby, Chapman was approached by Huddersfield Town to become assistant to their manager Ambrose Langley, who had played alongside his late brother Harry before the war. Chapman was intrigued and appealed to the FA, noting that he had been away from the club working at the Barnbow arms factory when the supposed illegal payments had been made.

  The FA showed mercy, Chapman took up the post, and when Langley decided a month later that he would rather be running a pub, he found himself installed as manager. He advised the directors that they had a talented young squad, but that they needed ‘a general to lead them’. Clem Stephenson of Aston Villa, he decided, was just the man. Stephenson was thirty-three and, crucially given Chapman’s belief in the value of counter-attacking, had developed a way of breaking the offside trap by dropping into his own half before springing forward. Performances and gates improved rapidly while Chapman, always looking at the bigger picture, re-turfed the pitch and renovated the press seats at Leeds Road. In 1922, despite their stuffed donkey mascot catching fire in the celebrations that followed the semi-final victory over Notts County, Huddersfield won the FA Cup, Billy Smith converting a last-minute penalty in the final at Stamford Bridge to see off Preston North End.

  The authorities, though, were not impressed. The game had been a poor one, littered with niggling fouls, leading the FA to convey its ‘deep regret’ at the behaviour it had witnessed and to express a hope that ‘there will not be any similar conduct in any future final tie’. Huddersfield asked what was meant, to which the FA replied that the club should recognise indecency when it saw it, the lack of clarification prompting many to believe that Chapman was being censured for having deployed his centre-half, Tom Wilson, deeper than usual so that, in the words of the Huddersfield Examiner, he acted as ‘a great spoiler’.

  It is impossible at this remove to determine whether the FA had anything so specific in mind, but again what is apparent is the perception that there was a ‘right way to play’ from which Chapman was deemed to have deviated. Equally, the deployment of Wilson with a brief, if not to man-mark, then certainly to check Billy Roberts, the opposing centre-forward, suggests that the stopper centre-half was on its way, and may have come into existence even without the change in the offside law.

  There were other isolated incidents of clubs fielding their centre-half with a specific defensive brief - Queen’s Park, for instance, in danger of being overwhelmed by Rangers in a Glasgow Charity Cup tie in 1918, dropped Bob Gillespie back into what was effectively a central defensive role - but what was unique about Chapman’s Huddersfield was less the willingness to deploy the centre-half defensively as the fact that they developed a distinctive style, based around their manager’s distrust of the wing play that was so revered in Britain. Inside passing, Chapman
argued, was ‘more deadly, if less spectacular’ than the ‘senseless policy of running along the lines and centring just in front of the goalmouth, where the odds are nine to one on the defenders’. As the Examiner noted in 1924 after Huddersfield had wrapped up the league title, ‘the low passing and the long-field play of the Leeds Road team has become famous.’

  What was significant was not merely that Chapman had a clear conception of how football should be played, but that he was in a position to implement that vision. He was - at least in Britain - the first modern manager, the first man to have complete control over the running of the club, from signings to selection to tactics to arranging for gramophone records to be played over the public-address system to keep the crowd entertained before the game and at half-time. With Huddersfield on their way to defending their title in 1925, the Sporting Chronicle asked: ‘Do clubs realise to the full today the importance of the man who is placed in control? They are ready to pay anything up to £4,000 and £5,000 for the services of a player. Do they attach as much importance to the official who will have charge of the player…? The man behind the scenes who finds players, trains talent, gets the best out of the men at his command is the most important man in the game from the club’s point of view.’

  The following year Huddersfield completed a hat-trick of league titles, but by then Chapman was gone, enticed south by what he saw as even the greater potential of Arsenal. It was not, it must be said, obvious. Arsenal were struggling to stay up and, in Sir Henry Norris, labouring under an idiosyncratic and domineering chairman. Leslie Knighton, Chapman’s predecessor, had been forbidden to spend more than £1,000 on a player in an age in which £3,000 fees were becoming common, while there was also a ban on bringing in players measuring less than 5’8”. When Knighton defied the height restriction to sign the 5’0” Hugh ‘Midget’ Moffatt from Workington in 1923, Norris had him offloaded to Luton Town before he had played a single league game. Knighton was dismissed at the end of the 1924-25 season, with Norris citing poor results, although Knighton claimed it was because the club wanted to avoid paying him a bonus he was due from a benefit match.

  Chapman, warning that it would take him five years to win anything, took the job only on condition he would face no such restrictions, something to which Norris reluctantly agreed. His first signing was Charlie Buchan. Sunderland valued him at £4,000, which their manager, Bob Kyle, insisted represented value for money as the inside-forward would guarantee twenty goals a season. If he was so confident, Norris replied, then the fee should be structured according to Buchan’s scoring record: a £2,000 initial payment, plus £100 for each goal scored in his first season. Kyle went along with it, Buchan scored twenty-one, and Sunderland gratefully accepted £4,100.

  Not that such a thing seemed likely that September after the defeat at Newcastle. Buchan was an awkward character, who had walked out on his first day at Arsenal because he thought the kit was inadequate, and then refused to train on his second because he found a lump of congealed Vaseline in his supposedly freshly laundered sock. Some managers might have seen that as wilful obstructiveness or an unrealistic finickiness, Chapman seems rather to have regarded that as evidence of high standards. He also admired in Buchan an independence of thought about the game, something that was far from common in players of the age. John Lewis, a former referee, had noted in 1914 that ‘our professionals evince no great anxiety to learn anything of the theory of the sport… In most teams there is no evidence of pre-conceived tactics or thought-out manoeuvres,’ and, for all Chapman’s efforts to encourage debate, not much had changed.

  Buchan had argued from the beginning of the season that the change in the offside rule meant the centre-half had to take on a more defensive role, and it was notable that in Arsenal’s defeat at St James’ the Newcastle centre-half Charlie Spencer had stayed very deep. He had offered little in an attacking sense, but had repeatedly broken up Arsenal attacks almost before they had begun, allowing Newcastle to dominate possession and territory. Chapman, at last, was convinced, but the mystery is why, given his natural inclination to the counter-attack, he had not done so earlier. He was not a man readily cowed by authority, but perhaps the FA’s words after the 1922 Cup final, coupled with his recognition of what they had done for him in lifting his life ban, had had an effect.

  Arsenal were certainly not the first club to come to the conclusion that the centre-half had to become a third back, but where they did break new ground was in recognising the knock-on effect this would have at the other end of the pitch. Buchan argued, and Chapman agreed, that withdrawing the centre-half left a side short of personnel in midfield, and so proposed that he should drop back from his inside-right position, which would have created a very loose and slightly unbalanced 3-3-4.

  Chapman, though, valued Buchan’s goal-scoring abilities too highly to compromise them and so instead gave the role of withdrawn inside-forward to Andy Neil. Given Neil was a third-team player, that came as something of a surprise, but it proved an inspired choice and an emphatic endorsement of Chapman’s ability to conceptualise and compartmentalise, to recognise what specific skills were needed where. Tom Whittaker, who went on to become Chapman’s trusted number two, recalled his boss describing Neil as being ‘as slow as a funeral’ but insisting it didn’t matter because ‘he has ball-control and can stand with his foot on the ball while making up his mind’.

  With Jack Butler asked to check his creative instincts to play as the deep-lying centre-half, the new system had an immediate effect and, two days after the debacle at Newcastle, Arsenal, with Buchan re-enthused by the change of shape, beat West Ham 4-1 at Upton Park. They went on to finish second behind Huddersfield that season, at the time the highest league position ever achieved by a London club. The next season, though, began poorly, partly because success had brought over-confidence, and partly because opposing sides had begun to exploit Butler’s lack of natural defensive aptitude. Some argued for a return to the traditional 2-3-5, but Chapman decided the problem was rather that the revolution had not gone far enough: what was needed at centre-half was a player entirely without pretension. He found him, characteristically unexpectedly, in the form of Herbie Roberts, a gangling ginger-haired wing-half he signed from Oswestry Town for £200.

  According to Whittaker, ‘Roberts’s genius came from the fact that he was intelligent and, even more important, that he did what he was told.’ He may have been one dimensional, but it was a dimension that was critical. His job, Whittaker wrote, was ‘to intercept all balls down the middle, and either head them or pass them short to a team-mate. So you see how his inability to kick a ball hard or far was camouflaged.’ Bernard Joy, the last amateur to play for England and later a journalist, joined Arsenal in 1935 as Roberts’ deputy. ‘He was a straightforward sort of player,’ Joy wrote in Forward Arsenal!, ‘well below Butler in technical skill, but physically and temperamentally well suited to the part he had to play. He was content to remain on the defensive, using his height to nod away the ball with his red-haired head and he had the patience to carry on unruffled in the face of heavy pressure and loud barracking. This phlegmatic outlook made him the pillar of the Arsenal defence and set up a new style that was copied all over the world.’ And that, in a sense, was the problem. Arsenal became hugely successful, and their style was aped by sides without the players or the wherewithal to use it as anything other than a negative system.

  Arsenal lost the FA Cup final to Cardiff in 1927, but it was after Norris had left in 1929 following an FA inquiry into financial irregularities that success really arrived. Buchan had retired in 1928 and it was his replacement, the diminutive Scot Alex James, signed from Preston for £9,000, who made Chapman’s system come alive. The club’s official history cautions that nobody should underestimate James’s contribution to the successful Arsenal side of the 1930s. He was simply the key man.’ Economic of movement, he was supremely adept at finding space to receive the ball - preferably played rapidly from the back - and had the vision
and the technique then to distribute it at pace to the forwards. Joy called him ‘the most intelligent player I played with… On the field he had the knack of thinking two or three moves ahead. He turned many a game by shrewd positioning near his own penalty area and the sudden use of a telling pass into the opponents’ weak point.’

  By the time Arsenal won the FA Cup in 1930 - their first silverware, as Chapman had promised, coming in the fifth season after his arrival - the new formation had taken clear shape. The full-backs marked the wingers rather than inside-forwards, the wing-halves sat on the opposing inside-forwards rather than on the wingers, the centre-half, now a centre-back, dealt with the centre-forward, and both inside-forwards dropped deeper: the 2-3-5 had become a 3-2-2-3; the W-M.

  ‘The secret,’ Joy wrote, ‘is not attack, but counter-attack… We planned to make the utmost use of each individual, so that we had a spare man at each moment in each penalty area. Commanding the play in midfield or packing the opponents’ penalty area is not the object of the game… We at Arsenal achieved our end by deliberately drawing on the opponents by retreating and funnelling to our own goal, holding the attack at the limits of the penalty box, and then thrusting quickly away by means of long passes to our wingers.’

  Trophies and modernisation tumbled on together, the one seeming to inspire the other. The FA, instinctively conservative, blocked moves to introduce shirt numbers and floodlit matches, but other innovations were implemented. Arsenal’s black socks were replaced by blue-and-white hoops, a clock was installed at Highbury, Gillespie Road tube station was renamed Arsenal, white sleeves were added to their red shirts in the belief that white was seen more easily in peripheral vision than any other colour and, perhaps most tellingly, after training on Fridays, Chapman had his players gather round a magnetic tactics board to discuss the coming game and sort out any issues hanging over from the previous fixture. At Huddersfield he had encouraged players to take responsibility for their positioning on the field; at Arsenal he instituted such debates as part of the weekly routine. ‘Breaking down old traditions,’ a piece in the Daily Mail explained, ‘he was the first manager who set out methodically to organise the winning of matches.’