The Newer and Truer Story?
Say 2-3-5 to anyone with knowledge of football and they will be convinced of their certainty of what it is. But, if truth be told, it is a Lernaean Hydra with as many heads as you would care to imagine, capable of being tweaked and twisted to every football thinker's will. Yet, if that same truth be out, despite the multiplicity of possibilities there are were basic three varieties, The Pyramid, W:W and The Cross. The last is Scots. The first is a misnomer of Scots or Welsh origin, according to your predilections and the middle one is no misnomer but subject to those same biases.
The misnomer arises perhaps from lyrical symbolism. There is nothing wrong in that except that the confusion it creates needs clarification. The convention is for football formations, just as teams are today normally built, to be expressed numerically , and indeed graphically, from defence to attack. So 4-2-4 is a palindrome and confusing. 5-4-1 is not, five in a line across the back in front of the goalie, who doesn't count because every team has only one, four in mid-field and a lone striker. 2-3-5 should on that basis be as straight-forward, two in defence, three in midfield and five in attack, narrow at the back, the base, wide up-front, the top, which is just what a pyramid is not. It is wide at its base and pointed up top. In fact 2-3-5 is more like the old-fashioned spinning-tops of my childhood and that, by coincidence, is precisely when The Pyramid alias The Top was last seen. I remember at primary school the team-sheet being pinned up with that configuration, positions numbered one to eleven, but even then we never played it. The Pyramid, The Top was already a dinosaur. Yet 2-3-5 was not, at least not quite.
Then there is the myth of The Pyramid's origins. It was said that its source was North Wales and that it came about in 1878 because one of Wrexham's pair, as was the then fashion, of centre-forwards by the name of John Price was so rapid and could cover so much ground it allowed his pairing, Edwin Cross, to drop back into the half-backs. There is no reason to doubt the characters, they existed, or the story, or indeed the timing. The problem is the chronology. Simple, if painstaking, research shows that 2-3-5 was tried, rejected and tried again prior to that date in the home at the time of almost all footballing innovation, at least that which worked, Scotland. Moreover, it was already being used extensively in the Edinburgh area by its then major clubs at exactly the same time as its Welsh iterations. Team line-ups from the time show so. There is even the possibility that the Welsh, having played their first ever international in and against Scotland, admittedly in Glasgow, saw it first North of the Border and took it home to try it for themselves.
So to the real story. Football itself, or at least the Association variety, was invented in England in 1863 and until 1870 Englishman played Englishman. Englishmen first played Scots in 1872. That is not to say that there were not games against "Scotchmen". Englishmen had for two years played in what are not deemed official encounters against, with just three exceptions in personnel, Diasporan Scots born in England and other places in the Empire, like Wales and India. Moreover, all teams, including the unofficial Scots, until then played the then accepted formation, 1-2-7, although there must have been experimentation and the Royal Engineers, based in Chatham, in particular showed the first inclinations to play distinctive, joined-up football; the "combination game" as it was known.
Modern Association football, however, began in 1872 at the West of Scotland Cricket Ground at Partick in Glasgow. There Scotland, led by
Robert Gardner, for the first time did everything a modern footballing side might be proud of and then wort further. The pitch was doctored, a team was built from the back, "the bus was parked", on top of which a completely new tactical formation was invented. But it wasn't 2-3-5. That would be tried within months by more that one Scottish team but rejected in favour of Gardner's innovation, 2-2-6, a box-four defence and six rather random forwards.
2-2-6 is another system that has long fallen completely out of favour, finally one hundred and thirty years ago in 1888 to be precise, but even by then is was more a 2-2-3-3 and had been so for a decade. Nevertheless we still have its cousin, the box-six. It is what Wales used in the its 2016 and very successful European Championship campaign, three centre-backs and three in midfield in front with two full-back/wing backs outside them and two forwards, one up front, one dropped off.
But back to 1878. It was in the decade from that year The Pyramid/Top, the pure Pyramid/Top, might be said to have had its heyday, in Britain as a whole at least. It would last another decade south of the border. It would never really take hold in Ireland, where the Scottish route was followed as the nineteenth century became the twentieth. In Uruguay it was pushed aside by 1912, on its way out in Brazil in 1913 as it was in Austria by the mid-1920s. It was being superseded in Spain by 1928, in Switzerland by 1940. In Italy it was gone by the 1950s, whilst in the Czech Republic and Hungary it probably never existed at all except briefly before the Great War and then perhaps only for five years.
And back to the myth. After 1878 The Pyramid/Top began its advance from its Welsh home first into the English Midlands and then London and the Home Counties. But there is a problem. 1873, in the months immediately following the first official Scotland-England international, had seen the formation of a number of clubs in Scotland, specifically in Glasgow and the Vale of Leven. Two of the Glasgow clubs were Ibrox and Havelock and on 23rd November they met. The latter would play two full-backs behind a fly-kicker, three half-backs and just four forwards, 2.1.3.4, whilst Ibrox would line up with two backs, three half-backs across the park and five forwards. Nor would it be a one-off. When Ibrox played Queen's Park, Drumbreck, Clydesdale, Oxford and Havelock again later in the season not only would the formation be repeated but Clydesdale and Oxford would also use it. The Pyramid/Top had been invented and had been tried not once but repeatedly five years before it was supposed to have been.
Ibrox and Oxford would not be teams that would last. Even Clydesdale, in spite of Robert Gardner joining it from Queen's Park, would be dissolved in 1881 by which time The Pyramid/Top in its first manifestation should have been subsumed by 2-2-6 and then 2-2-3-3. But in fact it had not gone away, merely moved across the country from west to east. In 1876 when Hearts played its then main rival, St. Bernards, both clubs took the field with line-ups that were the pure Pyramid/Top and by the end of the decade, with the notable exception of Hibernian, so did the city's other teams. Then progressively in the 1880s first Hibs were persuaded and The Pyramid/Top, or in time its younger and cleverer sibling, WW, 2-3-2-3, even began to spread.
WW had taken the notion of forward pairings that had in the late 1870s been developed, again in Scotland, notably at Vale of Leven. They came from pure 2-2-6, where at first they were in a line side-by-side, one on each wing, one in the centre. Then they became a three-by-three block still on each wing and in the centre but one in front of another, a 3-3, a centre-forward and two wingers in front of three inside-forwards. And finally they were a flexible combination of the two, appropriated by Edinburgh with the central inside-forward dropped back between widened half-back and then placed in front of already existing defensive W. It was notionally 2-3-5 but not quite as it might have been, more a 2-3-2-3.
And the new formation began to extend its reach. Initially it was northwards up the Scottish East Coast and then between 1885 and 1887 ever deeper into the West of Scotland. Indeed in 1888 it came within perhaps a club and a game of wiping out even 2-2-3-3 before the metamorphosis that would create firstly
The Cross and secondly reverse the tables took place, or rather was recognised. Admittedly full reversal needed time but by the 1930s The Pyramid, The Top, although the process would take a little longer elsewhere, was in Britain effectively history. It had been fully displaced in part by W:W, of course, but equally by The Cross and then its derivative, The System, mistakenly called W:M but actually M:W, with The Cross and The System but not W:W forming the bases of the three-, four- and five-at-the-back football of today.
Actually to call the original process that created The Cross a metamorphosis is perhaps to over-egg the pudding. In fact it was really not even a synthesis, which implies like W:W 50:50, but on paper a comparatively simple adaption. To use modern terminology, if the creation of W:W was surgical grafting of the 2-2-3-3 attack on The Pyramid/Top defence then The Cross was achieved by inserting a relatively small piece of 2-3-5 DNA into 2-2-3-3 to make, expressing it more accurately, 2-(2-1)-2-3 in defence and 2-2-(1-2)-3 in attack. It too was notionally 2-3-5 but again not entirely.
But there the comparison ends. Who discovered the structure of DNA is generally recognised to be Crick, Franklin, Wilkins and Watson. Who thought of 2-3-5 no-one knows. Perhaps it was the Ibrox captain, long buried. Who thought of W:W definitely no-one knows but who thought of The Cross is perhaps more open. Where it was thought of was Renton in the Vale of Leven. The instrument of its application was James Kelly, although he is unlikely to have been its source. He was very young so possibly lacking authority. He was tried in several positions, in the forwards and as one of the two half-backs no doubt sometimes just filling in but at other times perhaps a subject of tactical experiment. In others words may be he was being directed and, as was the case then again with captains deciding tactics, that director might well have been his, Archie McCall, one of the few in Renton team, including his brother, Jamie, who would not take the professional shilling and so whose potential role has been largely ignored. Certainly he from left-back, a by-then, wide or at least widening Scottish full-back, would have been in an ideal position on the field to see, oversee, even manoeuvre the team in both defence and attack. The question is, was he the innovative thinker too?