Of all the pieces I have written this has been the most difficult. The reasons are fourfold. Firstly, there is no doubt that the player in question was a huge and important servant to Scottish football. His place in the Scottish Football Hall of Fame is testament to that. Yet, secondly, he may on the field also have been the cause of a substantial delay in what would for thirty years prove to be the distinguishing feature of Scottish football over its longest period of success and produce a series of innovations crucial to the modern game. Thirdly, the person, the player in question, whilst a brilliant on the field, might off it have had other facets to his character that were not so pleasant. And finally the evidence for two of the above is frankly scant.
However, let us start and with the person and his playing career. He played for his main club, Queen's Park, for a dozen seasons and then for two more guesting here and there. How many games that entailed is impossible to know. Furthermore in an era, in which there were just four internationals a year he won fourteen caps over eleven seasons. But even that does not tell the full story. In the international that was regarded as the most important, that is against England, having perhaps been tried out against Wales in his first, from 1884 every year for a decade he was a fixture. His name was, of course, Walter Arnott.
Walter "Wattie" Arnott was born in Glasgow, in Govan, in 1861. It was precisely the right moment. He was eleven when football began to take off, in Scotland at least, a perfect age to be infected. And at twenty he was turning out for Pollockshields Athletic at a time when Queen's Park was looking to rebuild particularly in defence after being first matched and then surpassed by clubs from the
Leven Vale, notably Vale of Leven. Perhaps he was even in a genteel, amateur way tapped up. He would not be the only one. Two years earlier
Andrew Watson had been persuaded to join from neighbouring club, Parkgrove, whilst Andrew Hair Holm was being brought through; three quality full-backs as Queen's Park sought to find a settled pairing.
To an extent Arnott's Queen's Park arrival, whilst sensible for him and the club, was also fortuitous. At international level Vale of Leven's McIntyre was beginning to age and the great full-back of the previous half a decade, Ranger's Tom Vallance, aged just twenty-five, would for work reasons in 1882 leave for India. The problem was he, like them all, was an amateur and had to make a living. He chose tea-planting. In fact he would soon be back and would play for Rangers again in 1884 but in the meantime on the Sub-Continent had contracted Blackwater Fever and, although he survived, his health and therefore his ability would suffer permanently. Then at club level Holm, the incumbent at right-back was also to step away from the game at just twenty-four. He too had a living to make. Whilst playing football he started as a clerk. He became became a whisky distiller and a very successful at that. When died in 1934 he was worth in today's equivalent over £13m. And finally there was Andrew Watson. Although he had a private income and therefore was comfortable he would find, probably unknowingly to begin with, he had other problems, two certainly, possibly three. The first certainty was that he was born in Demerara, now in Guyana, and then and now in South America. The might-have-been was that, whilst his father was Scots, born in Easter Ross and on his mother's side his grandfather was probably Banff-born, his maternal grandmother had been a slave. She had been Black and that too, in spite of being three-quarters peely-wally Scots, was Watson's label. And the second certainty by chance or not in 1882/3 the Scottish FA decided to change its eligibility rules. Until then it had been residence. Watson lived in Glasgow. From then it became birth and it meant Watson, having won three caps and captained, it is said, the national side once, could no longer be picked. He could play for Queen's Park, which he continued to do, if irregularly, until 1886 but no longer for Scotland.
Which takes us back to Walter Arnott and good fortune. When he joined Queen's Park he was twenty-one. At twenty-two in 1883 he was first selected for national side; the match against Wales. He played that day at left-back in Vallance's old position. His partner was Holm, two Queen's Park players alongside each other and playing the Queen's Park way in a 3-0 away win. Indeed that was as it might have remained for several years had not Holm stepped back from playing that same year. Arnott was then able to move across to his preferred position on the right and there he would remain on all but two occasions of thirteen, forming a series of full-back partnerships, of which the most enduring was from 1887 at club and country level with Robert Smellie, who also played for Queen's Park and the Queen's Park way.
However, at that point there was a problem, even though it was probably not perceived as such at the time. In the second half of the 1870s a distinctive Scottish style of "integrated" football had developed beginning at Vale of Leven and, I believe, based on tactical and positional innovations it had transferred from the other and far older game, at which it excelled,
shinty. Feel free to disagree with me if you wish but show me evidence for the alternative. Then out of the "integrated" in the first half of the 1880s came the "scientific" with the Leven Vale clubs and Queen's Park at the forefront. And from it in turn in 1888 Scotland adopted in principle at least and for the first time
The Cross, the system that had since 1885 been developed at Renton around James Kelly, as the club won the Scottish Cup and in beating all-comers from England became World Champions.
In it Kelly had come to play as an attacking centre-half innovatively in front of the box-four, the two half-back, two full-back defence of the then accepted 2-2-3-3 system. It was the one that at club level through much of the West of Scotland and internationally had been used for a decade and a half, although in Eastern Scotland for the last decade increasingly it had been superseded by 2-3-5, what is wrongly labelled The Pyramid and should be The Top with its more defensive centre-half, a tactic which was also was advancing westward at a rate. Frankly, however, the new system did not work for the national team. In the 1888 Scotland-England encounter that took place in Glasgow the away team won 0-5 and, although the following year some pride was restored with 2-3 away win for Scotland in London it was done with a compromise. Kelly was still in the team but he played at right-half with Dumbarton's George Dewar as a much more "conventional" i.e. defensive, 2-3-5 centre-half. In fact it would take five years for The Cross even partially to bed in with two draws by which time Arnott and Smellie, having in the interim been selected on several occasions each, were gone. The Queen's Park pairing from 1894 had been replaced by combinations mainly of full-backs from two clubs, Celtic and Rangers, both of which by then had fully adopted The Cross.
Of
those new full backs the most notable to begin with were in 1895 Dan Doyle and John Drummond. Both by then were not the young. Doyle was thirty and Drummond only a year younger. But they were experienced with Celtic's Dan Doyle in particular cut from a somewhat different cloth. When first selected he was already twenty-six with a cavalier reputation on the field, which would eventually get him into deep water off it. That is not to say, however, that he or indeed Drummond had roles on the field that can be compared with that of full-back today. In the twenty or so years from 1874 that Scotland had been the dominant force in British, and therefore for most of the time also in World football, not one goal had been scored from open-play by a Scottish full back in an international game. Indeed to the Second World War only one would be; Nichol Smith in 1899. Full-backs were there to defend and start attacks not finish them off.
However, with Doyle and Drummond's arrivals and, of course, with others to come there was a notable, if marginal, change. Until 1888, i.e. the advent of The Cross, in seventeen years just three Scottish goals had been netted by half-backs, and one of them was from Dr. John Smith, a top forward, who knew what to do in front of goal and had dropped back for a single game. Then in 1888 and 1889, when the half-backs had been supplemented and the opposition was probably still trying to get their head around it, there was a flurry of three. And then again as Kelly was recalled in 1893 there was one, from the man himself, and from 1895, that is from Doyle and Drummond and as the system was finally embedded, until the Great War there was an average of one a season. The question is why.
In truth there is no certain answer. But I would like to offer a possible explanation. We know that by the mid-1920s it had long been the convention that in Scotland full-backs marked wingers and the left and right half-backs the two opposing inside-forwards. In England it was conventionally the reverse. The man who who stated it was the captain of the Wembley Wizards, Jim McMullen, and he had learned his basic football during the period of perhaps the greatest attacking centre-half of all, Alex Raisbeck, an apprenticeship that was completed by 1910. We know too the Scottish system left the attacking half-back to run with the centre forward in defence and initiate forward movement when in attack. We know that from John Harley in Uruguay and he learned his Glasgow football as the 19th Century became the 20th. We know also that John Cameron used an attacking centre-half in, as player/manager, winning the FA Cup for Spurs in 1901. He says so in his book Association Football and How to Play it, written in 1907 and had learned his basic football as a late starter and by the time he had joined Everton in 1896. It means The Cross had to have been embedded if not nationally then in Scottish club football by then, if not universally, then as the innovation being adopted by the most successful teams. By then they were already Celtic, the team Kelly had moved on to after Renton taking The Cross with him, and Rangers, reviving under William Wilton. Celtic would take the league title in 1893, 1894 and 1896 and be runners-up in 1895. Rangers had taken it in 1891, be in the top three every year but one until 1898 and win it again in 1899. And in the same period they would take five out of nine Scottish Cups. But perhaps more importantly those most successful teams did not include Queen's Park. Having refused to join the Scottish League in 1893 it was only involved in the Cup, winning it that same year and never winning it again. It's time at the top and therefore that of its style was history.
Now marking convention must come from somewhere. Until the advent of The Cross there had in Scotland been two stages of earlier development. The first, the previously-mentioned "integrated" era from 1874 to 1880 was when pairings evolved, largely in attack but also to a lesser degree in defence. Then came the "scientific" from 1880 to 1888, when attack became integrated with defence and where pairings became de rigeur throughout. Internationally Arnott and Smellie were the obvious example. Then once
The Cross arrived there was little development and much confusion. Scotland hardly won a game for five years. Goals were leaked as whatever was being done at half-back was not dove-tailing with what was happening at full-back, a mismatch only really overcome when the Renton/Kelly/Celtic system at the former was finally matched with Celtic/Rangers at the latter. At that point Scottish football soared, which suggests the full-backs had been the problem, and they had been Arnott for all five years and Smellie for three. Indeed the problem may even have recognised, if not fully accepted at the time. On both occasions that Smellie did not play Celtic full-backs, McKeown and Doyle, had taken his place, a compromise but one with less than spectacular results, a home draw and a bad home loss.
At this point it should be said that there is no slur intended on Arnott and Smellie. Both were fine players. Their records show just that. They played well together. They understood their system, Queen's Park's. It is also clear that Celtic and Rangers full-backs when paired played well together. Their record is equally impressive and suggests they too understood a system, not a club one but common one. It appears, however, that Queen's Park plus another did not work probably because they did not have a systematic understanding or even a recognition that each played a different system, the old Queen's Park way on the one hand and the new Cross way on the other.
The problem is that there is frankly no evidence from club games of the time either way. But then why should there be. Each club would presumably have full-backs at one with each other. However, equally there is no empirical evidence from reports of international games either. Yet its stands to reason. In spite of the full-backs on wingers convention, with the wing pairings and the advanced forward pairings of the old and Queen's Park game plan the space for the attacking side was down the flanks and between the half-backs. It made sense then for the full-backs to tuck in at the rear of a square box-four covering both the wings and the centre in equal measure. That, however, was not the case with The Cross. The centre-half, even though it was attacking, still tackled back and gave some central cover. And if the other half-backs stayed narrow then it allowed the full-backs to spread, at the rear of now a parallelogram with less of a central role and most attention now reserved for the wingers. It took a little time to work out but after 1893 and particularly after 1896 for a decade it more than showed in results. The problem is that there were casualties, an admittedly ageing Arnott and a younger Smellie at the top of the list. Neither proved able to adapt but it was more than that. The assertion is that both, with their outdated Queen's Park approach and by dint of being in situ in the end for five years, actually held up, even impeded the change through widening needed in full-back play to allow the new, specifically Scots game to advance to the point where Scottish football boomed and Scotland for a decade was once more and for a decade virtually unbeatable.
And so to Arnott the person off the field. Football would never make him wealthy. He would marry late, raise a family, die in Cathcart in 1931, a retired salesman, and be buried in the local cemetery. There are few stories from his later years part from that he coached Queen's Park's young players. The story comes from when he was just making his way in the game. In a match possibly in February 1882, against a Sheffield Select XI, a drunken SFA-official was heard to remark that he would gladly drug Walter Arnott, if an injured Watson were able to play in his place. The problem for the SFA official was that one of those listening to the remark was Arnott himself, who in writing demanded an apology from the SFA, which was apparently forthcoming.
Quite why the apology was required in the first place is a little had to fathom. The official was drunk and foolish and a very inexperienced Arnott must surely have recognised that Andrew Watson was an older, more experienced and therefore better player. Yet the remark irked him. Perhaps he was ambitious, a little too so indeed, but there is also the possibility of prejudice, just as it cannot be dismissed in another story of Watson being punched in a game against Dumbarton and, more seriously, the SFA's seemingly sudden decision to change the eligibility rules.