& WM
It seems simple. A problem arose and and a change of rules was required, it was said. The change produced its own question and an answer was found, it is once more said, by the man who had caused the original problem. But, of course, nothing, and certainly nothing in football, is in reality as simple as that.
It was the Cameron Cross, the Scottish short-passing game carried onward and forward by the Yorkshire-born son of a English miner and adapted, not least for the major change in 1911 of the goalkeeping rule, the confining of the keeper to the penalty area, and the employment as a standard part of the game of the Off-Side Bogey, the off-side trap, and its perfection at Newcastle and beyond from the early 1900s. No-one in English football did it better. As
Bill Struth and Rangers took their own route in Scotland winning league titles in 1920, 1921, 1923, 1924, and 1925 but no Scottish Cups, Chapman's Huddersfield would come from the other direction, winning the FA Cup in 1922, then ease up the league to win it in 1924 and 1925 with a team described thus but still clearly recognisable in origin.
When the decision was taken in 1866 to allow the football to be passed not just backwards but also forward the quid pro quo was offside. Goal-hanging was not gentlemanly. But there were repercussions. The simple long-ball over the top was rendered, if not useless, then limited. The dribble appeared to be the alternative. It wasn't. The pass proved to be it.
Roll on to the professional era. There is no argument that money changed football. Off the field it was doing so even in the amateur days. Shamateurism was inevitable. On the field losing changed from being unwanted but tolerable to being unacceptable. Winning mattered, not least financially. Some rules were broken, tactics were adjusted and innovated and Herbert Chapman was involved in all three.
Chapman was a journeyman player, but one not without talent, whose lucky break was to be one of the players chosen by
John Cameron, player/manager at Spurs to play his role in what had been an FA Cup winning team, when Cameron's legs began to go. By all accounts Chapman did it well and he learnt well too. When Cameron moved on so did Chapman himself as player/manager of one of his previous clubs, Northampton Town, bottom of the Southern League Division One, where Tottenham had finished sixth.
There by the end of the following season Spurs were seventh but Northampton, using Chapman's tweaking of Cameron's fetch-and-carry inside-forward model, finished just a single place below. The adjustment were to wing-play, itself a slight variation of
The Cross but also with a Scottish origin, and an equally slight widening of the half-backs allowing the still attacking centre-half to drop a little, A season more, with Tottenham elected to the football league, using the same increasingly counter-attacking model they were top of the Division and there they more or less remained until 1912, when Chapman was tempted away to second division Leeds City.
That season Leeds had avoided bottom slot by a single place but had nevertheless required reelection. The next with Chapman the club finished sixth and in 1914 better still in fourth. In fact the wheels came off somewhat the following season. The club finished fifteen with hardly an away point and it would have been interesting if Chapman, who had invested in players, presumably rebuilding, would have been able to pull it round. However, war intervened and, whilst it was perhaps fortunate for the manager it was fatal for the club. It was not being run financially correctly. How far Chapman was involved will be never known but by the end of the war City had been dissolved, replaced by Leeds United, and its manager banned from the game.
And there the story might have ended except that Chapman was still regarded as a managerial talent, there were extenuating circumstances and another club was interested enough to try to get the ban reversed and did so. It was nearby Huddersfield and in February 1921 Chapman became its assistant Secretary. Again there are some questions about the circumstances, although they might have been planned all along. Within a month Chapman was promoted to Secretary, that is manager, and he was not slow in getting stuck in, introducing much the same style of play as he had used at both his previous clubs, i.e.
"a strong defence and a fast, counter-attacking response, with the focus on quick, short passing and mazy runs from his wingers, who would pass low inside the defence instead of crossing from the byline"
"Chapman bought perceptively, welded his assets together astutely and soon sent out one of the most successful League sides of all time (Huddersfield). It was stubborn, disciplined and highly mobile with Clem Stephenson, once of Aston Villa, at the heart of everything. He was a stocky tactician without much pace but his passes were as sweet as stolen kisses."
However, in doing so Chapman caused a rule change. The reason for it was ostensibly concern over lack of goals. Huddersfield counter-attacked, that is, defended first and attacked later. At Northampton he had said simply,
and at Huddersfield he saw no reason to change his mind. But in reality it was panic over loss of revenue. After an understandable surge following the end of the Great War crowds had been falling. The blame was put on reduction of action. It wasn't really true. It was simply different action. Defensive play improved as more teams learnt offside but at the same time those same teams were learning to beat it. The number of goals did fall, then settled and began to climb again but it didn't matter. The rule-change had been made. The number required for off-side was reduced from three to two. And it seemed to work. Huddersfield Town, now without Chapman, who had made the move to Arsenal, in winning the 1926 league, its third in succession, scored ninety goals and let in sixty having the previous year conceded just twenty-eight and netted just sixty. And then someone thought about it. The intellect was Charlie Buchan, even if the idea was not entirely original."a team can attack for too long"
In fact the new thinking made little immediate difference to the best teams, which carried on much as before for a half dozen years more. However, longer term it would change the way the game would be played in the second half of the 20th Century world-wide. Abroad it would legitimise the step to 4-2-4 that Hungary and then Brazil would both take on to great glory. In Britain the response from Chapman's Arsenal, to which Buchan was one of the first new recruits, would be The System, oscillating between 3-5-2 in defence with tracking-back wingers, 3-2-3-2 in transition and in attack 3-2-1-4, said to be 3-4-3 but not really. It involved three real changes to what had come before and one, the re-narrowing of the half-backs as in the original Cross, was a restoration and a second simply the making more permanent of what had been ad-hoc but de facto, an inside-forward providing the half-back/forward link a la Cameron. Which left the last, crucially the dropping of the centre-half from between and in front of the half-backs to equally just in front of and between the full-backs. He wasn't quite a centre-back but not far off and the result was what might best be described as a cross within a re-jigged Cross.
Buchan himself was a one-off. He was a Diasporan-Scot, the London-born son of Aberdeen parents, who was so well thought of even north of the border that the Scottish selectors are said to have tried to tap him up in spite of the eligibility rules. In 1926 he was already a thirty-six year-old centre-forward, had spent fourteen years and three hundred and seventy-nine games at Sunderland, scoring two hundred and nine goals yet was still a player Herbert Chapman had turned to when he left Huddersfield for an Arsenal that had in 1925 avoided relegation by a single place.
And it seemed the arrival of Chapman and then Buchan on the field was instant. In 1926 Arsenal finished as runner-up to Huddersfield. Yet it was nothing of the sort. For four years Arsenal continued to play in much the same way as Chapman had at Huddersfield and at Northampton with variable results. And for those same four years the club would be mid-table, during which time Buchan as a player came and went and the Diasporan-Scots pool was once more dipped into and David Jack, the son of a Scottish former player, was pulled out to replace him. Nevertheless in the background thought was being applied by the manager and very much around Buchan's idea. Rebuilding was going on, which would allow control in the air and on the ground behind the half-backs but also restore the half-back/forward linkage the removal of the centre-half had disrupted. The solution to the former was found in Herbie Roberts, a big, young Welsh wing-half first signed in 1926, who was developed into the new role and over two seasons introduced to the team before becoming permanent. The answer to the latter came in a series of wingers, who worked their socks off , and in 1929 in the form of an inside-forward at Preston via Raith. He was Alex James, more pacy than Stephenson but as sweet a passer, if with the left rather than the right. And with him, indeed them, Arsenal would win the FA Cup in 1930, the First Division in 1931 and in the next five years four more trophies in a case of change but also plus ca change.