1885-1996
Although James Forrest might now be recognised as the World's first professional international player, he was, of course, by a long stretch not the first professional footballer. That had probably been James Lang, a Clydeside shipyard worker, who between 1874 and 1878 had turned for
Robert Gardner's Clydesdale and then Third Lanark. In 1874 itself he had even been in the Clydesdale team that against Queen's Park had lost the first Scottish Cup Final, forming the right-wing pairing with
Frederick Anderson of future China fame. However, from 1876, having been capped once, Lang had also flitted between Glasgow and Sheffield, where he was supposedly employed in a cutlery factory but is said there to have been an avid newspaper reader, before in 1879 finally settling in England, initially back in Sheffield and in 1885 in Burney, for reasons that will become apparent. And if it was not "Reddie" Lang then certainly it was
Archie Hunter. Joppa, Ayrshire-born, he had played alongside Lang at 3rd Lanark in losing the 1878 Scottish Cup Final to
Vale of Leven. It would be for Lang, now as a centre-forward, a second loss. Hunter would be one of the left-wing pairing; that is before moving south seemingly on a whim to Birmingham. There from the summer of 1878 and for a dozen seasons, again seemingly without any other visible form of financial support, at least for the first seven "amateur" years, and thus during that time due presumably solely to non-residency excluding himself from Scottish selection, not only did he played for Aston Villa but was also joined, again presumably equally whimsically, by his equally footballing brother, Andy.
Lang and the Hunters would soon be joined by others over the next half a dozen years, notably in a number of the teams that were appearing not yet in the cities but the industrial towns of Northern Lancashire; Bolton, Oldham, Darwen, Accrington, Burnley, Blackburn and Preston. A case in point is the Blackburn Rovers team of 1882. It, the first northern team to do so, reached but lost that year's FA Cup Final and included in the XI on the day were Hugh McIntyre, Fergus Suter, Thomas Strachan and Jimmy Douglas. McIntyre, Suter and Strachan were from Glasgow, Douglas from Renfrew, none were in Blackburn for an unpaid holiday and all, clearly fine players to a man, were also excluded from national selection, no doubt on the same grounds as the Hunters.
Now, it is clear from all the above that Lang and Hunter, McIntyre, Suter, Strachan, Douglas and other were amateur footballers only in name. Whether it was by direct payment of inflated expenses or through jobs, bogus or otherwise, they were paid firstly to move south and then to play. However, it does not mean that local players did not have to be and were not offered at least similar terms. James Forrest, also at Blackburn, was a case in point. He too was shamateur and, whilst at club level it might be a case of see-no-evil, speak-no-evil his inclusion in the 1884 England team seems to have been the moment stretching of the definition of amateurism in football in general went too far. Whilst it might of been politically difficult for it to be called out internationally at club level genuinely amateur teams were emboldened with once more Blackburn at the centre of complaints.
In 1884 Blackburn Rovers reached the FA Cup Final for a second time, where this time it faced and beat the still arch-champion of amateurism in Scottish football and Scottish Cup holders, Queen's Park. At that time Scottish teams still played in the FA Cup. Ironically Jimmy Douglas scoring one of Blackburn's goals. However, it also faced a challenge from Notts County, the team it had beaten in the semi-final and incidentally one played for by Stuart MacRae, on the grounds that it was paying its players, which, if indirectly, it was of course. Notts County would lose its appeal, erroneously, but the problem would not go away. As Blackburn reached the final again the following year, 1885, facing Queen's Park for a second time, it did so against a background of growing repercussions from a similar objection that had been lodged before a fourth round game the previous year, 1883-4, by London club, Upton Park, against Preston North End. As a result Preston had not just withdrawn, giving Upton Park a walkover, but had refused to take part in the competition the following year, 1884-85, had found allies in Burnley and Bolton's Great Lever, which also withdrew, and also had in addition the backing of more than thirty clubs, almost all from the north. In fact, the northern group went so far as to threaten to form a "British Football Association" in competition to the FA, at which point the latter backed down. In July 1885 not only was Preston exonerated, again erroneously, but the northern shamateur realism vanquished southern amateurism and the payment for playing was officially sanctioned, in England and for England at least.
For Scotland it meant a twofold choice and two consequences. The choices were embrace professionalism and, if not, accept that Scottish amateurs would play English professionals. Queen's Park ensured that the former did not happen, at least not yet. The latter was in part avoided but ultimately at Scottish clubs expense. An attempt was made by Scotland to get the English FA to agree that internationals should only be played by amateurs on both sides. England turned the proposal down. Scotland was forced to back down but had what it thought was a response, one which spectacularly back-fired. In 1887 it withdrew its sanctioning of Scottish participation in the FA Cup. If Scottish amateurs would play professionals at country level, they would not at club. To which, as a first consequence, English clubs said thank you very much, carried on as before but now with less competition and preceded to hire even more Scots talent. In 1884 some sixty odd players had been listed by the SFA as being considered professional. By 1888 that number was more like three hundred, including not just Archie Hunter but the
Ross and
Goodall brothers and, for example, virtually all the
Sunderland team; three hundred talented players, who now, as a second consequence, could not be considered for international duty not just on the grounds of residence, as per the
Watson/Eadie Fraser ruling of 1882/3, but from 1885 also because payments were now overt having been there all along but under-the-table-payments.
In the meantime international football continued. England had managed to keep to home-grown players, as had Scotland. Wales had been, shall we say, somewhat flexible about birth and borders as usual. Indeed what problems there were had Ireland as their source. In 1884 it had for the first time selected two players based in Dublin, turning out for its university, and therefore in southern rather than northern Ireland. One was Frederick Moorhead. The other was William Eames and he had been born in India, to which someone or something, let's call it England, objected on the basis that Irishmen, indeed all Britons, born in the Empire were English. In fact Eames was not only to score an own-goal in a 1-8 thrashing by England but was never to play international football again but the Irish were not prepared to let it rest and now they had a forum to express their displeasure, the International Football Association Board.
IFAB had been st up in 1886 as a medium for the maintenance of unified rules of the game. It was the formalisation of informal meetings that had begun in 1882 with Ireland becoming the fourth international team. Each of the Home Nations had a vote. Each could raise concerns and through it Ireland was able to introduce the rule that a player born in the Empire could choose, as Eames had done, to play for the country of his father's birth. Unfortunately to its, Scotland's and Wales's future frustration it did not extend that ruling to players born either in the United Kingdom, to England's increasing advantage, or outwith the Empire.
In fact that frustration at the ruling would be very quick in coming or at least in potentially the ruling being tested, had the SFA the courage to do so. It was 1888. England had gone ten years without winning a single encounter against England. It might even since 1885 be accused of holding back on de facto introducing professional players to its national team. There had been just two against Scotland in 1886, four in 1887 but in 1888, perhaps through pent-up frustration, the gloves finally came off. For the first time a newly-introduced seven-man International Selection Committee did England's choosing. Six professionals played. It would have been seven, if James Forrest had been fit. And the result was obvious. At Hampden England won 0-5 with one of the goals scored by a Scot, not just by ancestry but up-bringing. His name was
John Goodall. He would go on to play for England fourteen times over a decade and score twelve times, almost once a game, twice as frequently as his best club-playing years at Preston and Derby.
However, John Goodall had not chosen to play for England. It had chosen him and it is doubtful if he had a right of refusal. Brought up from a young child in Kilmarnock and having learned all his Scottish football there, he had not only turned professional in 1885, one of the 300, but had been been born in London, just as his brother, Archie, had been born in Belfast and would later turn out for Ireland, as their Ayrshire mother followed their Clackmannan-soldier father from posting to posting. Nor would Goodall be alone for long. A reserve for the following year's England game against Wales Bolton's David Weir would take the field that same year, 1889, against both Ireland and Scotland. In the latter he would even be alongside Goodall in a team with now exactly as many Scots as amateurs because, although born in Aldershot, his father a Army officer's servant, Weir had been brought up and learned his footballing trade in Coatbridge.
Scotland would admittedly win the 1889 encounter and in London. But north of the border the result was seen as something of a fluke. England had been two up in seventeen minutes. Scotland scored three time in the last half-hour with the second an own-goal in the 82nd minute and the third a goalkeeping fumble in the last. Concern about performance was still there aas was pressure building up. 1888 in England had seen at the instigation of Scot,
William McGregor, the formation of the Football League as an explicit means of providing professional clubs like his
Aston Villa with predictable cash-flow. Meanwhile north of the border on the one hand there had been the virtual disassembling of
Renton, the World's best team, with the not unconnected founding of Celtic, and on the other a continued official stand against professionalism at club and international level. There was a clear contradiction. Celtic was at the very least an obviously shamateur set-up. Furthermore, the following year, 1890, the contradiction was increased. It became apparently acceptable for the Scottish team against England not just to include four Celtic players but, as a Scottish League was being created, also a player from a largely new Renton team weeks before it, having initially been included, was excluded from said League on the grounds of being professional. As a situation it was untenable, riddled with deceit that within eighteen months had been not eliminated but simply rendered unnecessary. The following year Renton was back in the Scottish League either as if nothing had happened or something had changed. It hadn't. And the year after that Scottish football dropped the monetary pretense all together and became professional officially.
Thus it was in 1893 that Scotland for almost a decade faced England on somewhat equal terms. It was important. For the first time in its history after a win in 1889 Scotland had started to draw and be beaten. It had been 1-1 in 1890, a 2-1 away loss in 1891, a poor 1-4 home defeat in 1892. But, of course, the terms actually were not quite equal. The professional exclusion might have been done away with but those of firstly of birth and most importantly residence remained. Not only did the situation of John Goodall or Davie Weir remain unchanged, with in 1891 Thomas Porteus, born in Newcastle, raised in Dalkeith and coming from Hearts to Sunderland, even added to the their number, but Scots professional playing in England still had no chance and it showed. In 1893 Scotland received a second drubbing, this time at the Richmond Recreation Ground.
The result of the 1893 games was 5-2. No Scots-English played but there was nevertheless a curiosity that was to have substantial repercussions, not least long-term for Scotland, which might have been avoided had the SFA again made a stand, not just then but also in the future. Both teams played an Irishman.England'swas John Reynolds, who had been brought up in Ahoghill in Antrim, played for three seasons in Irish football, came from an Irish family, already had five Irish caps but, it turned out, had been born in Blackburn, Lancashire. He was fine. Scotland's was Willie Maley, raised in Scotland from the age of one, born of Irish soldier father and a mother born in Canada of Scottish parents so actually more Scots back upbringing and ancestry than Reynolds was English but born in barracks in Newry, where his mother and father happened to be at the time. He was not, as was probably pointed out from down south, the SFA deciding not to contest and the player, aged only twenty-four, after just two caps, when he might have gone on to win a dozen, being quietly dropped.
Which brings us to G.O., Gilbert Oswald Smith. Quite simply Gilbert Smith, amateur to his core, has to be regarded as one of the best forwards certainly of his generation and perhaps of the first fifty years of the game. He was skilled, gracious, wisp-ly effective, two-footed, a maker and scorer of goals, a player who rarely headed the ball, admired by other amateurs and professionals alike, who also played cricket to county level and quite probably was gay at a time when homosexuality was illegal but apparently not an impediment to being a top footballer, indeed all-round sport and sportsman.
G.O. Smith played football twenty times for England, captaining some fourteen times, scored eleven times, so once every two games, and was in a losing team only thrice. He was first capped at the twenty, whilst still at Oxford, and for the last time in 1901 at the age of just twenty-eight, from when he concentrated on his day-job, teaching. He had been born in 1872. He was the cousin of Charles Smith and like Charles was a Diasporan. Although G.O. was born in Croydon in Surrey and had gone to Charterhouse School, his father had been a merchant in India and was Scots, born in Edinburgh. Indeed, two Diasporans on the same team, G.O. played three times with John Goodall, once against Scotland, actually a Scottish win, and had he and Goodall played for their fathers' homeland the whole series of Scottish games from 1888 to 1901 but particularly from 1893 to 1895 might have been turned on their heads. But it was not to be and as the pressure of the first real failure Scottish football had ever seen increased finally the Scottish Football Association did what had been needed for a decade. In 1896 it did away with the residency qualification and against England brought in five from down south including a certain
Tommy Hyslop but most importantly perhaps
James Cowan. Ex. Renton and Vale of Leven Aston Villa's Cowan was the natural successor, both geographically and technically, albeit three years late, to Maley's half-back partner and originator of the position of Scottish centre-half, James Kelly. The result was immediate. In spite of both G.O. and Goodall together in England's forward-line Scotland was not just two up in half an hour and achieving a first victory for an unprecedented seven years but also a new and once more equal era for the Scottish game would finally begin.