Jimmy Hogan was not a Scot. But then that is not the point of his inclusion. It is about style and, perhaps by sheer fluke that will become clearer, he was a carrier of an idea, of an approach to playing football, which had its source in Scotland, indeed in the style of one particular, Scots player.
James Hogan was born in Nelson in Lancashire in 1882. He would die in neighbouring Burnley in 1974. He was on the face of it English, except that his parents were both Irish, his mother, Margaret, Irish-born in Sligo, his father, also James, a cotton-dyer, born in Bradford but of Irish parents. He was a man, who both fitted in and didn't. He was clearly intelligent. His father had thought he might enter the priesthood. In 1896 at the age of fourteen he would go to study at the Salford Diocesan Junior Seminary, St Bede's College, in Manchester. where he would be head-boy. However, he had another talent, football.
It cannot be claimed that Hogan was a great footballer. He was never more than a journeyman. At twenty-two he was said to be playing for Rochdale but the following year was back in Burnley, where over three seasons he would play fifty games at inside-forward, scoring a dozen times. Then it was two seasons at nearby Nelson before he was signed by Fulham. It was the first of the turning-points in his life, although he would stay at Fulham only a season and take the field only four times as the Southern League club pushed to join the Football League. But he was trained there by
Jock Hamilton, the Scot from Ayr, who had just become the first professional coach to work in Brazil. Furthermore he played alongside
R.C. Hamilton, the Elgin-born, former Rangers and Scotland inside- and centre-forward with a difference. And he watched, listened and learned.
From Fulham Hogan went to Swindon, still in the Southern league, whilst his former team had been elected to the Second Division of the Football League, finishing fourth. He then returned north, to Bolton, where again he had a settled period, fifty-four games in five seasons with eighteen goals scored. But in the meantime he was already coaching. In 1910 it was in Holland with Dordrecht, where he was followed by ex-player and his erstwhile club secretary/manager at Burnden Park, Ayr-born John Somerville, and the Dutch national team. In 1911 and 1912 it was in Vienna with Amateure SV, a relationship with Austria that would last the best part of three decades.
Hogan would leave Bolton in 1913. Meantime MTK, a Hungarian team based in Budapest had hired as its coach the former Scotland international,
John Tait Robertson, ex. Chelsea
player/manager. He would stay two years and when he left Hogan would succeed him. It was the second of his turning-points. He would officially stay at MTK for seven years but largely he had no choice. When the Great War broke out he was trapped there, physically safe but unable to leave without the risk of internment as happened to several other British football coaches in Europe, notably
John Cameron
and
Fred Pentland. However, it was not without its compensation. He had time not just to develop his ideas on football and its coaching but to begin to implement them.
However, that might have been it. When the War was over he would have returned to Britain to try firstly to find work and, perhaps implement some of those ideas at home. However he found rejection instead. Immediately after the Armistice he did come back, his wife and family had been there throughout, and asked for the small compensation payment that was due from the FA to footballers caught up in the hostilities. He was told he could not have it. Moreover, he was effectively told he was a traitor because he had not fought.
At that point Jimmy Hogan had the choice either to leave football or to return to Europe to find work. He went to Switzerland as coach to Young Boys Berne,. And there he stayed. In 1924 he was one of two assistants to Edward Duckworth, the manager of Servette Geneva and the Swiss national team at that year's Olympics in Paris. Switzerland took the silver medal. The other assistant was the Hungarian, ex. MTK player under Hogan, Dori Kuerschner. Indeed, in 1925 MTK would be the next port-of-call for Hogan. He stayed two years before beginning a number of years working in Austria, both at club and national level, where he formed a close partnership with Hugo Meisl. Meisl had been a player, a winger with the Vienna Cricket and Football Club before the Great War and in 1919 he had been appointed the manager of the Austrian national team. He would stay in position until 1937 and his death and in truth Austria's results in the first decade of his management were not bad. It beat the obviously weaker teams and lost to the stronger ones. Yet Meisl was not happy, calling on Hogan to replace the aerial, long-ball game that had been used with what the Burnley-man advocated, the passing game on the floor, the Scottish passing game he had learned at Fulham.
It was at this point that Hogan got doubly lucky. By Meisl he was given carte-blanche and in Matthias Sindelar he found perhaps the player he had been looking for all along, or at least from his Fulham days, his second R.C. Hamilton. Nicknamed The Paperman because of his slender physique Sindelar was arguably the best player of the 1930s. He had come into the Austrian team at the age of twenty-three in 1926. he would play until 1937 and a terrible and controversial death, perhaps murder. In the interim he would win forty-three caps and score twenty-six times. But his game was much more than that, drifting in from deep and shooting at times from distance, his nearest equivalent since perhaps being The Ghost, Tottenham and Scotland's equally tragic John White. And with Sindelar and under Hogan Austria would match Europe's other top team, Italy, in 1932 beating it in Vienna then losing to England at Wembley by the odd goal in seven and in 1933 drawing with Scotland and at Hampden.
At last on the basis of results clubs in England began to show interest. In 1934 he was back at Fulham for the first time for a quarter of a century. He lasted weeks. The professionals at the club simply rebelled, unable to accept his approach to playing the game. Yet it was an approach that clearly worked. Straight from Fulham Hogan returned to Austria and coached them to the World Cup semi-final in 1936. The competition took place in Italy. The opposition was Italy. The game was played in a downpour which didn't suit Austria's passing style and the Italian goalkeeper played a blinder.
The outcome was, however, enough for Aston Villa, relegated for the first time ever, to take a chance and this time, perhaps in circumstances where he did not have to take what he had at Craven Cottage, Hogan's methods worked. In 1936-37 the Villa were safely in mid-table. In 1938 they were top of the division by four clear point, promoted with Manchester United, ironically as West Bromwich and Manchester City came down. Nor did they seem to struggle in the top-flight, finishing in 1939 in comfortable mid-table. But, of course, it was to be a work-in-progress that was interrupted by war, at the end of which Hogan was not reappointed, his place taken by one of his former Villa players, Alex Massie. It looks as if he even struggled for work and the story becomes a little confused. It is said that in 1948 he joined Brentford as a coach, having in 1945 been brought into struggling and undisciplined Celtic again as a coach by Bob Kelly and just as at Fulham from the senior players be met by a wall of non-cooperation. It is also said that although his stay would be short his departure would not before some of the younger players had taken note, not least Sean Fallon, who arrived that same year. And Fallon and Jock Stein were in the crowd, when the team that most openly expressed their gratitude to Hogan had one of their greatest triumphs. However, in Celtic's Official history it is stated that Hogan in fact arrived at Parkhead at the beginning of the the 1948-49 season, that his coaching was by the end of that season beginning to produce results. Having finished fifth from bottom of the Scottish First Division in 1948, the club was sixth in 1949 and again in 1950, Fallon having just arrived, at which point the manager, Jim McGrory, Hogan and fourteen players had set off on a European tour that would end with with a visit to Rome and being mentioned by the Pope in an address at St. Peter's and, after which Hogan at the age of sixty-eight left Celtic and seems to have left football too. Frankly, of the two versions the latter seems more plausible and could incorporate the Brentford coaching too. Moreover, by 1950 Hogan would have been sixty-eight and, as a staunch Catholic, had seen the Pope and judged it was time to hang up his boots for good, Hogan's boots that is and not the Popes.
In the Hungarian team of the late 1930s, and a measure of how ideas once planted can thrive even without the planter, there had been Sarosi, a deep-lying centre-forward, not chosen by Hogan, he was elsewhere, but in his mould. In the Hungarian team after the Second World War there were Nandor Hidegkuti and Peter Pelotas. Both were forwards and both played for MTK, the latter more conventional and winning twenty-four caps and netting eighteen times over six years. Hidegkuti would lie deeper, coming through and scoring from further out in sixty-nine games, thirty-nine goals over thirteen years. He was Hungary's Sindelar and on 25th November 1953 against England at Wembley and on 8th December 1954 against Scotland at Hampden he led the line in two of the most comprehensive victories imaginable. The Magic Magyars, who were open in their acknowledgement of the influence of Hogan, indeed their debt to him as a coach and technician, as Fallon, Jock Stein and others watched and perhaps finally understood, simply brushed aside the two oldest footballing nations in the World. And its was done by keeping the ball on the floor and with a the deep-lying forward in a role derived via Burnley, certainly from Scotland and, if you want specifics, then Borough Briggs, Elgin or thereabouts.