Peter McWilliam - football's quiet revolutionary

Chapter Three
As Peter McWilliam's playing star waned, or rather was abruptly extinguished, so it looked as if that of the man he played alongside so often, Colin Veitch, was slowly following suit. In the 1910-11 season he had played thirty-four times. In 1911-12 it was just six. His England international career was already over. However, there still a little something in the ageing legs. In 1912-13 he would take to the pitch twelve times and six more times the following year before finally bowing out in 1914. Yet, during those three seasons this highly intelligent, renaissance man, writer, political activist, actor and one of the founders of the Professional Footballers Association, football's trades union, would make his contribution elsewhere. It would be tactical and it is this question of tactics, where Newcastle had for the best part of a decade been surprisingly innovative that has to be examined in the light of what was to come, somewhat under the 1912 radar, had radar been invented then, and from Peter McWilliam. 

In 1911 a rule change was suggested by the Football Association, the English Football Association, and agreed by the other Home Countries and the International Board that by then included FIFA. The suggestion was from the following season to confine the goalkeeper's handling of the ball to the penalty area. The penalty area, itself, had been a new introduction a decade earlier to do exactly what it said on the tin, not so much precisely to define where a foul that would otherwise be a free kick became a foul resulting in a penalty kick but from where that penalty kick should be taken. For the decade prior to the invention of the penalty area a penalty could be awarded anywhere in the last twelve yards right across the pitch at each end and the penalty kick taken from the point of the foul. Before that there was no such thing as a penalty. Now the foul had to be in the smaller penalty area, limited to directly in front of goal, and the kick to be taken as today from the penalty spot, again directly in front of goal and the last vestige of the original twelve-yard strip.

In fact, the introduction of the new penalty rules had gone extremely smoothly. That they remain in place with only minor adjustments is evidence enough of their effectiveness. The problem would lie elsewhere and was the result of a rule that had been in place from the very origins of the game. It concerned the goalkeeper. For years he had been considered just one of the eleven but with a single, special privilege, the ability legitimately to handle the ball but only in certain ways. He could not catch it and hold it but could punch or knock it away, catch and kick it from the hands or knock it down, then bounce and catch it repeatedly. And crucially he could do all that anywhere in his own half. 

As with everything a rule breeds not necessarily circumvention but adaption. During the 1890s, as football became professional and less “gentlemanly”, a new breed of goalkeeper had emerged. The most extreme example was “Fatty” Foulke. William Henry Foulke, born in 1874 in Dawley, what is now part of Telford. In his youth he was an athletic colossus, six feet four tall, the equivalent of perhaps six inches more today, who despite his semi-rural Shropshire origins was discovered playing village football in Derbyshire and by Sheffield United. For the club he made his début aged 20 at the beginning of the 1894-5 season and from then played 299 times in the next eleven seasons. By that time he had filled out, if not to a final 24 stone but well on the way. And he had developed a style of play, to which he was entirely but not uniquely suited. 

The rules of football as they stood before Foulke's first game had afforded very little protection to goalkeepers. They could be barged at any time and, although they, the rules, in 1894 softened somewhat to barging only when the 'keeper had the ball in his hands, for the onrushing forwards it became a matter of timing not intent. The goal scored by knocking the goalie with ball into the net was not unusual. Some professional forwards even made a speciality of it. 

However, against Billy Foulke the normal 5ft 7ins forward no matter how malicious would simply bounce off. It made Foulke very effective, good enough to be selected once for England in 1897 for a 4-0 win against Wales. And Foulke was also professional. As his girth expanded he may not have been the most agile of 'keepers but he developed a style of play that was very effective. Sheffield United would take the FA Cup in 1899 and again in 1902 and be runners-up in 1901. Willie Foulke would be in goal on all three occasions. 

The style was to take advantage not just of his solidity but also the rules as they were. He would at times take the ball and advance, bouncing it, opponents bouncing too, off him. He would advance as far as he needed, even to the half-way line, from where with his strength it was a short send into the opposition goal-mouth. Other teams hated it not least because it worked and they started to complain. However, Foulke was not the only 'keeper, about whom complaints were made. The other main one on the list was Leigh Roose. In his biography he is described as “playboy, scholar, soldier and the finest goalkeeper of his generation”. Foulke had played until 1907. By 1916 he was dead, from cirrhosis. Leigh Roose would die just six months later, killed on the Western Front in France but before he went to fight he had changed football forever.

Leigh Richmond Roose was Welsh, just. He was born in Holt in North Wales close to the English border. He came from a well-to-do family. He was never to play, never to have to play professionally. He remained an amateur all through his career with all twelve of his club, able to demand significant expenses but not to accept payment otherwise. 

It was a career that had begun at eighteen in 1895 with Aberystwyth on arriving at the town's University. He was in goal in 1900 when the club took the Welsh Cup. At six feet one inch and a little over 13 stone he was described as “This Wonderous Hercules”. But he was not just a big man. Although he could play like Foulke and did too at times, taking the ball to the half-way line, he was also agile, technically adept, with 

"sharp eyesight, startling reflexes, competitive instinct and reckless bravery",

highly intelligent, writing well on the game, and both innovative and as hard as nails. He 

"enjoyed taunting experienced………….forwards, some of whom felt the full force of his fist in goalmouth melees." 

and

"played in a daring style, often – at a time when other goalkeepers rarely strayed more than a few yards from their goals – rushing out of his penalty area to fill the position left by an errant full back. In his first international, he sprinted from his area and shoulder-charged an opposing Irish winger on the far touchline, bundling him out of play and knocking him unconscious.”

He also took full advantage of the rules allowing goalkeepers to handle the ball anywhere in his own half, from where he would kick and, with his prodigious arm throw the ball onto the heads of his forwards. Again it is said opposition teams complained and this time it resulted in the 1912 alteration to the laws of the game. By it goalkeepers were prohibited from handling the ball outside the penalty area. Thirty-five year-old Roose promptly retired. But he did so after three hundred and seventy league games, twenty-four Welsh caps and having been the custodian when in 1907 Wales won the Home Championship for the first time, captaining the team that same year in the win 1-0 against Scotland; one with Peter McWilliam at left-half. As for football at a stroke the game was pushed back thirty to forty yards and those who were left had to learn to adjust. 

So it was in this time of flux, of tactical change that McWilliam, by now balding and hat-wearing, left Tyneside and moved to London. In making the move thus he was doing something that was then very rare, if not unique, going straight from player to manager without passing through the player/manager stage. The club that had appointed him was Tottenham Hotspur a division below Newcastle, a team that under John Cameron with his similarly Highland roots had a decade earlier from the Southern League already tasted success in winning the FA Cup, the only non-League club ever to do so.