- trainer or coach?
The case of William Raeside is a curious one. He is a man, who went under of two names, his own and W. H. Cowan. He is also one, who worked as an accountant or a clerk but around coaching several football teams in the Hispanic world, in Spain itself , in Argentina, in Mexico and also in Norway but always in short in short bursts, for year a so. He is also a man, who imported Scottish players to Mexico City and Buenos Aires, with, it must be said little real success in terms of trophies. In fact with or without imported Scots the trophy cabinet was largely empty.
The brilliant Andy Mitchell has done definite work in tracking down who was William Raeside. What he seems not to have been was a successful player at any high level, either in Scotland or England. There have been claims that he played for various teams, Hibernian, South Shields, Darlington and had references from Celtic and Motherwell but in not one case has it been possible to find any verification. Certainly there are Raesides connected with a number of these teams at the beginning of the 20th Century, Raeside is not an uncommon Scottish name, but they are Robert or Thomas but never William.
Now there is also a further problem with William Raeside; his birth in 1892. It meant that he was twenty-two at the start of the Great War and twenty-six at its end. It means that the potentially best years of any playing career he might have had would have been precisely those of the hostilities, during which he seems not to have served in the Armed Forces, which suggested an exempt profession. On marriage in 1911 he is described as a "steel sawyer" so that may well have been enough to prevent call-up. And it is on these years that I want to concentrate at least to begin with.
There are in the biographical details of Raeside several mentions of St. Mirren and Charles Durning. St. Mirren is understandable. Andy Mitchell has shown Raeside to be born not in Glasgow but in Paisley. St. Mirren or Abercorn would have been his local clubs. In fact in 1889 in two meetings with Celtic Abercorn had a Raeside at centre-forward. And he was there again in 1890 against Port Glasgow Athletic. It could not have been William, he was unborn, but it might have been a relation, even his father. Who can tell. But of Charles Durning more is known. He was a football trainer. In other words he was responsible for fitness. He seems to have joined St. Mirren in about 1910 yet seems in 1911 to have been living in Glasgow in Springburn, registered as a boiler riveter, working at the locomotive works. His training-work does not appear to have been either full-time and/or any more than intermittent. At Love Street he would stay a decade before it was announced in the Press that he being hired by Hearts, also that Hearts conditioning improved as a result but that he was sacked the following year as results reversed and relegation was narrowly avoided. The dismissal was quite possibly political as the manager, Willie McCartney, was perhaps looking for a scapegoat, after which riveting probably perhaps proved a steadier occupation. Charles Durning died in 1949 in Maryhill aged sixty nine a retired shipyard foreman.
Meanwhile, William Raeside was in 1910-11 eighteen or nineteen. He is unlikely at that age to have been a first team player at any senior club, although at precisely then and at that club twenty-year-old
Bob Millar was doing exactly that before moving to America. It also highly unlikely for the same reason he would have been anything more than an apprentice trainer, who may well have been working and learning from Durning and have remain doing just that whilst Durning was there and perhaps a little beyond. It would explain the work he is said to have done and conditioning coach at Glasgow University at about that time. It might also offer an explanation for the suggestion made that Raeside first travelled to Spain in 1922. That was the year that St. Mirren was invited by Barcelona F.C. with Notts County to play in a tournament to celebrate the opening of its then new stadium, Les Cortes. There were, of course, connections between both British clubs and the city of
Barcelona. Barcelona F.C. had a decade or so earlier had a number of players from Scotland including
Geordie Girvan and
John Pattullo. The former had worked for Johnston Shields with their factory in the city suburb of Poble Nou, a founding partner of which had been Edward Steegmann, a Notts County member certainly and possibly player. Furthermore Coats, the Paisley thread makers, had opened their factory in another suburb,
Sant Andreu, in addition to which the coach of Barcelona was Durham-born Jack Greenwell. It might even explain the suggestion that Raeside worked for several clubs and presumably several seasons in Norway, possibly after Catalonia. He was no longer retained by St. Mirren but had carved enough of a reputation to be employabl elsewhere.
St. Mirren would play three games in Barcelona, losing twice to the home club but beating Notts County. It would then travel to Santander in the Basque Country to play two games against North Spain Select XIs, a win and a draw. Here again there was a connection.
Fred Pentland, the former England international of Irish origin, had arrived in 1920 to coach Racing Santander for two seasons before moving just along the coast to Athletic Bilbao off-and-on for the next fifteen. Moreover, he was followed at Racing for the next seven years by Paddy O'Connell, an ex-Irish international, who had spent the 1919-20 season with Dumbarton. And from Santander the St. Mirren party travelled further west still to Gijon for two more games, a win and a loss. The touring party was away for the best part of a month and if Raeside was with them how much Spanish he might of picked up is pure conjecture but in 1927, possibly after Norway, he received an invitation from Celta Vigo in Spain's most western province to coach it.
Celta had had as its first manager/coach Francis Cuggy, son of another Irishman, who also in a career interrupted by the War had played at right-half one hundred and sixty-six times for Sunderland and just before the War twice for England, both against Ireland, both defeats. In 1923 he had accepted a five-year contract with Celta and stayed only three, returning home in 1926 to Tyneside again to become a shipyard worker. Celta then filled for a year before calling on the services of William Raeside. How and why is unknown but perhaps the St. Mirren tour had played a part in getting his name known.
Certainly Raeside seems to have make the most of Vigo. He was joined there by the woman, who was to be his second wife and the family he already had with her. They had lived together in Glasgow from about 1920, would be married in 1930 after his divorce in 1928 and for the first half of the 1930s seem on the face of it to have settled into domestic life in Glasgow. Except that when Eugen Millington-Drake, the British "Minister" to Uruguay was asked to recommend a coach for the Montevideo club, Nacional, which for three years had been runner-up in the Uruguayan First Division to
Penarol, Raeside came to mind. Millington-Drake had sporting pedigree and connections. He had rowed for Oxford in the 1911 Boat Race. He had been the Honorary President of the Uruguayan delegation to the 1936 Olympics in Berlin. Millington-Drake also had Scottish connections. His wife was Lady Effie Mackay, daughter of the Earl of Inchcape, son of James Mackay from Arbroath. But none of that explains "accountant Raeside" unless he was at the time actively involved in, if not football, then sport. In his early forties he was unlikely to have been playing so he was either coaching, of which there is no sign, or training, except, again as conjecture, might Raeside have had something to do with the British football squad at the 1936 Olympics, the first for two decades and the first with Scots in it.
And this is where the distinction between managing, coaching and training comes in. Managing was then still largely still a Secretarial role, i.e. administrative. When it came to choosing the team for the following Saturday in many clubs it was the fiefdom of a committee of directors and would remain so until the 1950s. Then there was the fitness-men, who stepped up also to administer, as epitomised by
Bill Struth
at Rangers. There was no doubt who was in charge at that club but, although he had been an athlete, he had never been a player. The playing system he devised but did not implement it, devoting himself to ensuring that his players were stronger and fitter than the opposition. Off the pitch inculcating the playing system was role of the senior professionals, who he chose to fit it and who bought in or did not stay long. On the pitch it was the captain's responsibility with fine tuning allowed according to circumstances. Then starting perhaps with Jock Hamilton in Sao Paulo in Brazil in 1907 there were a number of occasions over the following thirty years when ex-footballers were engaged in various places and for short periods as much to raise levels of fitness of players abroad along British league football lines as coach in detail. Inevitably there would have been some cross-over in terms of transference of skill, organisation and formations but the bottom-line seems to have been to get the players at the clubs in question to be able to run around for faster, longer and install at those same clubs a modern, conditioning regime that would continue. That could be done in a year, which seems to have been Raeside's preferred stay at a single club, in Spain, in Uruguay and at two separate clubs in Mexico, whereas coaching, i.e. tactics or technique a la Pentland required, indeed still requires, more time. It is a maxim that is a true today as it was in Raeside's.
Except that Raeside at his first Mexican club found himself in a different situation, to which he found a novel solution, the introduction not just of Scottish techniques but Scots players. It was 1946. Raeside had been hired by the Asturias club in Mexico City. His seems to have arrived in early September 1945 for the 45-46 season. Certainly he sailed at the end of August for New York and en route. The Second World War had only finished in May that year so matters either moved fast or even during the War he had maintained contacts. In the previous season Asturias had finished second in the Central League, one of three that were regional, and lost in the national play-off for the semi-finals of a knock-out competition to decide the champions. The new season would see a truly national format for the first time, perhaps the reason for Asturias' interest in what the Scot might bring, and was already two weeks old, when he arrived. It would see at the end Asturias finish tenth in what had become a national league of sixteen, at which point Raeside was retained for the following one but clearly had suggested and had approved a radical departure from convention, for which there is perhaps quite a simple explanation.
Raeside knew about fitness. He knew a bit about football organisation too but he was not a coach, at least not at a high level. Persuaded at Asturias to stay for more than one season he needed help with the latter, particularly, it seems, in defence but on the field in general and for that help he looked to home. He managed to persuade three Scottish professionals, Jackie Milne, Tom McKillop and Jimmy Hickie, to join him in Mexico City. None was in the first flush of youth. McKillop was the youngest at almost twenty-nine and ten years at none other than Rangers and two international caps. Jackie Milne was thirty-five, also with two caps, and came from being wartime -pre-war and player/manager at Dumbarton. Hickie was forty-three and had last played at any level in 1936. However, in Hickie Raeside had a full-back of experience. In McKillip he had the same at right-half and in Jackie Milne a winger capable of playing on either flank. Moreover, in all three areas of the pitch there was now know-how with in Milne someone who could on the pitch direct the whole team in a way that Raeside could not, indeed, as trainer was not qualified to do.
From this distance now what Raeside attempted to do looks not unlike Struth in a sombrero. And to an extent it worked. Despite the introduction of three old foreigners with their different style and them having to play in the rarified air of the Mexican capital Asturias actually held steady, at the end of the 1946-7 season again tenth, a position that might have been far worse. At the conclusion of the next season without them the club was to prop up the table with just six wins in twenty-eight games, with Raeside simply by his absence clearly making enough of an impression in the Mexican game as a whole to be invited back over the next decade not once but twice. Alas on neither occasion was it with Scots players or indeed much success and nor was there much of the latter in between at Cheltenham Town in 1952-3. It seems Raeside might have got them fit, but on his own at least he coodna' mak 'em play.