On the almost empty border between Scotland and England there is no sense of a vortex either to the south or north. Yet it is there, drawing, drawing southwards and, although in footballing terms it is now far weaker than it was, for a hundred years or so it proved almost irresistible in terms of both talented people and original ideas.
It was first obviously felt on 30th November 1872. It might even have been said to have begun eight months earlier on 5th March or eleven days later on 16th March or even two months earlier still on 10th January. The first date is that of the World's first official football international, in Glasgow between Scotland and England. The second was the first time a Scots team, Queen's Park, met an English one, the Wanderers, in again an officially recognised match. The third is that of the final of the first FA Cup. It was the first time in a final at least Englishman played Scot with on the one side and victors the same all-English Wanderers, and on the other the Royal Engineers. At the time the Royal Engineers were recognised for their distinctive style of football, known as “combination play", which was probably a product of their unique combination of mechanical and military off the field transferring onto it. However, there is another possibility. The soldiers had four Scots in the eleven. All were in their early twenties, all forwards, Hugh Mitchell, Henry Renny-Tailyour, Herbert Muirhead and Adam Bogle. The problem is only Bogle was actually born in Scotland, in Glasgow. The others were Diasporans. Mitchell and Muirhead were English-born and Renny-Tailyour in India. And as for the fourth and final date it is the first time those same part-Scots Royal Engineers were known to play in an official competition in defeating Hitchin away 0-5 in the second round of that same first FA Cup.
But back to 30th November 1872. All the Scotland players were drawn from Glasgow's suburban Queen's Park. All were Scots-born. The club and therefore the team was captained from goal by Robert Gardner. And the team was organised. It was not entirely surprising. Gardner already had organisational form. Against Hamilton Gymnasium in one of the few earlier matches the club and he had taken part in he is said to have handed each of his team-mates a sheet of paper with instructions on how to play. Whether the instructions were technical or positional or both is not known but it is safe to assume that Gardner in one way or another did the same for the international.
Certainly his team took the field with a formation that was new. The game had traditionally been played with seven individualistic forwards, a roving goalkeeper and a triangle of three defenders between them, either two full-backs and a single half or two halves, left and right, and a single, sweeping back. Gardner changed all that.
His idea was to play just six forwards, an equal number note, and four defenders arranged as two backs, left and right and two halves in front of them arranged as a box-four. The formation allowed the box to contract under sustained English pressure and expand in attack. Scotland had not just built a team from the back. It had also “parked the bus” and formalised counter-attack. And there was to be a fourth innovation that day. Gardner had been offered the free use of the larger Glasgow Academicals' rugby ground close to present-day Ibrox. He turned it down and instead agreed to pay for the use of the smaller West of Scotland cricket ground in Partick, where it is still to be found. One explanation is that the rugby pitch was like the public school football pitches that the English team was used to. On the other hand the cricket ground was smaller, squarer and much more like the park spaces that Queen's Park called home, and more so with spectators pressing onto it. In other words Robert Gardner seems to have chosen a surface, this surface, to suit the home team, his team. If so, it was a first example of “doctoring the pitch” in terms not just of location but also of size.
And it all worked, not once but twice over. The result would be a 0-0 draw and the idea had immediately been drawn south. His example was followed by England in the fixture in London the following year.
If Glasgow's Adam Bogle was the first Scots-born player known to feature for a prominent English-based team; he had played for the Royal Engineers in the game against Hitchin; then the first one to move from a Scottish club to an English one was Robert Smith. As early as 1870 he is said to have moved from Glasgow, where from the club's foundation in 1867 he had been a Queen's Park member. He went to London, where he played for South Norwood. In October 1872 he was probably in the Norwood team that played and defeated Barnes 1-0 away in the first round of the second FA Cup. The following month he was certainly with his brother, James, in that Scotland team that drew with England in Glasgow. And two or three weeks later he may well once more have been in the Norwood eleven that lost to Windsor Great Park in the FA Cup's second round.
By then James Smith had joined his brother in London, also playing for South Norwood and there they had been if not Scotland's representative with the English FA then certainly the link between it and Queen's Park. They may even have been that same link between the Scottish Football Association, formed in March 1973, and the English FA until Robert's emigration to Canada in 1875 and then Wyoming, he would die in the United States, and James's death back in Scotland in 1876.
Professional, or rather shamateur football probably first appeared once more in England but in the form again of a Scot, one J. J. Lang.
James Lang, nicknamed Reddie on account of his hair, born in Glasgow once more in 1851. He began his footballing career at Eastern F.C., founded in early 1873 and one of the original clubs on the formation of the Scottish F.A. but was clearly foot-loose. In 1874 he was already playing in the first Scottish Cup Final against Queen's Park and for Clydesdale, captained now by Robert Gardner and the eventual runners up. In 1875 Clydesdale was knocked out of the same cup in the semi-final after two replays and by the odd-goal again by Queen's Park. In March 1876 he played for Scotland in the first international against Wales, featured in a match between the cities of Glasgow and Sheffield, was spotted by The Wednesday, Sheffield Wednesday, and invited by October to work in the South Yorkshire city.
At this point it gets a little nebulous. That same year a second Glasgow-based player moved south. Peter Andrews had also played for Eastern. In 1875 he had even taken the field for Scotland in a 2-2 draw with England in London but the following year moved again to Yorkshire and began to play for Sheffield's other team, not United as now but Heeley. However, his move had been not to Sheffield itself but Leeds, where his work might have been legitimate with his footballing contributions for Heeley remaining strictly amateur. Lang's work, however, was not. Wednesday did not pay him directly but a club director, the owner of a cutlery factory, did with Lang said to have spent a great deal of time reading newspapers and in reality, if not openly professional then patently paid to be around to play.
And where Lang had opened the door, others would soon follow. He himself would return after a year to Glasgow, apparently there still considered an amateur but not to rejoin Clydesdale but play for Third Lanark. On 23rd March 1878 he represented Scotland for a second time, again against Wales. And he scored. A week later he was in his club team once more, a team that lost the Scottish Cup final against Vale of Leven. A year later still he was back in Sheffield, where he stayed until 1886, at which on legitimisation of professional football, in England at least, he immediately moved to openly professional Burnley.
And in that same 1878 Third Lanark team were two Hunters. John was at full-back and Archibald a forward. And it would be Archie, who that same year would next take the road south. However, he would travel not to Yorkshire but Birmingham. There he was supposed to be joining Calthorpe United. On what basis is unknown but there was a Scots connection. It was a club on the south side of the expanding city, run by John Campbell Orr, born in Glasgow, raised in Cupar. Yet Hunter ended up on the north side of the city at
Aston Villa, another club run by two more Scots, George Ramsay and
William McGregor. Ramsay was the player. Also from Glasgow he had in 1873 played as goalkeeper, really then "goal-minder"for Rovers in the first Scottish Cup against Eastern. Rovers had lost 4-0 away with presumably Lang and possibly Andrews amongst the opposition. In Birmingham he taught the fledgling Aston Villa the Scottish game and would then manage the team until 1926. McGregor was the administrator, the man who a decade later would be the driving force behind the English Football League and a major figure in the English FA.
William McGregor was born in Braco in Perthshire. He is said to have seen his first football just to the north of the village at Ardoch but the game would not have been the Association variety but the Ba' Game. It was the traditional brawling chase after a ball often on Hansel Monday, the first Monday of the year or sometimes the first Monday after January 12th, which pitted one part of a town against another or village against neighbouring village. It was the inter-community game that the football we know today would by 1890 almost entirely replace.
McGregor was apprenticed from Braco to be a draper in Perth. On completion of his indentures in 1870 he took himself to Birmingham, where his elder brother was already working and in newly urbanising Aston he opened his own shop. Now there was never any indication that William McGregor was a player but he was an enthusiast and you can take a Scot out of Scotland but not the Scotland out of the Scot. On arrival he first became involved again with Calthorpe F.C.. He is said to have officiated. However, with in 1874 members of the Villa Cross Chapel near McGregor's shop forming their own team and the involvement of Ramsay, and temporarily the
Lindsay brothers
from Golspie he clearly switched allegiances. By 1877 McGregor's involvement was such that he was invited to become a committee member., the same committee that just a year later rubber-stamped Hunter's recruitment.
In 1880 McGregor became a director of the Villa. In 1882 Ramsay retired from playing and seemingly for two years stepped back but in 1884 he returned to become Club Secretary, effectively Manager, and remained so until 1926., forty-two years in all. In the meantime in the first years of the 1880s, although football in Southern England apparently remained amateur the Northern English clubs were turning for instant talent ever more frequently to Scotland, where for a decade the standard of football played, as shown by international results, had been superior to that in England both technically and tactically. By 1884 it was thought that over sixty Scots had taken the road south, all in the process foregoing their right to play for their nation but paid enough, even if it were under the table, to make it worth their while. In both 1884 and 1885 Blackburn Rovers met Queen's Park in the FA Cup Final and ironically in both games in defeating the amateur, Scots the Lancashire team had fielded four from north of the border. Renfrew-born Jimmy Douglas even scored in the first game.
In fact so rampant was shamateurism in certain English clubs that others were becoming increasingly unhappy. Objections to shamateurism were formally aired with the FA notably by the London team, Upton Park, in 1883-4. The Football Association of course in London at first agreed but when in 1885 a staggering thirty clubs from the Midlands and the North, more than a quarter of the total entry of the previous season's FA Cup, responded by threatening to break away the FA, wanting still to control all football, had no choice to relent. In the summer of 1885 professionalism was legitimised in England but not, or rather not yet, in Scotland.
The decision, understandably, did nothing to stem the flow of Scots players south. In fact it did the opposite. Three years later they are thought to have numbered over three hundred and clubs were finding hard to make the money to pay them from Cup games and friendly and exhibition matches that could be cancelled at the last minute. It was precisely that situation, in which in early 1888 Aston Villa found itself and to which William McGregor reacted. He wrote to his own club and four others, again all Northern, proposing both a meeting in London a day before the Cup final in March and an idea. It was to arrange an annual, fixed programme of home- and away fixtures for interested clubs. A second meeting followed in Manchester just three and half weeks later and in September the Football League, the first football league, consisting of twelve teams literally kicked off.
William McGregor would be the first chairman of the Football League's management committee. In 1892 he saw the league add a second division, stepped down, was elected President and then in 1895 was made the first life-member. Between 1888 and 1894 he was also the Scots-born chairman of the English Football Association in a period that had seen in 1888 a further major footballing innovation, again in Scotland, and the start of its spread southward. The innovation had taken place in the
Leven Vale, the valley that runs north from Dumbarton to Loch Lomond. However, it was the first time the Vale had been an innovative source. The second half of the 1870s had seen the emergence for the first time of football as a working-class game, mainly from two clubs,
Vale of Leven F.C. and
Renton, but also at Dumbarton. It was almost a decade before the equivalent in England. And that same period and the first half of the 1880s too had seen from the same footballing hotbed the development of a style of football that would initially be "integrated" and become known as “scientific”. It began with John Ferguson
and pairings, via
Andrew Watson, who would actually finish his playing career in England and sadly, and would reach a peak with widening fullbacks post
Walter Arnott.
However, in the 1880s, discounting crude boot 'n run, not just the Scientific style of football was played in Britain. There was a second said to be Welsh but actually Scots too. It was 2.3.5, The Pyramid, actually The Top, which was by the mid-1880s largely adopted in England and Wales, and internationally by both countries, in Eastern Scotland and in 1887-88 threatened to overwhelm all-comers even in the West of Scotland and even at international level. The reason it didn't was down to a single club, once more Scottish, Renton.
In 1886 in the international in Glasgow Scotland drew with England with an essentially Queen's Park and scientific half-back pairing. In 1887 they were a trio, Robert Kelso of Renton, Leitch Keir of Dumbarton and the defensive, John Auld of Third Lanark. Scotland played not simply 2-3-5 but The Pyramid. Yet in 1888 Kelso and Keir were still there but between them was James Kelly also of Renton and later a pivotal figure in the foundation of Celtic and therefore the adoption of the professional game in Scotland. The young Kelly had begun in 1884 as an eighteen year-old inside-forward. He had also since played as a half-back in a pair, on both right and left. Now, aged twenty-two, he was first at club level and for the first time internationally dropping back a little between and in front of the existing half-backs as a new phenomenon, the attacking centre-half, the embryonic Scottish centre-half. It would within a decade become not just the standard formation north of the border for the next forty years but the pivot of a style, a shape of play, the
Scottish Cross that would in time be exported with Scots literally worldwide. Moreover, it would of course be taken with variation to England, to Liverpool and Liverpool F.C. almost immediately, to Spurs by the turn of the century and for the next sixty years, to Newcastle in the 1900s, to Fulham and via Northampton and Huddersfield to Arsenal in 1930s. But most importantly it would also be carried almost simultaneously again with variation to Spain, to Holland and to Central Europe and in South America, to Argentina, Brazil, Uruguay and Chile, .
In 1891 league football came to Scotland. In 1893 it became professional. However, as the changes took place so tactical innovation slowed. Perhaps it was simply due to the learning process but with Scottish professionals playing in England accepted for the national team in 1896 there was invigoration. New thinking began to emerge both north and south of the border. Initially it was political. Scottish international, John Cameron, would in 1898 be the first Secretary of the first footballers' professional body, the Association Footballers' Union. It would be crushed but he would move on to become the first top-flight player-manager, take Tottenham Hotspur to White Hart Lane and with his Spurs team playing his version of The Cross in 1901 win the FA Cup, the only time it has been won by a non-League club. And he would do it with him as the first fetch-and-carry inside-forward, a position, as he reduced his playing, he would fill with a certain Herbert Chapman. Meanwhile, still in Scotland R.C. Hamilton, a Rangers player from 1897 to 1906 and again in 1908, was captain of the Invincible team of 1898-9, club top scorer for nine seasons, every season he was with the club, for six seasons was Scotland's top scorer and did it all alternatively as at an inside-forward and the prototype False Number 9. Then in 1906 he spent a season at Fulham, getting them promoted to the Football League and there playing alongside
Jimmy Hogan, having or Scotland been the partner for three seasons of R.S.McColl, who himself would take the Scottish game to Tyneside and where he would be followed by
Peter McWilliam,
Colin Veitch and
Bill McCracken. All three would be integral in the development of the Off-Side Trap and McWilliam in particular would go on to to management. He would in 1912 take over a reins at Spurs, take them to a second Cup win, create in Kent the first “cantera” that would produce Arthur Rowe, Bill Nicholson and Vic Buckingham, so important in the rise and rise of Ajax in Holland and Catalonia's Barcelona.
And then there is the sweeper-keeper, an idea said to have been developed by
Harry Rennie. He had from 1900 had played 196 times for Hibernian and thirteen times for Scotland in an era when the penalty area arrived but a goalie could not only play the ball with his feet anywhere on the pitch as today but also still handle the ball not just in the area but throughout his own half. Rennie retired in 1908. Goalkeeping was becoming something not for the brave and agile nor the thinker but the enormous. However, the trend prompted a change in the rules. From 1912 the goalie was confined to the penalty area and the Rennie approach was revived with his sweeper-keeper style even reemerging in the modern game.
Nor would the drift end there. Furthest south of all the arrivals in Uruguay in 1909 of John Harley and in 1912 of Archie McLean in Brazil would see the transfer of The Cross to the former and the Scottish passing game to the latter. In both countries they would provide bases of distinctive styles that would develop over the next three decades to a certain extent defined and refined by local conditions and culture but nevertheless with a recognisable source. And to a similar extent this same process of assimilation would also take place in Britain and Europe, in the former until the 1970s and the latter to the present day.
In 1925 Arsenal had a new manager. It was Herbert Chapman. With Huddersfield he had just won two league titles back-to-back using a style of play that was largely John Cameron's. That same style was also being used in Spain. Fred Pentland had from 1921 taken it to Bilbao and with the city's club and it sister in Madrid, Atletico, was so successful in winning titles that Barcelona and other teams would simply copy. In the meantime at Highbury with less initial success Chapman sought both to rebuild his new team and absorb new offside rules. He did it not by not by discarding Cameron's game but with the help of Diasporan Scot Charlie Buchan, by adapting it. The Cross was replaced by a derivative WM, actually MW or more accurately something between MW and MM, between 3-2-2-3 and 3-4-3. The centre-back was almost invented with the moving back of the centre-half to between and just in front of the full-backs in a back-three but the fetch and carry inside-forward retained. From 1929 Alex James was it. From 1930 four trophies were captured and even on Chapman's death in 1934 there would be continuity. Peter McWilliam would turn down the management of Arsenal but accept the post of head-scout and be one of the trio that won as many trophies in four years to 1938 as Chapman had won in the previous four.
In 1938 Peter McWilliam would return to manage Spurs but his time would be interrupted by the Second World War and he would retire. However, his influence and Scottish-influenced tactical thinking did not end at home or abroad. Arthur Rowe would take Spurs to the title in 1951 using Push-and-Run, the passing game derived from McWilliam's practise routines. Bill Nicholson would a decade later do the League and Cup Double with Spurs and take the club into Europe with the brawny skills of Dave Mackay and the spectral ones of John White. Vic Buckingham, having with West Bromwich also come within a whisker of the Double, would work in part abroad. There he would be instrumental in the expansion of the youth system at Ajax, where thirty five year earlier another ex-McWilliam player, Sid Castle, had also been integral to its establishment, and go on to introduce much the same youth system at Barcelona. At Ajax he would be the one to introduce a young Johan Cruyff to the first team and, long after both Scientific football and The Cross had faded in their Scottish birthplace, Cruyff, of course, would not just be literally pivotal to their product, Dutch Total Football, but also the author, based on foundations laid by Buckingham, of the modern Barcelona youth system and thus the team of the first decade of the 21st Century and indirectly Manchester City.