The Birth of Tiki-Taka – the Replay
(A version of this article first appeared in Nutmeg Magazine in September 2017)
It is hard sometimes to criticise, especially when the author of a notion to be challenged is so highly regarded, both generally and by myself, for writing one of the definitive footballing books. But here goes anyway.
The author in question is Jonathan Wilson and the book Inverting the Pyramid. If you are interested in football, why would you be running your eyes over this article otherwise, and you haven't read it, do so. It will inform and enlighten you. But beware. It will do so with an English perspective inevitably blinkered by no doubt unintended but nevertheless inaccurate Anglophone conventionality.
Now, in these politically complicated times with Scotland and England somewhere between counselling and divorce, it is perhaps time to suggest an alternative narrative, one that begins to separate the Scottish from the British, i.e. English, and give its rightful place in the World game. And a good starting-point might be Jonathan's article in the second issue of the Scottish football magazine, Nutmeg, in September 2016. The article is entitled “Glasgow, 1872: The Birth of Tiki-Taka”. What is correct about the title is that Scotland was indeed, if not the birthplace, then the country of tiki-taka's conception and almost half of its 130 year gestation. Where it is wrong is that conception was neither in Glasgow, nor in 1872.
The term tiki-taka was first used in 2006, perhaps a little earlier, and to describe, as all football fans will know, the Barcelona of Pep Guardiola and since. It origins are Spanish, as have been its greatest practitioners but the well from which it principles are drawn is indeed Scots, although the water-carriers have also been English and above all Dutch. Let me explain by starting at the beginning, 2006, and working in an Irish and Highland way backwards. As a part-Irish Highlander I feel I have the right.
Think tiki-taka, see Xavi Hernandez, Andres Iniesta and one other weaving and interchanging in midfield notably to supply Messi. All three, along with so many others, are products of Barcelona's youth system, of which its residential element, La Masia, is a part. It boards the young players from away, whilst local youngsters are day-pupils.
La Masia was a direct initiative of the late Johan Cruyff as Barca player but only an enhancement of an overall scheme, a scheme that he had in essence inherited from and before his recent death reintroduced to his beloved Ajax where it is now again producing obvious results. But ideas very rarely come out of the ether. There is almost always a process of synthesis often of older ideas, and sometimes of old and new. Football is no exception and this process of synthesis will be a recurring theme of this and other of my writings.
Now, old ideas need carriers and they, the carriers, for the ideas to live and be taken on, need to mentor young receivers, players and coaches alike. Cruyff had two mentors. One was his main manager at first Ajax and then Barca, the very Dutch Marinus Jacobus Hendricus ”Rinus” Michaels, as a player also inculcated in the Dutch club's way. The other was the un-Dutch Vic Buckingham, an Englishman both inculcated and convinced of another but, as will become clear, related way. Buckingham was in quick succession twice manager of Ajax, from 1959 to 1961 and for the 1964-65 season. It was that second spell when he introduced a 17 year-old Cruyff to the first team. And he was also one of four famous products of another club, all of whom achieved a certain, above-average success, three of whom also sharing a far less famous second club. The one with one only and even then something of an add-on was a certain Alf Ramsay. The two others who shared both were Arthur Rowe and Bill Nicholson. The first club was, of course, Tottenham Hotspur. The second was Northfleet, now Ebbsfleet, in Kent.
In 1920 as football recovered after the Great War and there was a moment for new ideas Spurs had tried to come to arrangement with Charlton, then still also in Kent. The intention was for it to be feeder club, playing the same style as and with young players supplied from White Hart Lane. Charlton decided on another course that in two years led to entry to the Football League but it did so with both a manager and players almost seconded from Tottenham. However Spurs did not give up. In 1924 it entered into much the same agreement with Northfleet. The manager, who had suggested the Charlton arrangement and finalised the one with Northfleet was a Scot, more specifically a Highland Scot,
Peter McWilliam, one of the most unrecognised and underestimated figures in World Football, then and now. And it would not be a one-off. In 1934 on the death of
Herbert Chapman McWilliam was offered the management of Arsenal, declined, accepted the position of Chief Scout of Spurs North London rivals and finalised a similar agreement with another Kentish team, Margate.
Arthur Rowe as Spurs manager on winning the League title in 1950, credited his Push-and-Run style, one that Nicholson would continue and adapt in the club’s hey-days in the 1960s, to McWilliam practice routines but it was a style of play that was, in Britain at least, to die out. In Holland it would be another matter. It is said that the famous Ajax youth system from which would emerge Total Football was introduced by perhaps the club’s most revered manager of all time, the Englishman, Jack Reynolds. That is true but only just. Ajax’s own records show he did so just a few months before, with the club struggling, he seems to have been sacked.
Reynolds was then replaced by another Englishman, Harold Rose. He lasted a season and the Youth team was dismantled before he too moved on. It was 1926. A third Englishman, Sid Castle, became club’s manager and it was he who in two seasons restored the club's playing fortunes and in doing so added both a Reserve and a Youth team. Moreover, when he left the club both teams were removed only for the Youth but not the Reserve programme to be restored several years later, as Ajax again floundered once more under Reynolds, yet recover. In the meantime Castle would go on to manage Heerenveen and once more with an emphasis on youth development, most particularly the Cruyff of his day, Abe Lenstra, take it into the Dutch First Division.
So who was Sid Castle? He was a winger born in Basingstoke, who in a career disrupted by the Great War had at the age of twenty-seven played the 1919-20 season at Spurs under McWilliam, spent two more at Charlton, as it decided to accept the MacWilliam’s Spurs’ offer or not, and a final season at Chelsea as Charlton was replaced by Northfleet in Spurs’ affections. Two years later he was at Ajax and there seems to have achieved in adding both the Reserve and Youth teams to the coaching structure a synthesis of what he had absorbed from McWilliam with local circumstances. McWilliam’s and Spurs’ external Northfleet structure became Castle’s and Ajax’s internal.
It was this structure of first-team and youth only that Vic Buckingham found when he arrived at Ajax in 1959. He, the Tottenham-man, the Northfleet-man, the by-proxy McWilliam-man immediately added a reserve team between First and Youth thus restoring the structure that fellow Tottenham- and McWilliam-man, Castle, had originally put in place. Buckingham was to have to do it again when he returned in 1964, the reserve team having been disbanded meanwhile, and it was this structure of first, reserve and youth teams that his successor, Michels, was to inherit, tinker with a little but leave essentially alone throughout his management at Ajax to be passed on to Cruyff, when he in turn became manager two decades later.
Meanwhile Buckingham had in 1969 become manager of Barcelona. He would again stay two years leaving for Sevilla in 1971. But this was not the Barcelona of today but a club struggling in Franco's Spain in the shadow of a “preferred” Real Madrid. Nevertheless Buckingham set to work on the club, specifically its structure. A youth team was immediately introduced, ungraded from Barcelona Amateur and which would become Barcelona 'C'. The following year in 1970 Barcelona Atletic was formed. It is now known as Barcelona 'B' and it is this structure that Buckingham's successor as manager would inherit. He was none other than Michaels. And he would in 1973 bring in Johan Cruyff and the rise and rise of Barcelona would start to manifest itself. Cruyff himself would manage the team for the eight crucial years from 1988-1996 that would see the progression through the 'C' and 'B' teams, both renamed under Cruyff, and the introduction into the first team of amongst others, Guardiola.
Since then the success of Barcelona has not been due just to the managers. It might even be said to have been in spite of some of them. It was others like Quique Costas, a Barcelona player with Cruyff, on four occasions the guardian of the 'C' and then 'B' team, the former again under Cruyff, who continued along the same pathway once the Dutch master had gone, overseeing the production of much future talent. However, paths can be followed in two directions. Forward from Cruyff there is a direct and obvious link to Guadiola. Backwards there is an equally direct, if less obvious, connection to Peter McWilliam not just as a manager and organisational theoretician but as a player and example.
So who was McWilliam. Inverness-born in 1879, he played for Inverness Thistle. In 1902 aged twenty-two he joined Newcastle, where he became known as Peter the Great, retiring through injury in 1912 to manage Spurs for fifteen years, then manage Middlesbrough, find Arsenal’s players post-Chapman and again take on Spurs before the Second World War intervened. In his time as a one-club player in England, he was notionally left-half in a team that won the league in 1904-5, 1906-7 and 1908-9 and was in the FA Cup Final in four times, losing in 1905, 1906 and 1908, winning in 1910. As a manager and scout he was promoted once, won the League twice and two FA Cups.
But there is another element to Barcelona football beyond organisation. It is style. It too had its origins in Scots football again with Peter McWilliam's Newcastle and also the Spurs manager, who essentially preceded McWilliam, John Cameron.
In McWilliam’s case by notional left-half is meant he developed a licence to wander and more than a little, from left to right and back and forward, from defence into attack and vice-versa. Innovative in England, it was a stylistic corner-stone in a series of famously attacking Toon teams, which nevertheless also invented the off-side trap. At the time Newcastle's game style was labelled “combination” but that was name applied for the previous forty years to several types of football. It might better be described as “integrated”, one of several developments of a more generic Scottish game. It might even be said to be embryonic rotating that would be integral, again in Holland, perhaps via Sid Castle, to Total Football.
As for John Cameron he had slightly earlier at Spurs developed another, more defensive, fetch-and-carry, pass-and-carry combination style, and with it as the first player/manager won the FA Cup in 1901, the only time it was won by a non-league club. And it was he who was later to be one if not the main influences on a number of again English managers, who after The Great War went to work in Spain, the most important of whom was Fred Pentland. He was by background an Ulster-Scot who nevertheless played for England, had at the beginning of the war been coaching in Germany and became an internee at the Ruhleben camp outside Berlin. Cameron was another. In fact Cameron was Secretary of the Ruhleben FA and Pentland might be said to have "sat at his knee".
Cameron's wise words seemed to have quickly sunk in. Once in Spain between 1920 and 1935 Pentland with Athletic Bilbao would win the Copa de Rey four times, reach the final with Atletico Madrid and win La Liga, founded in 1928-9, in 1930 and 1931 and be runners-up in 1932 and 1933. He would help coach Spain to the first ever victory over England by a non-British team and he would persuade Barcelona by example to change from an English, long-ball footballing style to the one he had adopted under Cameron's influence and employed at his Spanish clubs, the short-passing Scottish game. It is in essence the style still used in Spain. It is the style at the core of tiki-taka.
Scotland's distinctive game had developed over the forty years in four stages before The Great War. Its fourth stage was based on 2.3.5. but The Cross not The Pyramid, which had been adopted in England, is said was of Welsh origin but was actually being played in East Scotland at mich the same time. The Cross had emerged at Renton, specifically from 1886 with James Kelly as its figurehead. It had at its core a central, distributive, attacking centre-half positioned between the half-backs and the forwards, to which positional interchange was increasing added. It reached a zenith, perhaps not the beginning but a halfway point on the road to tiki-taka, in Scotland’s international team of the first decade of the 20th Century with Alex Raisbeck as the pivot, Andy Aitken behind and to his right and none other than McWilliam notionally behind and to his left.
However, The Cross also included four other, inherited elements. The first and oldest was the sweeping keeper, the embryo sweeper-keeper. The second was narrow half-backs, which made the advanced centre-half necessary. The sweeping-keeper and narrow half-backs had both been introduced with the first ever International in 1872. The third was wider full-backs and the fourth, in contrast to The Pyramid, the convention of half-backs marking inside-forwards and full-backs wingers.
However, none of the above would have made any difference had it not been for the second essential element of tiki-taka after movement, accurate passing, for which McWilliam was especially noted. Passing was in the beginning of football not a skill of value. Both in England for perhaps thirty years and for a few years in Scotland the game was about the big boot, running, dribbling, tackling and scrimmage. Attack too was the essence of the game for two decades in England but not in Scotland. Robert Gardner, the major figure in the early Scottish game as player, goalkeeper, administrator, organiser and tactician had stepped onto the field of play at the first Scotland-England game in 1872 having studied the opponents' form, doctored the pitch in terms of dimensions and, most unprecedented, specifically organised his team from back to front and not vice-versa. He “parked the bus”. It worked. The result was a 0:0 draw, notably because of a total innovation, a box-four defence, which compressed under pressure and expanded on the counter.
The sweeping-keeper was a natural product of, in the early days of football, the keeper considered as a player like any other but with the added ability to use his hands to stop or block the ball anywhere in his own half. In Scotland again Robert Gardner added to it by instigating immediately in front of goal the art of narrowing the angle. With the box-four came narrow half-backs. Wider full-backs and the Scots marking convention seem to have developed in the first golden era, the “scientific” era of the Scottish game from 1880 to 1888. They make more sense with a sweeping-keeper filling the space between them, emerged probably because of a series of pairings with players from Queen's Park, Dumbarton, Vale of Leven and Renton, the most important of whom and an almost constant was Walter Arnott, and once they spread so the marking convention became entirely logical.
Arnott would join Queen's Park in 1882. He would play his first International the following year, his last in 1893, including ten games in a row against England, the match that really mattered. It had been Queen's Park too that had been not just the first Scottish club of all but also the great early propagandist for and the dominant team in the game north of the border during its first four years. Yet for all Queen's Park's early influence the game it played and was played against it shows little or no evidence of passing. That was to change in 1876 but not at Hampden Park.
There was then, of course, no Scottish League, just from 1874 the Scottish Cup. Queen's Park won it for the first three years. Then for three years it was won by Alexandria's Vale of Leven, “The Vale”. It might have done so earlier but for an objection in 1874 to captain, John Ferguson, who that year had already become the club's first international. The claim was that Ferguson in a still strictly amateur sport was a professional. That he was but as a runner not a footballer. He was also a noted shinty player again as an amateur. Vale of Leven took the objection as a slight, resigned from the competition having drawn with Clydesdale, Robert Gardner's Clydesdale, away with every prospect of winning the home tie. Clydesdale went on early the following to the semi-final only to lose to Queen's Park by a single goal in the second replay.
It was the year Queen's Park after overcoming Clydesdale would beat Renton in the final. Renton in its semi-final had defeated Dumbarton. Renton is a mile and half from The Vale. Dumbarton is two miles in the opposite direction. All three teams had been formed in the months after Queen's Park had in late 1872 played a demonstration match beside the Leven river that flows from Loch Lomond at Balloch past Alexandria and Renton into the Clyde at Dumbarton. All three teams were not Glasgow and in contrast to the Glasgow clubs they were drawn not from the middle-class and military backgrounds but the working-class populations of a rapidly industrialising area, populations drawn firstly from the Highlands to the North and West, from Perthshire and later, like James Kelly's parents, from Ireland. They brought with them the their sporting traditions; shinty, the Ba' Game, hurling and Gaelic football, each with their own well-established tactics. And they continued to play the ancient sports. After winning the Scottish Cup in 1877, 1878 and 1879 The Vale in 1880, having been knocked out of the Scottish Cup by none other than Dumbarton in the First Round, turned its attention to the other sporting interest of its founders, shinty, a game with passing, pairings and positional interchange at its heart. It entered the foremost shinty trophy of the time, the Glasgow Celtic Society Cup, and won it.
And it was precisely in the period, from 1876 to 1880 with the obvious possibility of cross-fertilisation between shinty and football and when The Vale dominated the Scottish Cup that reports in the Press both at club and International level begun to mention passing as the preferred style. It was also when with six forwards team sheets began to highlight “pairings”, players in defence at first and then in attack working together on the wings and in the centre at club level and then being chosen internationally from the same club because of their proven ability to “combine” not just vertically up the pitch but across it also, combination being greater than the sum of its parts. With it came interchange, movement at close range of men and ball, the very essence of tiki-taka but not from the middle-class teams of Glasgow but in working-class Leven Vale, near-Glasgow perhaps but not Glasgow, and not in 1872 but half a decade later.