(This post was first published by The Dabbler in August 2011)
I’ve been following football for thirty years – since the days of Ron Greenwood’s England – and one minor consequence of that is that a younger generation now accuse me of having lived through the Golden Age of Real Football, namely, the Seventies. Some would say I’ve lived through two – and I’d agree that the football of the mid-90s was exciting and that it was an optimistic period for the English game. But I’d take issue with both views, partly because I’ve seen ideas of what constituted the Good Old Days change again and again and distrust the concept altogether.
If I had to make a choice, though, I’d pick from four main candidates. The Shankly/Revie/Busby/Clough era of 1964-1974, which saw success at both club and international level for both England and Scotland. The post-War boom years of 1946-1949, which saw the Matthews-Finney-Lawton England and packed league grounds. The Chapman/Buchan Years, 1920-1934, but in a way this is where the fourth choice comes in, because neither Chapman nor his lieutenant Charles Buchan would have agreed that the heights of their respective careers represented any sort of peak at all.
In the period of Chapman and Buchan’s collaboration, there were three main strands of thought about the Great War. One, mostly forgotten now, saw the War and victory as a great vindication of Britishness and British ways, and this perhaps contributed to an increase in cultural conservatism as people sought to preserve what had proved itself in blood. There was the “classic” Owen-Sassoon ruling class betrayal view, in which traditional sources of authority had lost validity and influence. The third strand, in which Chapman and Buchan partook, saw the War as a great stunning: it had knocked things out of kilter, and before they could be restored, a new and rootless generation had taken a hold.
Writing for the Sunday Express at the beginning of the 1930s, Chapman said:
Football today lacks the personalities of twenty or thirty years ago. This, I think,is true of all games, and the reason for it is a fine psychological study. The life which we live is so different:the pace, the excitement, and the sensationalism which we crave are new factors which have had a disturbing influence. They have upset the old balance mentally as well as physically, and they have made football different to play as well as to watch. And they have set up new values. The change has, in fact,been so violent that I do not think the past, the players and the game, can fairly be compared with the present.
Of course, this isn’t “a fine psychological study” but some ill-thought-through lounge bar stuff from someone who become used to never being contradicted. Chapman’s Golden Age of Football was Edwardian, and centred around the great Newcastle United side of the era. Buchan would have disagreed only in detail – for him, the peak was the slower, more thoughtful, skilful passing game that characterised Newcastle before 1914, not Newcastle per se, although, far from blaming the young for putting things into reverse, Buchan’s analysis was actually quite subtle.
Buchan acknowleged that the post-War audience probably demanded something like the faster, cruder football of the 1920s, but nevertheless he placed the real blame on two post-War developments.
The first of these was the creation of Football League Division Three. Before the War, football had consisted of two elite professional divisions whose clubs hailed, for the most part, from the north, and a professional and semi-professional Southern League whose best members were a match for the great northern clubs. Beyond these was a thriving, rapidly evolving network of county and city leagues, mostly amateur, which represented the great bulk of all football played.
To Buchan, this network of minor clubs and leagues was a supreme training ground for young men who might play for four or five clubs at various levels at any one time. This made it possible for the keen and dedicated to play almost daily, and doing so they would come up against every kind of opposition and build their skills, knowledge and experience. Think Outliers here, and Malcolm Gladwell’s 10,000 hour rule of mastery. By contrast, players contracted to Football League clubs would play only once or twice every week – or, if they were merely part of the huge squads clubs maintained in Maximum Wage days, barely at all.
With League membership for the most important 40 non-League clubs came League registration for their players, and with that, the door closed to playing for multiple clubs, or for the same club but in a multitude of local competions. Buchan saw this as the cause of the degradation in skill he’d witnessed as the 1920s wore on.
Buchan’s second culprit was the 1925 change in the offside rule, which led directly to something now considered traditional: the English long ball game. Overnight, the law change had made it unnecessary to think a way to goal – a punt up to a huge centre forward and his bulky, unsubtle colleagues, playing the percentages, was so much easier. Buchan’s own idea to combat this, the third back game, which he and Chapman introduced at Arsenal, went some way to offset this, at the cost of negativity.
Chapman blamed the flappers, in other words : Buchan blamed the suits. This might in fact be the first really clear example of criticism being levelled at the men running the game in England, and I think it reflects something interesting, namely that the game was ageing and its administrators with it. In 1885, Lord Kinnaird, aged 38, and Major Marindin, aged 47, had masterminded the legalization of professionalism in football. Charles Clegg, who’d opposed the change, was 34. Charles Wreford-Brown, not involved at that stage, was 19. In 1918, when the FA met on the day after the armistice to plot the future of the game, of those present, Kinnaird – who’d lost two sons in the War – was 71, Charles Clegg was 67 and Charles Wreford-Brown 52. Football’s founders, but players no more. Old men. Die-hards. Traditionalists. Suits.