Perhaps it is the merely the intellectual meandering of a man, who has seen over a mounting tally of years too much football disappointment and has just felt the ninetieth minute dagger of despair against the heart only to experience a euphoria that was little more than a dot on my temporal horizon, one that my ageing, fading eyes thought lost for good. But, in yet another manifestation of Scots  hope over experience, perhaps this is finally it, the turning-point or rather the returning-point when the new ways, having been seen so completely and persistently to have failed, are not abandoned entirely but set aside and we go back to our first principles.

In fact it could be said that in a way we are stepping back almost exactly one hundred and fifty years. The date was 30th November 1872 , the venue The West of Scotland Cricket Ground in Partick and the event, the World's first, official football international, the sixth game between a Scottish and English eleven, the result a 0-0 draw and the reason, that Scotland took the field with not one one, two or three backs but four in the form of a box.

Reports of that days make it clear that it was not pretty. But it worked. The box expanded but mostly contracted as required under the direction of captain and goalkeeper, Robert Gardner, the man with hat and hair, and with it the first step in Scottish way of football was born. It was style of playing that was over time developed but at its rectangular, defensive core was to remain in essence unchanged for a little more than fifty years, which in most histories of footballing tactics written elsewhere seems to be regarded as purely coincidental to the Sottish international successes of precisely the same period. Between 1872 and 1927 in the fifty-three games against England, the foe that has to be accepted as mattering most, to Scots at least, for every two English victories there were three Scots. The statistics are as simple as that and, whilst they are inevitably influenced by other factors none applies throughout save one, the Scottish boxed-based, vertical styles, i.e. from goal to goal, be they 2-2-6 or later 2-2-1-5, The Cross with its attacking centre-half, worked better than the line-based, horizontal, side-line to side-line-based English styles including the supposedly ubiquitous 2-3-5.

Now, whilst Robert Gardner's idea of a box was probably square anyone who has ever packed anything, including a defence, knows it need not be. In addition it can be oblong, trapezoidal or any of the three at any time in a game according to playing requirements. And the direction, in which the Scots game took it was largely but not exclusively the second of the options. the trapezium. The development of goal-keeping, specifically sweeper-keeping in Scotland in 1880s and 1890s made the widening there of the full-backs possible and the emergence, if not necessarily its adoption, inevitable. Yet it does not rule out the strengthening of the base of that defensive box, as Herbert Chapman and Charlie Buchan would do with the introduction of the centre-back in the late 1930s. Nor does it exclude a distortable box, of which the defensive component of the cantilevered Cross honed to near perfection from 1920 onwards at Bill Struth's Rangers was demonstrably the best example, on the basis of letting in fewer goals than other box-systems, against which it was employed.

However, what the box does rule out is ever thinking about defensive football linearly. The concept is spacial. The box is a shape not a line and therefore the defensive elements of 2:3:5, 2:4:4, 4:2:4, 4:3:3, 3:3:4, 3:4:3 et al do not apply except as the shortest of shorthand.  A described shape would be, indeed, is better. The Cross works. So does The Pyramid even if it is upside-down. Moreover, in the old Scottish way of playing football this mode of two dimensional thinking was also applied elsewhere. Within literally a few years of football catching fire in Scotland and of  new, Scots, defensive thinking the same the same process was also applied to attack, where the linear, crashing, rugby-like, forward rush had been the way, or rather the English way. Indeed it was thinking on both, albeit with a slight lag for the latter, that in the decade from 1876 English football showed itself so eager to import in the form of what we call the "Scotch Professors". And it was based on triangles, the triangles that made inter-passing possible, which might on the face of it present a problem.  How does a box-based defence, apples, blend into a triangle-based attack, oranges, a question to which might on the face of it seemed problematic except that every Pythagorean, indeed anyone who has ever made anything solid, apart from over-cooked porridge or similar, knows that every square, oblong, indeed trapezoids in general are constructed of two or more triangles. In other words to link defence with attack and vice versa is to place a layer of Granny Smiths on or under a layer of Golden Delicious and, using a successful recipe, let the cooking blend them together. 

So what went wrong in Scotland in or around 1930? My response it that we went linear. Our game lost a dimension, not just figuratively but literally, which at a national level for a brief time in the 1960s with an exceptional group of players and a manager with a core memory it re-found but for the best part of half a century has since decided not to recognise, whilst others, notably abroad and repeatedly, did and to great effect and not without substantial Scots input. Indeed, it is precisely that process of Scots football flourishing elsewhere, if fact almost everywhere outwith our own country, which this web-site is all about.

Yet possibly there is change and Steve Clarke is the new Robert Gardner. Certainly his footballing ethos is the pragmatic and to build from the back.  But there is more and that is perhaps what is most exciting. Clarke has wiped the slate clean and seems to be creating a style that is more or less Scottish-unique. Moreover, it is based on the box, not the square, Gardner-box of four, two on two, but an oblong of six, three by two. Indeed, at times it is based on boxes because as the wide full-backs, the wing-backs, as they interplay with the midfield and full-out in attack with the central striker, form trapezoids respectively with first the back three and then with the centre of the park. 

And to a degree it has worked.