And when you are done looking at this site for the Scots input on football world-wide, here are two more.
For those who literally want to trace on the ground the local development of Scots and Scottish football in our own and other countries there is the newly available and ever-expanding site of:
The Scots Football Historians' Group
And on Scottish sports history in general but inevitably including fitba', see Andy Mitchell's inestimable:
The Cross and RC
Ironically just as the emergence of "scientific" football was occurring in the hotbeds of the game in and around Glasgow, so in the northern centre of the emerging Welsh game, in and around Wrexham, according to accepted history there would be the first sign of a new playing configuration. It was 2-3-5, known today as The Pyramid.
In fact, The Pyramid is a misnomer. If the convention of defence to attack in formation description is followed, it is not one at all but inverted and more like a Spinning Top. Furthermore, it was not actually Welsh, being employed extensively in Edinburgh football before its emergence in The Principality and it would continue to be so as the Welsh Pyramid evolved. However, let us go with the Welsh version of events for the sake of continuity. They began not through the tactical or positional, nor via thought but with the other route to innovation, namely one player’s exceptional physical abilities. That player's name was John Price. A centre-forward with the Wrexham club itself he was blessed with such pace that he was said to be able to cover the area normally patrolled by two central forwards, allowing the second to drop away towards the half-back line and into a different role. It was, if not introduced, then employed at the Welsh Cup Final of 1878, which Wrexham won 1:0 with Edwin Cross perhaps the first player to wear the new mantle, albeit unknowingly and somewhat hesitatingly, of “centre-half”.
The hesitation was due because in dropping back to the new position a problem was created for the box-formation that the Welsh had initially borrowed, whether via England or more likely directly from Scotland via
Dr. Gray and the Thomson brothers is unclear. It also makes no difference. The problem was that the player doing so pressed onto the half-backs, crowding them and at the same time leaving gaps for the opposing forwards to attack through the inside channels and on the wings, right up to the goal-line. In the first international against England the following year, 1879, Wales avoided the problem altogether by ignoring the innovation and playing not two full-backs, nor three but a back four in line behind six forwards strung across the pitch. It protected the wings but left acres of space in front and behind those backs. Yet they lost only 2:1 against an England team also with six forwards, but a box-four defence.
However, despite the problem of crowding Wrexham persisted with development. And by 1880 the first stage had been worked out of a solution that would be the foundation of an alternative not just to the Scottish 2-2-6 as a formation but also to the Scottish, philosophical approach to defence and attack that would within the decade see
The Cross
developed north of the border. It was an alternative that more or less in its original form would be used widely but not everywhere in England at least until 1928 and from then to the Second World War in a form modified, if indirectly, by yet more Scottish thought.
That first stage of the solution was simplicity itself. If the redundant second centre-forward moved back, the half-backs should spread wider. That "centre-forward" now did turn “centre-half” not just notionally, "floatingly", if you like, but truly positionally, filling the gap right between the right and left half-backs and protecting the full-backs, with in theory the goalkeeper filling as before the space behind them both between and outside across the pitch. However, every action has a reaction. If the half-backs spread too wide, they crowded the deeper-lying of the wing pairs on right and left and, despite the best efforts of the centre-half, might leave the full-backs and goalkeeper open to direct central attack. The response might well have been to bring the half-backs in a little in a "U" capped by the centre-half but getting it right was zonally delicate, requiring perhaps more positional discipline than could be expected and a better alternative in time found to be keeping the half-backs wide in a "capped V"and use Vale of Leven’s “inside-forward” approach of centre-forward and wingers pushed up ahead with the secondary wingers still hanging back but moved inside in a "W".
To an extent it worked. Full-backs and goalkeeper were better protected. Attacks were intercepted further up the field with one proviso, the attack down the wide wing. However, for that an additional positional adjustment could be made, precisely as it would be in Wales after 1880 and in time be taken up in much of southern England. However, it would, it appears, not be adopted in Eastern Scotland and therefore not by any of the “Scottish Professors”, who from East and West had started to take the Scottish game to industrial, Northern England.
The adjustment was instead of the wingers being in advance of the “inside-forwards” they could be pulled back behind them in a “Gemstone” formation. The wingers would overlap in attack but in defence also force opposition attacks wider. However, that in turn required or at least suggested a further tactical change. The Scottish marking convention stemming from the box-defence of full-backs on outer wingers and half-backs on inner wingers, “inside-forwards”, could be reversed. The now wider Pyramid half-backs could take on, unencumbered, the duty of marking the opposition wingers, definitively transferring their previous responsibility for the inside-forwards to the full-backs. And this is precisely what over time happened. Not only did it seem to make sense zonally, especially if an attack was beyond its first stages, it also facilitated intervention still higher up the pitch, which is always to be preferred. However, as always there was a proviso – if the half-back was beaten by the winger with the full-back engaged with the inside forward the winger had open country between him and goal. In such situations there was no back-up except the goalkeeper.
This winger-fullback vulnerability proved to be The Pyramid's generic weakness, one that encouraged opposition wing-play not just inside but outside the half-backs. In the Welsh original and its derivatives it was never fully resolved by defenders, although the first line of defence could be pushed further up-field to a little past the half-way line, by pulling the inside-forwards back a little from a flat forward three into an “arrowhead” formation”. It made for easier back-tracking by them then to fill the gaps and was extensively employed in the initially mainly amateur but later increasingly professional, Southern English game. However the system as a whole, even after tinkering, remained one, in spite of its almost fashionable acceptance in places at home and abroad, that was fundamentally flawed and was to be horribly exposed some fifty years later after a change in the offside laws made it not simply awkward but downright dangerous.
Meanwhile, football in Scotland had gone its own way, just. Track the formations used by teams in the early 1880s it becomes clear that, whilst West Scotland. i.e. Glasgow and its surrounds, remained with the 2-2-6 formation, Eastern Scotland, based initially around Edinburgh but gradually extending north to Fife and then to Dundee, moved increasingly to 2-3-5. In fact by the middle 1880s an increasing number of West Scotland teams were also adopting the same system until there was almost only one 2-2-6 team standing, Renton in the Leven Vale. It had seemingly not just picked up the gauntlet from its neighbour, Vale of Leven of course and just one and half miles up the road, but from 1884 taken it on. It went from heavy defeat in the third round of the Scottish Cup by The Vale in 1883-4 to defeating The Vale in the Cup Final of 1885, runners-up spot in 1886 and in 1888 the largest Cup-win in its history and the "Championship of the World".
And Renton had achieved "World" dominance by inventing and implementing a new way of playing. The Cross had arrived. The weakness of 2-2-6, or as it was actually still being played, 2-2-[3/3], was the link between defense and attack and to resolve it required two things. The first requirement was a player, who was fast, could run all day, head like a forward, pass like no other yet still tackle and tackle well when called on. It needed not just what today might be called a good "mid-field playmaker" but frankly a footballing genius and in
James Kelly Renton not so much found but developed him. He was eighteen and a forward when he came into the team, twenty-two when he left it and in the interim he had been moulded. The question is, by whom? The second requirement was for a formational adjustment that facilitated this new type of player and that was arrived at perhaps by chance, more likely through thought and definitely by tucking in the half-backs. And if thought had been applied, again the question is, by whom?
No-one will ever be able to answer the "by whom" question, or is it questions? Too much has passed. It may, of course, have all been serendipity but it seems unlikely. Alternatively it may have been
James Kelly himself but again there must be doubts. Although he was at the centre of a system that clearly worked, both at Renton and then at Celtic, he could never replicate it at national level, where he did could not have had the same tactical understanding from team-mates, if he were the lead, and no direction, if, as it seems, he were not. At Celtic that direction seems to have come most successfully from Willie Maley, who even substituted for Kelly at times. At Renton it came from senior, defensive team-mates, not least the captain. As was the convention then, it would have been him, who developed tactics off and decided them on the pitch. And he was Archie McCall. Indeed it may even have been McCall on the left and and his fellow full-back,
Andrew Hannah, on the right, who as a pair had taken the art of widened full-backs to the point that they were as integral to The Cross as its attacking centre-half, even to the point where the attacking centre-half and therefore The Cross was made possible.
But Archie McCall was never a footballing "star" in the way Kelly, or, indeed, Andrew Hannah at Everton and particularly Liverpool would be. He won just one Scottish cap to Hannah's and Kelly's eight. He never moved south, as did almost all of his team-mates at the time and in the next several years. He never seemed tempted, although he might, as one of the oldest in the team, have been less attractive to English teams and, well, may have been in any case comfortably shamateur. Renton was expelled from the first Scottish League season in 1890 for being "professional" with McCall very much still its captain until 1894 and living in Renton as he would continue to do after football. He had married Maggie Bell there in 1891. He would have his children there, the first in 1894. He would be living there still in 1901, in Alexander St. just yards from the old Renton ground, Tontine Park. He would still be there in 1911. And he would die in the village in 1936 at the age of seventy-four, no doubt lauded for past deeds locally but nowhere else, that is until now perhaps.
With the example of Renton and then Celtic The Cross became first the accepted club style of play in Scotland, then internationally and subsequently found its way both south and in time abroad. As Renton had stuttered as its great team was dismantled and declined rapidly after McCall ceased to play so behind Kelly at Celtic initially John Reynolds and the flamboyant Dan Doyle formed the full-back pairing to suit. Success followed. Celtic would win the Scottish Cup in 1892. Then it became Tommy Dunbar and Doyle as Celtic took the 1892 league title and Walter Arnott left the international scene after a decade, allowing Scotland also to begin the somewhat grinding process of also embracing The Cross. In the following game against England, that of 1894, Doyle, at his preferred left-back and not right, won his third cap and was made captain, perhaps to make it work.
That day Doyle was alongside Queen's Park's Sillars, who was nothing if not versatile but may not have known what he was doing exactly. He had already been tried at full-back, half-back and inside-forward. The result was a 2-2 draw at Hampden with England equalising with five minutes to go and neither full-back to blame for either goal. Then for the next England match Doyle was paired with Rangers' John Drummond and that seemed in time to work. Drummond in fact outlasted Doyle, himself becoming Scotland's captain and forming, after the Celtic man, a solid partnership for club and country with fellow Ranger, Nicol Smith. Moreover that pair well into the new century, with others, all of whom seemed to know what they were doing as results rebounded remarkably, behind Kelly's successor
James Cowan and then
Alex Raisbeck, also seemed effectively to pass on the baton to
Andy McCombie and James Watson, Sunderland's equivalent pairing. It is proof positive, firstly, that The Cross was by the turn of the century not just the property of Celtic, league champions again in 1896 and 1898, but had also been embraced by William Wilton's rejuvenated Rangers, champions in 1899, 1900, 1901 and 1902. Secondly with "the others" in terms of clubs all outwith Glasgow - Dundee, Hibernian, champions in 1903, Airdrieonians, runners-up in 1903, St. Mirren and Hearts, champions in 1895 and 1897 - it showed that The Cross as system was being adopted country-wide. Thirdly it verified, if verification were needed, that Renton was indeed the true source of The Cross. The "other" personnel in question from Dundee and Hibs were Bob Kelso and Robert Glen. Kelso had previously been the right-half in McCall and Renton's 1888 team and in 1894 Glen had been McCall's Renton replacement on the club captain's retirement. And finally, it confirmed that The Cross had slipped the border, at the very least, to Wearside, quite probably to Liverpool and was reaching Newcastle. Scotland's centre-forward, R.S. McColl of newsagent fame, was about to arrive on Tyneside. Andrew Hannah had played out his career on Merseyside before returning to Scotland. And at Sunderland McCombie was Invernesian and Watson Motherwell.
However, if The Cross changed defending and might even be said to have created the "mid-field" then it also allowed through one man attacking also to reinvent itself. The man in question is R.C. Hamilton,
Robert Cumming Hamilton, Elgin-born, so learning his early football not in the Scottish League, and who has to be seen as the antecedent to Mathias Sindelar, Nandor Hidegkuti, the inestimable John White, Lionel Messi and Eden Hazard, amongst a few others, to all who have played and play as a False No. 9.
Where the Hamilton approach came from is impossible to tell. It may have had its source in the Highland football he played as a teenager but equally have been simply a product of him and his thoughts. A highly intelligent man, who would become a teacher, on retiremnt from the game he returned home to become a major force in Moray education and Provost of Elgin. However what it produced via Queen's Park and Rangers was a player, who was famed for shooting from deep and again from deep centre-forward or inside-forward, for much of time at international level operating vertically between
Alex Raisbeck and Bob McColl and at Rangers between Neilly Gibson and John McPherson setting up goals for others and scoring himself.
R.C. Hamilton would for Rangers score at a fraction under a goal a game, one hundred and fifty-four times in one hundred and sixty-four appearances over ten years. He would also over twelve years win eleven caps and score fifteen goals, or almost a goal and a half a game. As a comparison McColl would at much the same time play three more club games, one hundred and sixty-seven, scoring just seventy-one times and also win two more caps, thirteen, and score two fewer goals, again thirteen at one a game. Yet McColl is in the Scottish Football Association's Hall of Fame and Hamilton is not. Why?
Furthermore, whilst McColl is rightly applauded as having in 1901 taken the Scottish game to Newcastle, to St. James's Park, where a great team resulted, Hamilton took both it and his game to Fulham, and with far greater impact long-term. There playing alongside him was Jimmy Hogan. And it was Hogan, who took Hamilton's concept of the False No. 9 position to Austria, where he found Sindelar, with Alex Jackson and Uruguay's Andrade one of the three greatest players of the inter-War years, and to Hungary, where he was openly recognised as an inspiration of the Magic Magyars, with Hidegkuti as their the deep-lying, attacking fulcrum, their Hamilton. The only sadness is that, although Jimmy Hogan would live to see Hungary and Hidegkuti and be rightly praised, Robert Cumming would not. He had died in 1948 aged seventy back in his beloved Elgin, recognised fully as an educationalist but not for his pioneering, footballing prowess.