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:
Peter the Great
- football's quiet revolutionary
Chapter Fifteen
At this point, now chronologically well past the direct influence of Peter McWilliam, it is difficult to know which continuing strand of his football philosophy to pursue. Both, however, take us out of Britain. On the one one hand, although Vic Buckingham would have one more try in English football, he would then work abroad for the final twelve years of his managerial career and doubtlessly try to put into practice his footballing philosophy wherever he went. On the other hand there is Ajax.
However, perhaps the best option is not to go forward but take a step back, two decades back to Marinus Michels, or Rinus, as he was called. He had been born in 1928. Long before Cruyff but like him he would grow up within the all-embracing arms of Ajax. He became a junior member in 1940 at the age of twelve. Jack Reynolds was manager as he would be when football resumed after the Second World War and in 1946 when Michels, a robust, if not particularly technically-gifted forward, made his début as an eighteen year old. It was a début, in which he scored five.
Ajax won its regional championship that year and followed it up with the Dutch championship the next. In all over in the next twelve years Michels would play two hundred and sixty-four games for the Amsterdam club, his only club as a player, and score one hundred and twenty-two goals. In addition between 1950 and 1954 he would appear five times for the Dutch national team, losing every game. With his boots on he would see Reynolds retire, professional football be legitimised in Holland, managers come and go but not Buckingham. Michels, through injury, would retire as a player in 1958. Buckingham would arrive the following year. In 1960 Michels became manager of JOS, a still amateur club also in Amsterdam, and there he stayed for four years until appointed by another Amsterdam club, AFC DWS; a club that had been promoted to the Eredivisie just a year earlier and gone straight on to top it in its first season.
Perhaps Michels got a little lucky in getting such an appointment. The AFC DWS team had done well without him but the following season he kept the momentum going with runners-up spot in the league and the quarter-finals of the European Cup, beating Fenerbahce of Turkey, Norway's Lyn and only losing to Gyor of Hungary by an away goal. It was on the basis of that run that Ajax, after a poor season and Vic Buckingham in January about to depart to Fulham, that Michels' former club came calling.
Vic Buckingham was to have a difficult time at Fulham. At the end of the 1964-65 season the club without him had been one place off relegation from the First Division. At the end of 1965-66 with him that was exactly where it still was. True by 1967 he had lifted the team two places to eighteenth but in 1968 it was finally relegated. Buckingham was on his way to Greece, replaced by former player at Fulham and for Buckingham at West Bromwich, Bobby Robson.
Buckingham had left Ajax in January 1965, at which point the Englishman had in the season so far won nine games, drawn just two and lost eight. In today's terms that is thirty of fifty-seven points, on target for a finish in second or third place. He had brought in seven new signings at the start of the season, moving nine on, and, of course, promoted one from the Youth team, Johan Cruyff. Michels might have been expected to at least maintain that record. Yet in the remainder of the season he won just two Eredivisie games, drew six and lost three, nine from thirty-three points. The club finished in thirteen place, at which point Michels might, on the one hand, be said to have got lucky for a second time, whilst on the other hand perhaps he was just canny understanding what Buckingham had been in the process of creating, i.e. what he had, and how to complete it in terms of personnel and tactically.
Specifically his arrival at Ajax coincided with the second part of the second season with Johan Cruyff in the first team, and also by the end of the season the settling-in of Buckingham's imports of the previous two years. On both bases the team that finished the season was much more experienced than the one that had begun it. In addition for the coming season, 1965-66 Michels was able to continue the re-building. Twelve players left. Eight joined. His defence and midfield were already fully formed and functional. His forward-line would be strengthened particularly by the arrival of Henk Groot. Then the team, based essentially on Buckingham's, began to play not pure Ajax, but a blend, converting to 4.3.3 from Reynolds' initial two and, then post-1925, possibly three at the back and a 'W' forward-line, and in part therefore from the Northfleet and ultimately the McWilliam way. It would take the 1966 Eredivisie at a stroll. It would then in 1967 take both the Eredivisie and the KNVB Cup and in 1968 the Eredivisie once more, whilst being Cup runners-up. In fact, with Michels in charge from 1965 to 1971 Ajax won four Eredivisie titles, three KNVB Cups and in 1971 the European Cup. And in doing so the club not only laid claim to the concept of Total Football, Michels' idea, transferring it to the almost equally successful Dutch national side, but did so with a First team squad, an 'A' team and three youth teams. It was Buckingham with a twist. A third team was introduced and the third youth team dispensed with, which meant the club would be, if anything, less Youth orientated under Michels than his McWilliam -influenced predecessor and would remain so for the rest of Michels' tenure. Indeed it would stay so until the arrival as manager of no less than Cruyff himself.