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 Fourteen
After retirement from playing Vic Buckingham was ambitious but clearly recognised that after a year at Northfleet and fourteen years service at White Hart Lane his future lay not at Spurs but elsewhere. It was 1949. Arthur Rowe, alongside whom as a player Buckingham had played for four years, had arrived at White Hart Lane from Chelmsford and the younger man, probably recognising he would not be part of the new broom, headed for the exit.
However, Buckingham clearly left with a good reputation, or rather having created a good impression elsewhere. Within a year he had been invited to coach Pegusus. Pegusus was an amateur team founded just two years earlier and was made up of students of both Oxford and Cambridge Universities and Buckingham had previously coached Oxford and was now available full-time. On the other hand Bill Nicholson, alongside whom Buckingham played for a decade less the war-years, had coached Cambridge, but was still playing so perhaps fortuitously for his former team-mate was not.
Under Buckingham's guidance Pegusus adopted a style of play that was like Tottenham Hotspur, but not Rowe's “Push-and-Run”. Buckingham never played it but he had played under McWilliam, understood his style and, as the future would show, advocated a version of it. And with that version in 1951 Pegusus won the FA Amateur Cup, by which time. perhaps even on the strength of it, Buckingham had become manager of Bradford Park Avenue in the Third Division North. Bradford finished eighth, having been sixth the previous year and the next season the club was seventh so no real improvement. Yet Buckingham must have impressed once more and on 1st February 1953 he was offered the managership of First Division West Bromwich Albion.
The appointment was bizarre. Jesse Carver, the former Blackburn and Newcastle centre-half, having managed in Holland, including a year in charge of the Dutch national team, and two years at Juventus in Italy, in a season as only trainer/coach at The Hawthorns and also playing attacking football had taken West Bromwich to the point of challenging for the title. Of twenty-nine games he had won sixteen, drawn four and lost nine, an average, with then two points for a win and one for a draw, of 1.2 per game. With the manager's job vacant it looked as if, by his filling the vacancy, things could only get better. Except that he was not offered the position. As West Bromwich havered Lazio came calling, taking him back to Italy to continue coaching, before Torino, facing relegation, offered him the job as its manager. He took it, saved the Turin club from the drop, then moved on to Roma and for the next decade and a half continued to work in Italy and Cyprus with one try back in the UK at Coventry and from where he would effectively walk away.
Thus it was shortly after New Year 1953 West Bromwich turned in something of a panic to Vic Buckingham, who in the remaining eighteen fixtures still with Carver's team would take a point a game and finish in fourth place. Moreover so strong was Carver's legacy Buckingham would make only one meaningful addition the following season; Freddie Cox, the Arsenal winger, who nevertheless had started his playing career at Tottenham before his new boss had left, so was a known known. And it would be essentially that same team, Carver's tweaked by Buckingham and Cox that took the 1954 FA Cup and finished as runners-up in the League. It, playing fluid, attacking football, 'McWilliam' football, was even labelled the “Team of the Century” with the suggestion it should be chosen en-mass to represent England at the 1954 World Cup. It might, indeed, have done better than the team that did go, which lost to Uruguay in the quarter-final play-off but there would have been a, or rather two problems. The Scot, Jim Dudley, was the regular right-half and the Irishman, Reg Ryan, inside-right.
The following season, 1954-55, however, West Bromwich tumbled down the table to seventeenth place. Re-building was necessary and Buckingham began it. In 1956 his team was thirteenth, in 1957 eleventh and in 1958 fourth once more, just one place below Tottenham. And the position was more or less held. In 1959, as Spurs slipped away in Bill Nicholson's first managerial season, Buckingham's team was fifth, and only because of poorish home form. Had draws at the Hawthorns been wins the club would have been Champion.
It is a curious fact that, in spite of the successes of West Bromwich under Buckingham in histories of the club, at which he remains the longest serving post-war manager, he barely gets a mention. Nor is the fact that it was he who in 1956 signed one of the club's great players. He was Bobby Robson, who in six seasons four of them under Buckingham played two hundred and thirty-nine times for the club. Nor, indeed, is the reason for Buckingham's departure ever explained. It is said that he failed to maintain momentum at the club but the facts belie the assertion. Under him the team had been on the up. The “lack of momentum” amounted to one place and one point fewer than the previous year, i.e. nothing. Nor, finally, is there an obvious explanation of Buckingham's next move, except that it has certain parallels with Carver's six years earlier, another with more “radical” ideas than the directors of the club might have been able to accept or even comprehend. Indeed it suggests whatever problems there were at West Bromwich were not with the coaching staff.
So it was that, having not had West Bromwich's backing, in 1959 Vic Buckingham was offered and accepted the managership of Ajax of Amsterdam. Dutch football had been one of the last in Europe to turn professional. It had happened only in 1954. The Eredivisie, the First Division, was formed in 1956. Ajax had been its first champion but had under the Austrian manager, Karl Humenberger had no success since, although off the field he did add a third Youth team and also reintroduce the Kaufman concept of a Cubs team feeding into the Youth set-up. And in 1959 Humenberger returned to his homeland to manage Austria Vienna and Victor Frederick Buckingham stepped into an environment that was both new, as it was to be the first of several appointments abroad, and known. Jack Reynolds was still alive, retired from football for over a decade but still living in Amsterdam, his wife Dutch and he having become a tobacconist. The club still played the style it had in his time. It still retained the strong youth-to-first team structure that had proved so successful for Reynolds in the 1930s and yet it was a structure, a system, that Buckingham, as a product of the Spurs youth policy and Northfleet, must, perhaps to his initial surprise, have partially recognised but immediately understood.
Buckingham stayed two years at Ajax and remodelled the team, indeed the club. In his first season he on the field revived the forward line bringing in the Groot brothers, and won Eredivisie, finishing after thirty-four games level with Feyenoord but taking the play-off. 5-1. Off the field he inserted a Third team as a link between the 'A' squad and a slightly tweaked youth set-up. Ajax now had seven tiers.
Those league positions, again on the field, as he now rebuilt the defence, were reversed the following year but the KNVB Cup, the Dutch equivalent of the FA Cup, not having been played in 1959-60, was the consolation. And off the field he again made changes not in the number of youth teams but in the way they were organised. He dropped the lowest youth team, effectively the Cubs, but inserted instead the elite KNVB Youth between the newly-created Third and the remaining Youth teams.
And what Buckingham was doing across the North Sea at least on the field did not go unnoticed. He was approached by Sheffield Wednesday, which in spite of finishing second in the 1961 First Division, to Spurs' double-winning side, had lost manager, Harry Catterick, to Everton. It must have seemed a huge compliment to Buckingham and he readily and rapidly accepted the position.
Wednesday had not taken the title in 1961 because of it had drawn away too often and not won. The following year its home form under Buckingham was much the same but away form was worse. The club slipped to 6th place, a place below Sheffield United. The champions were un-fancied Ipswich, managed by another Tottenham player, this time under Arthur Rowe. It was Alf Ramsey. But by way of some consolation, although Tottenham was third, West Bromwich was only ninth and Ajax had also slipped to fourth in the Eredivisie, significantly off the pace, and with no Cup success. Its manager for that season, something of a stop-gap, was Keith Spurgeon, a defender, who had begun his career, one of two spells, at Margate. Jack Reynolds was in the last year of his life but connections seemingly continued.
The next year Sheffield Wednesday retained 6th place. Away form had improved but home form worsened. Spurs were second, to Harry Catterick's Everton, Sheffield United was tenth, West Bromwich fourteenth with in Holland Ajax, again out of the Cup, recovering somewhat to second. And at the end of the 1963-64 season Wednesday was once more sixth. Home form was now excellent with away form, if anything, worse than two years earlier. The club finished two placed behind Spurs but still six ahead of Sheffield United and four ahead of West Bromwich. Ajax was also struggling with no success in the Cup and now fifth place in the Eredivisie. But none of that was Buckingham's real problem. There had been for some considerable time problems of match-fixing for betting gain in British football. In 1962 one of Vic Buckingham's players at Sheffield Wednesday was approached. He persuaded two more club players to become involved. All three bet against their team beating Ipswich away in a match that took place on 1st December that year. Sheffield Wednesday duly lost, 2-0. Nor was likely to have been the only “fixed” game that year or indeed the next, that is until the main “fixer”, the Scottish, former player, Jimmy Gauld, was exposed. He saw a chance to make more money so divulged the “fixing” of the Ipswich-Sheffield game and named the three Wednesday players involved. They were with thirty others arrested and tried. They each received prison sentences and were banned from the game.
Now there was never any evidence that Vic Buckingham knew about or was involved in any of the events surrounding match-fixing but there is no denying his club was the most notable implicated. However, the story having broken in April 1964 within months he had resigned from Sheffield Wednesday, left the country and was not just back in Holland but with Ajax once more. He was perhaps just getting out of the heat because a year later he was back in Britain, as manager of Fulham for three years but at the time it did not look the best.
Vic Buckingham's second spell at Ajax produced no trophies. In fact, not only was there was no success in the Cup, in the Eredivisie the club finished thirteenth of sixteen, its worst position ever. However the spell was notable for three reasons. He first of all set about re-rebuilding the team once more. Eight new players were brought in or through; a new goalkeeper, defenders, forwards and in midfield. Secondly, one of those in midfield, perhaps in the circumstances a necessary introduction, was seventeen year-old Johan Cruyff. At the age of ten he had joined the Ajax youth system, the youth system developed by Reynolds but perhaps started by Sid Castle and inspired in principle by Peter McWilliam. Now he had his first team début and would feature ten times in all in the season. The third was the man, who would take over the managerial position, when Buckingham returned to England before the Dutch season had actually finished. That man was Marinus Jacobus Hendricus Michels, Rinus Michels.