Bill McCracken came to English football, stayed for a life-time and a half and then he was gone . He arrived from Northern Ireland, where he was born in 1883, and would die at the magnificent age of ninety-five in Hull, but Hull in Quebec in Canada. And in between he was a player as a one-club man, a manager for more than a quarter of a century, football scout into his nineties and the face to a change to football that is still with us.
As a player McCracken's team was Newcastle for four hundred and thirty-two games, which but for the years of The Great War might have be many more. He arrived from Belfast in 1904 as a twenty-one year-old right-back and would make the position his own, but not immediately. In his first season in 1905 he made thirteen League appearance of thirty-four as his new club topped the table for the first ever time. But he was not in the team, which that same year lost the FA Cup Final to
Aston Villa. Scottish international
Andy Combie was preferred. It would be much the same the following year too, 1906, twenty starts as Newcastle was forth and again runners-up in Cup, this time to Everton, McCombie first choice once more.
And once more in 1907 as Newcastle again took the league McCombie pulled on the shirt twenty-six times, whilst McCracken himself would play twenty-two times and make one FA Cup appearance. It was as many as it was going to be. The Toon was knocked out at home in the very first round and by Southern League Crystal Palace. In fact it was only the following season, 1907-08, that it began to change, McCombie had eighteen starts, McCracken twenty-one but now six in the Cup as the club went through six rounds to the final only to lose again, this time to Wolves.
However, Andy McCombie would play only once in 1908-09 in the league and just once in the Cup too. He was gone. He would stay as a player at the club until 1910 but would only play in the first team twice more. Twenty-five year-old McCracken stepped up. He played thirty league games and seven in the Cup, four rounds and three replays only to lose in the semi-final to Manchester United.
It had meant that Newcastle had now reached four FA Cup semi-finals and lost three finals in five years and, in spite of the plaudits the team had received in winning its league titles it had shown a soft underbelly. A rethink was required.
McCracken had arrived just as a revolution was bedding in. Toffee McColl had come and gone, bringing the Scottish passing game with him and leaving it installed when he had returned north in 1905. He left the highly intelligent Colin Veitch, Colin Campbell McKenzie Veitch, also captain, in his centre-forward slot, a settled defence with McCombie and Jack Carr at full-back and a good, all Scottish half-
Toon and
McCracken
- back line. On the right was Alex Gardner. On the left was emerging Peter McWilliam and as the attacking, Scottish centre-half, Andy Aitken. The problem was that he was somewhat out-of-position. For Scotland Aitken did not play there. He was right half, with McWilliam on the left but Alex Raisbeck or Charles Thomson central, And he was ageing. As a result the team could be rattled. Reports of the Crystal Palace defeat and all three of the lost finals emphasise how, despite Newcastle's obvious sophistication, it could buckle against teams prepared to be physical and use the long-ball well.
- In fact the first rethink did not work. The propensity to fold was not corrected by Andy Aitken being allowed to move on and Colin Veitch moving back to fill the vacancy. And nor might it have been but for a second rethink, firstly positional, moving Veitch to right-half, as Gardner also aged, with twenty-four year-old Wilf Low being bought in from Aberdeen for the 1909-10 season and also tactical, with, although he may or may not have been its source, Bill McCracken an integral part.
The new idea was the Off-side Bogey, what we today call the Offside-Trap, and, although simple in concept it was far more tricky in practice. The stepping-up had to be timed correctly and that was McCracken's genius. As an idea it might have formed in the Scots minds of Colin Veitch or Peter McWilliam or been a cooperation of the both but on the field it was Irish McCracken, now fully established in the team, who called it out and continued to do so long after Veitch and McWilliam had hung up their boots. And because he was so good at it within a playing decade a change of football's basic rules was forced. In 1925 the minimum number of players required between the receiver of the forward ball and the goal was reduced from three to two. Modern off-side had arrived.