Inverting The Pyramid Deconstructed: Part I — Genesis & The Pyramid

The men are picked — the ball is kicked
High in the air it bounds;
O’er many a head the ball is sped….

H.N. Smith

This is a short excerpt from H.N. Smith’s poem about football, celebrating Scottish club Queen’s Park F.C.’s win against Hamilton Gymnasium in the year 1869. Football had begun to be loosely formulated over 150 years ago in public schools in Great Britain and in 1848 Cambridge University tried to draft some basic rules of the sport, which they displayed in a field in the centre of Cambridge called Parker’s Piece, where football is still played today. Finally in 1863, in a meeting at the Freemasons’ Arms between Covent Garden and Holborn the FA was formed in London and they drafted 12 basic laws that the modern game as we know it today would be built upon.

The earliest tactics in football, so to speak were downright bizarre. Football’s first international fixture — a game between England and Scotland played at Partick, in Glasgow on 30 November, 1872 that ended 0–0(fittingly) saw England field a 1–2–7 with the forward line of seven players arranged asymmetrically(four on the left, three on the right) while Scotland lined up in a 2–2–6. (Imagine the chaos)

As Jonathan Wilson points out in this article called Glasgow 1972, The Birth Of Tiki Taka

“The England team Alcock brought to Scotland for the first international was physically much larger than their counterparts. Estimates vary, but there is general agreement that the English were at least a stone a man heavier on average than the Scots. In a running game, with players charging into each other, there could only realistically be one winner. An unfancied Scotland side held England to a 0–0 draw in the first ever international fixture, but what was important was they way they did it. They passed the ball. Passing, the basis of the modern game, the key aspect of the great central stream of tactical thought, began as an expedient Scottish ploy to frustrate England.”

While the earliest meetings of club sides in Britain and Scotland lacked the ingenuity of modern-day football — a crude form of the game we know today — the FA Cup took centre stage and began its journey as football’s oldest cup competition. The Old Carthusians beat Old Etonions 3–0 in the 1881 FA Cup final and slowly the FA began to receive more and more entries to the FA cup from clubs across Britain as the years progressed.

Meanwhile in Scotland in October 1884 while writing about Jamestown Athletics 4–1 defeat to Vale of Leven in the Scottish Cup, a Scottish journalist ‘Olympian’ in his column ‘On The Wing’ in the Umpire wrote,

‘“Divide and Conquer was a favourite dictum of the great Machiavelli when teaching princes how to govern…. What shall I say of Jamestown’s attempt to, I suppose, verify the truth of the aphorism. Their premises were right, but then they went sadly wrong with the conclusion. They made the grave mistake of dividing themselves, instead of their opponents and paid the penalty. And what a penalty! Tell it not in Gath. Publish it not in Askelon. Strategy can never take the place of eleven good pairs of nimble legs.”

That couldn’t have been farther from what would contrive to unfold in the coming years. By the 1880s the 2–2–6 and 1–2–7 would change in a pivotal way. It entailed one of the centre forwards, who usually played alongside each other up front, dropping back deeper into midfield to create the first 2–3–5: The Pyramid.

*Note: The reason it’s called a Pyramid is because of how the shape of all the players together appear, as seen below*

While the origin of who first employed the 2–3–5 has various disputed sources, like in Hungarian coach Arpad Csanadi’s book Soccer which suggests that the 2–3–5 was first played by Cambridge University in 1883, however, there is some evidence that suggests that they used the 2–3–5 around six years before that in 1877. While there are also claims that Nottingham Forest, ebbed by the experimentation of their captain Sam Widdowson, who incidentally also invented the ‘shin pad’, used the formation in the late 1870s. But in the book, Wilson recounts Wrexham’s use of the 2–3–5 against Druids in the Welsh Cup final in 1878.

As seen in the image above, Wrexham’s captain and full back Charles Murless decided to withdraw his forward E.A. Cross into central midfield because he felt that his other primary striker John Price had enough pace to compensate for the lack of an extra number in attack.

The forward playing next to Price, i.e. James Davies won the game for Wrexham that day, scoring the only goal of the game two minutes from time.

But suddenly, the central midfielder in the 2–3–5 opened new possibilities. The central midfielder, called the centre-half back then, (before the term was used for a centre-back in the modern game in England) became the epicentre and fulcrum of the team, being a multi-skilled, all rounder who defended and attacked, who was a leader and instigator, goal scorer and destroyer, which the legendary Austrian football writer, theorist and coach Willy Meisl would later elaborate as ‘ the most important man on the field ‘.

Patterns slowly started to emerge between the Brits and the Scots that differentiated their approach and philosophies to playing football, which mind you, was in a formative phase at the time. Scotland’s way of playing hinged firmly on a flowing passing game while England adopted a more direct passing approach. Debates were aplenty and not entirely uncommon during that period, between Scotland’s short passing vs England’s long passing and science vs physique and so on.

England’s style and approach would be termed as the ‘country kick and rush game’ while Scotland’s gameplay would be viewed as ‘the thinking game’ in the not too distant, inceptive years of the 20th century.

But despite the differences between both schools of thought, the strategies they adopted and the way they played the game during those fledgling years, the 2–3–5 became the touchstone formation used by clubs and teams in both countries, which became the steadfast staple formation that defined the era.

Apart from an interesting report in the Sheffield Independent of a game between the ‘Reds’ and ‘Blues’ in 1878 which listed and reported four backs, one half and five forwards, there is absolutely no other piece of concrete evidence of any side playing more that two defenders for the next three decades.

And so that subtle switch of formation, of dropping a forward into midfield to create the 2–3–5 Pyramid, became the cornerstone and foundation from which the basis of all tactical formations in the world of football would be derived from after the turn of the century.

To be continued in part II…..