Inverting The Pyramid Deconstructed: Part III — Herbert Chapman, Arsenal and The Third Back
This is a continuation from part II….
As football began to become more popular and captivate audiences way into the 1920s there were some changes made to the offside rule which the English FA decided to profess because of the decline in goals scored by teams. At the time in the 1925 season, the average goals scored by teams in England was at an alarming 2.58 goals a game.
So, the FA tweaked the offside rule which initially stated that three opposing players(usually a goalkeeper and two defenders) had to be between the forward and the goal to play him onside. The FA changed the law in the mid 1920s to require that there must be just two defenders between the forward and the goal to keep him onside, while another amendment instated that players can’t be offside from a throw-in.
The change in the offside rule was an immediate success with the average goals per game in England shooting up to 3.69 goals a game the following season. However, this amendment to the offside rule brought about significant changes in the way the game was played and immediately laid the foundation for Herbert Chapman’s development of the ‘third back’ or the W-M formation. And so, with the advent of Chapman and his W-M with the shift in the offside rule, it is widely regarded by football historians as the catalyst for the decline and increased negativity of the British game. However, Chapman would argue otherwise.
Herbert Chapman — Football’s First Modern Manager & Innovative Theoretical Thinker
Like Jimmy Hogan and Hugo Meisl(covered in part II) before him, Herbert Chapman would go on to contribute significantly to the way the game was played and in those days he would pioneer the art of tactics and tactical thinking in order to win.
Winning was and still is paramount in football. But during that period of time it was a brooding argument of playing the game ‘the right way’ as former Tottenham captain Danny Blanchflower’s dictum went:
“The great fallacy is that the game is first and last about winning; It is…. about glory, it is about doing things in style and with a flourish”
Danny Blanchflower(Former Tottenham captain)
However, in the book Jonathan Wilson compares Blanchflower’s argument to figure skating, where a panel of judges award the skater based on his/her performance out of ten. But this isn’t figure skating, this is football; And winning remained the highest priority. Subsequently, it wasn’t uncommon that teams and managers would resort to the darker arts of the game and strategic negativity in order to come out on top and win.
Enter Herbert Chapman. Chapman was born in Kiveton Park, a small colliery town between Sheffield and Worksop and if it wasn’t for football would have followed in his father’s footsteps into mining.
Chapman played for a host of teams including Grimsby, Swindon, Notts County and finally Tottenham before he would take his bow into management.
In 1907 he was appointed as manager of Northampton but his first season ended poorly. Chapman wanted his teams to reproduce the ‘finesse and cunning’ which he saw integral to the conception of football. But after his first season at Northampton, he was forced to rethink. It was then that Chapman developed his first grand idea that ‘a team can attack for too long’.
In order to expand on his theory, he began to encourage his team to drop further back, not to positionally mark the opposition forwards but to draw out all his opponent’s outfield players including defenders and open up space for swift counter attacks.
His tactic was a huge success. Northampton went top of the Southern league by Christmas 1908 and won the league eventually that season scoring a record ninety goals.
Chapman moved to Leeds City in 1912 and in the two seasons before WWI, took them from second bottom of Division Two to fourth. He also developed another one of his innovations much akin to a modern day manager in the form of instating team talks.
By the early 1920s following a controversial ban from football by the FA in 1919 for allegations of making illegal payments to players, Chapman was exonerated on appeal and took up the job as manager of Huddersfield.
Chapman told the Huddersfield board that they had a talented young squad but needed ‘a general to lead them’, who he found in 33-year-old Clem Stephenson of Aston Villa. After signing Stephenson, who was an intelligent forward who had mastered the art of timing his runs to beat the offside trap and score, Chapman began to rewrite the history books.
Stephenson fit perfectly into Chapman’s counter-attacking strategy and Huddersfield went on to win the 1922 FA Cup 1–0 against Preston North End at Stamford Bridge after Billy Smith converted a last-minute penalty to win the final.
The final itself was a dreary and dull affair full of niggling fouls and defensive play from Chapman’s Huddersfield after he instructed his centre-half Tom Wilson to drop deeper into defence converting the two centre backs to a back three. As The Huddersfield Examiner recounted Wilson acted as ‘a great spoiler’.
What was significant at the time was that Chapman had a clear strategy and conception of his style of play and was successful in implementing his vision on the pitch. Chapman was — at least in Britain — the first modern manager, the first man to have complete control over running the club, from signings to selection and tactics to arranging for gramophone records to be played over the public address system to keep the crowds entertained before the game and at half time. He was by far the closest thing to a modern day manager back in the 1920s.
The Beginning Of The Third Back & Inside Passing
This wasn’t the first time managers toyed with the idea of dropping the centre-half back to make it a back three. As early as 1897, C.B. Fry wrote about the tactic in the Encyclopaedia of Sport & Games:
“Sometimes, when a side is a goal or two ahead, and it is thought advisable to play a purely defensive game, a third-back is added by diminishing the number of forwards…. with regard to the shift of withdrawing a forward and putting an extra back, there is much to be said: that three backs are extremely hard to get through…. but unless the players thus moved are versatile and capable of performing satisfactorily the duties of their altered positions…. it is certainly unwise to play a third back, unless the extra man is a capable player in that position”
- C.B. Fry
While the times were still formative, the idea that someone as staunch and disciplined as Fry was ready to acknowledge the usefulness of the back three even in those days, suggested that the 2–3–5( covered in part I) wasn’t as sacrosanct as it seemed.
While there were instances of teams fielding a back three with the centre-half given a specific defensive brief, what was unique about Chapman’s Huddersfield was that they coupled the tactic with a distinctive pervading style of play. Chapman was widely known for his distrust in wing-play, which was at the time, revered all over Britain.
Chapman argued that ‘inside passing’ was ‘more deadly, if less spectacular’ than the ‘senseless policy of running along the lines and centring just in front of the goal mouth, where the odds are nine to one on the defenders’.
Chapman’s teams followed his philosophy ardently and it lead to further success for the journeyman.
The Arsenal Years & The W-M
After his spell at Huddersfield, Chapman was enticed south by what he thought was a bigger opportunity and a team with great potential in Arsenal while also being attracted both by the London club’s larger crowds and a salary of £2,000, double what he earned at Huddersfield. After being appointed after the 1925–26 season, Chapman warned the Arsenal board that he would take at least five years to win anything.
Chapman went ahead and signed 34-year-old centre-forward Charlie Buchan from Sunderland and proceeded to make him Arsenal’s captain. Buchan was extremely adept at dealing with a three man defence after being accustomed to it during his Sunderland days.
Buchan and Chapman would discuss and then later implement dropping the centre-half from a roaming position in midfield to the heart of the back line where he would marshal the defence.
In Chapman’s first season in charge, Arsenal were beaten 7–0 by Newcastle largely because Newcastle’s centre-half Charlie Spencer dropped back into defence and broke up any significant Arsenal attacks. Looking back on the game, although his side were beaten hollow by the Magpies, Chapman was convinced that deploying the three man back line was perfect for his Arsenal side, which given his philosophy of counter-attacking football was a marriage made for success.
While further up the pitch the 2–3–5 had seen the five forwards invert into a ‘W’ formation, much like the Argentina and Uruguay national sides of the 1920s( covered in part II) which saw two forwards, the number 10 and number 8, invert and drop deeper in front of the midfield three, but the defence more or less remained the same. The ‘W’ up front evidently spread rapidly despite the absence of television coverage in those years.
Buchan initially argued, and Chapman agreed, that withdrawing the centre-half to the back line would leave their side short of a man in midfield which would have a detrimental effect on the team, and so Buchan offered to drop deeper from his centre forward role into a number 10 slot. However, Chapman valued Buchan’s goalscoring prowess too much and instead gave the number 10 role to Andy Neil. Meanwhile, at the back Chapman would make an inspired change. Jack Butler would be deployed as a deep-lying centre-half playing in the centre of a back three.
The tactical tweak was an immediate success and following their Newcastle debacle, Arsenal beat West Ham 4–1 at Upton Park the next game. The Gunners then went on to finish second behind Huddersfield that season.
However, Chapman decided that the revolution had not gone far enough: what he needed at centre-half was a player entirely without pretension. He found him characteristically and rather unexpectedly in Herbie Roberts, signed for £200 from Oswestry Town.
Roberts became the centre-half Chapman always desired and slotted firmly into the defence as the ‘Third Back’. He used his height, positional intelligence and physical strength to command the Arsenal back three, which led to him becoming the pillar of the Gunners’ defence.
Buchan retired in 1928 and was replaced by Scotsman Alex James another unbelievably intelligent footballer who positionally was deployed in the slightly withdrawn number 10 role, and it was with James in his XI that Chapman’s formation & tactics would come alive.
By the time Arsenal won the 1930 FA Cup, beating Huddersfield 2–0 in the final, exactly five years since Chapman took over the reigns at the club(just like he promised) the core formation was firmly established. A ‘W’ up front and at the back an ‘M’. The 3–2–2–3 or the W-M.
Trophies and modernisation would unfold subsequently. Arsenal’s hallmark play would be to keep it tight at the back with their three man defence with Roberts at the heart of it and would then break swiftly with precise passes orchestrated by Alex James combining to lethal effect scoring goals and winning titles.
“Breaking down old traditions. He was the first manager who set out methodically to organise the winning of matches.”
The Daily Mail
Arsenal won the league title in 1931 and 1933 and were beaten in the 1932 FA Cup final by a highly controversial goal. The Gunners were likened to a well-oiled ‘machine’ and their gameplay on the pitch was described as ‘twentieth century, terse, exciting, spectacular, economic and devastating’.
While his tactics and style of play received their section of criticism, Chapman argued that it was a ‘winning system’ and questioned his adversaries by stating ‘why change a winning system?’
Death & Legacy
On January 1 1934, Chapman caught a chill during a game at Bury but decided to go ahead anyway and watch Arsenal’s next opponents Sheffield Wednesday. He returned back to London with a high temperature, but by January 6 pneumonia had set in and he succumbed to it that day, a fortnight short of his fifty-sixth birthday.
Arsenal went on to win the title in 1934 and made it a hat-trick of titles the following year in 1935. After his death, Chapman’s writings and works were published and released to the public, in which there was a tiny paragraph where he reflected on his contribution to the game:
“It is no longer necessary for a team to play well. They must get goals, no matter how, and the points. The measure of their skill is, in fact, judged by their position in the league table. Thirty years ago men went out with the fullest licence to display their arts and crafts. Today they have to make their contribution to a system.”
- Herbert Chapman
And so, the history of football was rewritten and thus finally resolved to winning. Football recognised the value of tactics, a cohesive system of play and the need for individuality to adhere to and work within the frameworks of that system.
He might have come to pass in 1934 but Herbert Chapman began the tactical evolution of football which would progress far into reaches of the 21st century.
