Free Inverting the Pyramid: The History of Football Tactics by Jonathan Wilson Page A

today the importance of the man who is placed in control? They are ready to pay anything up to £4,000 and £5,000 for the services of a player. Do they attach as much importance to the official who will have charge of the player…? The man behind the scenes who finds players, trains talent, gets the best out of the men at his command is the most important man in the game from the club’s point of view.’
    The following year Huddersfield completed a hat-trick of league titles, but by then Chapman was gone, enticed south by what he saw as even the greater potential of Arsenal. It was not, it must be said, obvious. Arsenal were struggling to stay up and, in Sir Henry Norris, labouring under an idiosyncratic and domineering chairman. Leslie Knighton, Chapman’s predecessor, had been forbidden to spend more than £1,000 on a player in an age in which £3,000 fees were becoming common, while there was also a ban on bringing in players measuring less than 5’8”. When Knighton defied the height restriction to sign the 5’0” Hugh ‘Midget’ Moffatt from Workington in 1923, Norris had him offloaded to Luton Town before he had played a single league game. Knighton was dismissed at the end of the 1924-25 season, with Norris citing poor results, although Knighton claimed it was because the club wanted to avoid paying him a bonus he was due from a benefit match.
    Chapman, warning that it would take him five years to win anything, took the job only on condition he would face no such restrictions, something to which Norris reluctantly agreed. His first signing was Charlie Buchan. Sunderland valued him at £4,000, which their manager, Bob Kyle, insisted represented value for money as the inside-forward would guarantee twenty goals a season. If he was so confident, Norris replied, then the fee should be structured according to Buchan’s scoring record: a £2,000 initial payment, plus £100 for each goal scored in his first season. Kyle went along with it, Buchan scored twenty-one, and Sunderland gratefully accepted £4,100.
    Not that such a thing seemed likely that September after the defeat at Newcastle. Buchan was an awkward character, who had walked out on his first day at Arsenal because he thought the kit was inadequate, and then refused to train on his second because he found a lump of congealed Vaseline in his supposedly freshly laundered sock. Some managers might have seen that as wilful obstructiveness or an unrealistic finickiness, Chapman seems rather to have regarded that as evidence of high standards. He also admired in Buchan an independence of thought about the game, something that was far from common in players of the age. John Lewis, a former referee, had noted in 1914 that ‘our professionals evince no great anxiety to learn anything of the theory of the sport… In most teams there is no evidence of pre-conceived tactics or thought-out manoeuvres,’ and, for all Chapman’s efforts to encourage debate, not much had changed.
    Buchan had argued from the beginning of the season that the change in the offside rule meant the centre-half had to take on a more defensive role, and it was notable that in Arsenal’s defeat at St James’ the Newcastle centre-half Charlie Spencer had stayed very deep. He had offered little in an attacking sense, but had repeatedly broken up Arsenal attacks almost before they had begun, allowing Newcastle to dominate possession and territory. Chapman, at last, was convinced, but the mystery is why, given his natural inclination to the counter-attack, he had not done so earlier. He was not a man readily cowed by authority, but perhaps the FA’s words after the 1922 Cup final, coupled with his recognition of what they had done for him in lifting his life ban, had had an effect.
    Arsenal were certainly not the first club to come to the conclusion that the centre-half had to become a third back, but where they did break new ground was in recognising the knock-on effect this would have at