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

the other end of the pitch. Buchan argued, and Chapman agreed, that withdrawing the centre-half left a side short of personnel in midfield, and so proposed that he should drop back from his inside-right position, which would have created a very loose and slightly unbalanced 3-3-4.
    Chapman, though, valued Buchan’s goal-scoring abilities too highly to compromise them and so instead gave the role of withdrawn inside-forward to Andy Neil. Given Neil was a third-team player, that came as something of a surprise, but it proved an inspired choice and an emphatic endorsement of Chapman’s ability to conceptualise and compartmentalise, to recognise what specific skills were needed where. Tom Whittaker, who went on to become Chapman’s trusted number two, recalled his boss describing Neil as being ‘as slow as a funeral’ but insisting it didn’t matter because ‘he has ball-control and can stand with his foot on the ball while making up his mind’.
    With Jack Butler asked to check his creative instincts to play as the deep-lying centre-half, the new system had an immediate effect and, two days after the debacle at Newcastle, Arsenal, with Buchan re-enthused by the change of shape, beat West Ham 4-1 at Upton Park. They went on to finish second behind Huddersfield that season, at the time the highest league position ever achieved by a London club. The next season, though, began poorly, partly because success had brought over-confidence, and partly because opposing sides had begun to exploit Butler’s lack of natural defensive aptitude. Some argued for a return to the traditional 2-3-5, but Chapman decided the problem was rather that the revolution had not gone far enough: what was needed at centre-half was a player entirely without pretension. He found him, characteristically unexpectedly, in the form of Herbie Roberts, a gangling ginger-haired wing-half he signed from Oswestry Town for £200.
    According to Whittaker, ‘Roberts’s genius came from the fact that he was intelligent and, even more important, that he did what he was told.’ He may have been one dimensional, but it was a dimension that was critical. His job, Whittaker wrote, was ‘to intercept all balls down the middle, and either head them or pass them short to a team-mate. So you see how his inability to kick a ball hard or far was camouflaged.’ Bernard Joy, the last amateur to play for England and later a journalist, joined Arsenal in 1935 as Roberts’ deputy. ‘He was a straightforward sort of player,’ Joy wrote in Forward Arsenal! , ‘well below Butler in technical skill, but physically and temperamentally well suited to the part he had to play. He was content to remain on the defensive, using his height to nod away the ball with his red-haired head and he had the patience to carry on unruffled in the face of heavy pressure and loud barracking. This phlegmatic outlook made him the pillar of the Arsenal defence and set up a new style that was copied all over the world.’ And that, in a sense, was the problem. Arsenal became hugely successful, and their style was aped by sides without the players or the wherewithal to use it as anything other than a negative system.
    Arsenal lost the FA Cup final to Cardiff in 1927, but it was after Norris had left in 1929 following an FA inquiry into financial irregularities that success really arrived. Buchan had retired in 1928 and it was his replacement, the diminutive Scot Alex James, signed from Preston for £9,000, who made Chapman’s system come alive. The club’s official history cautions that nobody should underestimate James’s contribution to the successful Arsenal side of the 1930s. He was simply the key man.’ Economic of movement, he was supremely adept at finding space to receive the ball - preferably played rapidly from the back - and had the vision and the technique then to distribute it at pace to the forwards. Joy called him ‘the most intelligent player I played with… On the field he had