A great half-back, and especially a great centre-half, is a tower of strength to any team. One wonders why with a man like A. Raisbeck on the side the Liverpool Club ever could have lost its place in the First Division of the Football League. Raisbeck is no mere first-class half-back. He is a man amongst a thousand. He is fit to be ranked with the great ones of the football field, the men whose names will go down to posterity. One can with perfect justice name him in the same breath with James Cowan, Ernest Needham, and William Groves. He has not perhaps the cool level-headedness of Cowan, not the artistic touch of Groves, not the all-round polish of Needham, but lie bears to bring on the game a quality which none of these men possessed in the same degree.

His great forte as a half-back is a dashing, breezy versatility. He is like an intelligent automaton fully wound up and warranted to last through the longest game on record. To watch him at play is to see a man pulsating to his finger-tips with the joy of life. Swift, rapid movement, fierce electric rushes are to him an everlasting delight. One would think he had discovered the secret of perpetual motion. He keeps on and on and on and never flags. Yet his movements are never aimless, never without a purpose, His thought is wedded to his action, and the result is always "something attempted, something done."

A great centre half-back has immense responsibilities, and while Raisbeck realises them, they sit lightly upon his shoulders. He is one of those cheery players who covet hard work and plenty of it. If Raisbeck is ever slack it is only when the opposition is feeble. To call forth his greatest qualities you have to oppose to him the best and brainiest in the land. Then it is that the light-haired Scots laddie swirls and swims through the opposition like a flash of fire. He is rarely content with doing what is generally regarded as his own portion of the work. A centre half of the best type has a special license to roam, to move out of his place to follow where danger threatens, whether it be defending in his own goal-mouth or pressing home the attack in the vicinity of his adversaries' goal. He is so fast and divines the run of the play so quickly that he can be "all over the shop" and yet never out of his rightful place.

Few men with his smashing style possess the ability to place the ball accurately to their forwards, but Raisbeck in his most lurid moments has all his wits about him, and can "feed" the men in front with splendid judgment. When the light of battle is in his eye, and the opposition looms large on the horizon, it is an inspiring sight to watch this dauntless player go out to meet it with a confidence which in a man of lesser talents would be sheer egotism. No doubt Raisbeck is alive to his worth — what man of parts is not? — but he is not even touched with the disease of swollen head.

He is usually seen at his best when playing for Scotland against England. There you see six of the best half-backs in the land, and if Raisbeck is not seen towering above the others, he never does less than divide the honours with the pick of the others. There is no nation that would not be proud to claim him for a son. His loyalty to his club is surely another point to be placed to his big credit balance. Through good and ill fortune, and amidst many temptations to desert, he has stuck fast to Liverpool. He was with the club in 1901 when it won the Championship of the League; he was with it when it lost touch with the First Division; and he perhaps more than any other helped to restore the old club to its present prestige. A strong muscular figure with a breezy personality, tall, well made, with the weight in the right place, he is a man that once seen on the field is not likely to be forgotten. Of the many sons of Scotland who have crossed the border to play football, there is no one more generally admired and respected than Alec Raisbeck of Liverpool.