SCOTTISH AND ENGLISH FOOTBALL — THE DIFFERENCE
— William McGregor | 11/01/1902 —

Football is and has been for so long a period universally popular, that, speaking generally, it is played in much the same style all over the United Kingdom. I am referring now to Association football, of course; that is the game in which I am mainly interested, although I can assure my Rugby friends that I am also keenly interested in their special pastime, and believe it to be unrivalled as an exercise, especially for boys and young fellows. After a certain stage it is not so good as the Association game; that is to say, a man is justified in playing the dribbling game for pretty well a decade after he has finished with the handling code. Then he takes up hockey, and finally gets on to golf — or bowls. Then, after that, comes the armchair period, and a disposition to depreciate the present and appreciate the past. There is a greater uniformity of style in Association football than in any game with which I am acquainted. There is a much greater difference between the styles in vogue in Rugby football in various parts of the kingdom than there is in the Association world; I have heard this advanced as a reason for the difficulty which the English Rugby Union experience in picking a representative team in which the unity of purpose is all that could be wished. But to the keen and expert critic there are pronounced differences of style between the English and the Scottish footballer, and these differences, I think, it would be instructive to carefully consider.

DELIBERATION OF THE SCOT.

The Scottish footballer is more methodical and slower in his movements than his English rival. This is due to his early training. He is in his football what he is in every walk of life. The Scotchman excels in everything in which thought is essential. The insurance world is dominated by Scotchmen; gardeners are largely drawn from north of the Tweed. Scotchmen are what their educational system makes them. They are the products of a system which has been in vogue ever since the days of John Knox. You will find a parish school or a subscription school in every district in Scotland, and the lads in them are taught to think; to use their reasoning faculties. The school to which I went was typical of practically every village school in Scotland. As soon as we could read we had to repeat the Catechism. Then we had to repeat what are known as the Proofs; probably the bulk of my English readers will not recognise the term. We had to give question and answer, and to no reason why a certain thing was forbidden. The whole process afforded almost as good a mental training as Euclid or a book on mathematics would. Probably my readers will have observed that a Scotchman usually thinks before he answers a question, and I do not think that his answer is any the worse for being pondered over. This phase of education has formed the Scottish character more than anything else. This is quite my own view; I have never heard anyone theorise upon the subject, but I am quite sure that my deduction is a sound one. When we were a little older we learned Euclid and Latin, and forty years ago many a ploughman in Scotland was a good Latin scholar. The religious difficulty in education never cropped up in Scotland. There were several English boys at the school to which I went, but they were all marched through their Catechism, and their parents never objected to the process.

THINKING OUT THE GAME.

The bearing of this upon the football of the young Scotchman can easily be seen. As a rule, the Scottish footballer is deliberate in all his movements. He thinks out his game as he goes along. McLuckie is slow with the ball; he likes to see precisely what the position is before he parts with it. John Campbell, of the Celtic, and later of Aston Villa, was a player of the same type. He could make a faster dribble than McLuckie is apparently able to do, but he was deliberate in every movement. When he first came to the Villa I have heard the crowd at Perry Barr hoot and howl at him because they thought he was dallying with the ball too long. As a matter of fact, they hooted so much that at one time Campbell was anxious for the Villa to release him, as he had quite made up his mind that he would never get fair treatment from a Birmingham crowd. Yet I had no difficulty in seeing what his methods were, and never had the slightest doubt but that he would make a splendid centre for the Villa olub. I think I may say without giving offence that a good many Englishmen are apt to how! before they think; it would be better for the crowd had they tried to reason out Campbell's game as he was reasoning it out for himself.

Then take James Cowan and Alfred Wood, the two crack halves of the past and present Aston Villa team. Cowan, as we know, was one of the fleetest footballers of his day, and when in pursuit of a forward who had got clean away never had the slightest difficulty in overhauling his man. But with the ball Cowan was always slow. Nine times out of ten he would dribble along with it for a second or two before he transferred it to a wing man. He reasoned out what he was going to do with great deliberation. His passing was perfect, but he never seemed to lose the ball on the spur of the moment. Wood, on the other hand, although lacking Cowan's place, covers a tremendous stretch of ground. The moment he gets the ball he seems to know intuitively where it ought to go. It no sooner comes to him than he has got rid of it. His passes as a whole, may not be quite so good as those of Cowan, and he is not such a remorseless tackler as the Vale of Leven man was. Both are great players, but you could not imagine two men whose methods were more diverse.

SKILFUL, BUT SLOW.

The young Scotchman plays football as he does everything else. If you were to spend twenty-four hours in a Scotch village, you would at once notice the difference between the manners of the youth there and the young people in an ordinary English village. There is a marked absence of flippancy among the Scotch youth. You would never hear a song of the quality of "Get Your Hair Cut !" roared out lustily in a Scotch village. You would hear good, solid Scotch melodies, some of which had probably been sung nightly in that village for two hundred years. Scotland produces a set of clever and sound footballers, but they have not the quick intuition of Englishmen. I doubt if there are any footballers in Scotland to-day who could play the game that Bloomer does. They have far more tricks with the ball than Englishmen; the way they hook a ball forward when it comes to them from the wing is very clever. But you do not get Athersmith and Bloomers there. The average Scotch footballer is too square with his passes to make the rapid headway that English forward lines make. There is always skilful combination, and the average Scotch forward will dodge with much greater success than his English rival. The Scotchman can get goals, too. There are many men of McLuckie's type north of the Tweed, but when they come to England they are frequently beaten by sheer pace. While the English play may not be as skilful as the Scottish, I should say that, on the average, it would take a Scotch forward line almost twice as long to get from the centre to the goal without losing the ball as it would take the average League forward string to cover the same distance.

AN ENGLISHMAN WHO PLAYED THE SCOTCH GAME.

The same characteristic is seen in the back play. The Scottish back play is very methodical. Andy Watson and A. H. Holm were a typical pair of Scottish back. Arnott was rather an exception — you must have exceptions to every rule. But Arnott was at his best when he had a safe man with him. You never saw Arnott and his partner play a game such as the brothers Walters used to habitually favour. Scottish backs usually adopt a stay-at-time policy. A notable exception in regard to forward play is Templeton, who has none of the usual characteristics of a Scottish forward. He is essentially English in his methods. I was never more forcibly struck by the difference of methods in men in the same team as I was when Queen's Park second team used to come to play Calthorpe, and later on the Aston Villa (then a merely local club), in the late seventies — 1877 and 1878. The man who took the public eye then was a player named Smith, who was for many years a member of Queen's Park. He was, I believe, a Stoke man, but always took part in the Queen's Park Midland tour after he had left Glasgow. I believe he was connected with the Excise or Inland Revenue; perhaps his association with Scothmen had led him into the habit of wanting to get something out of the public. Smith's dash and fast dribbling powers stood out in sharp contrast to the methods of his companions, and the Bristol-road and Perry Barr crowds had a great opinion of him. Wheldon's methods reminded me of the Scottish style of play; he was a trifle slow with the ball, but he had wonderful control over it, and, like a great many Scotchmen, he was a good goal-getter. Scotch forwards usually know how to get goals. John Goodall and Sam Thomson were excellent examples of the talented Scottish forward. They never showed any penchant for speed, but the command they had over the ball was little short of extraordinary. John Goodall was an Englishman by birth, but he learned all his football in Scotland, and played an essentially Scottish game.

THE SUPERIORITY OF THE SCOT.

There is not the same precision shown in the matter of offside in Scotland that there is in England. I have seen teams from over the border lose many matches here that they would have won in Scotland. The same method of back play in vogue there leads the forwards to get into the way of imagining that there must be two backs and a goalkeeper in front of them when they are anywhere near the centre of the ground. The quick and resourceful English halves and backs are always ready to throw the opposing forwards offside, and I am quite sure that the rule is far more strictly interpreted here than it is in Scotland. When fairly on the run the Scottish forwards do not often infringe the offside rule; it is only when a movement is started that they find themselves pulled up in what seems to them an inexplicable manner. As a rule the Scotch forwards make such square passes that they cannot easily get offside.

Although Englishmen took up Association football before the game caught on in Scotland, yet in the late seventies and early eighties Scotland boasted a superiority which was puzzling to many who were ignorant of the environment of the average youthful Scot. In the matter of open spaces Scotland was and is very happily circumstanced. Almost every small place there has its village green; and as cricket, which monopolises the time of the young Englishman during the whole of the summer — and a good judge he is to play such a noble game — is little practised in Scotland, the Scottish youth was toying with a football all the year round. Then he had another advantage over his English rival. Indoor attractions are few in Scotland, and the absence of indoor recreation meant more time for football. This explains the apparently surprising fact that little places like Renton and various villages in the Vale of Deven should be able to produce, not tens, but hundreds of talented footballers. But Glasgow also produces its great footballers by dozens. Certainly it does, but who knows how many of the young footballers of Glasgow learned the rudiments of the game on the village green? Glasgow, like London, attracts thousands of village lads every year; without such recruits no big city would keep up the stamina of its population. And, mark my words! there are no finer athletes — natural athletes, I mean — than young Scotchmen. The Scottish schoolboy, especially the Scottish public schoolboy, is a magnificent being. You have only to be on Musselburgh Links and see the boys from Loretto School to realise what a hardy race they are. You can see them out in their red coats, and without hats, in all weathers. Their games are part and parcel of their studies.

I hope you have not found this article prosy. It has been all theory. Never mind, reminiscences can come later. I cannot think that the subject is one destitute of interest.