LEAGUE V. CUP-TIE FOOTBALL
— William McGregor | 12/04/1902 —

Nothing has wrought so remarkable a change in football as the establishment of the League. As I had something to do with the introduction of the League system into football, this is a fact which naturally gives me considerable gratification. There is nothing new in the League system. The County Cricket Championship is practically played upon that basis, although that competition is in a sense an unfair one in that each club is not forced to meet the whole of the others. The American Baseball Championship was conducted upon the same basis, and I have since heard that chess and draughts clubs habitually resort to the League principle in determining their various club competitions. But so far as I am individually concerned, I may take credit for bringing the League system into special prominence. The idea in connection with football was absolutely new. Prior to the formation of the League, all competitions had been conducted upon the knock-out principle, which is in its very essence an unfair and inconclusive system.

CUP-TIE LUCK.

The Cup-tie system abounds in luck. One little error and a team is done with for 12 months, so far as a particular competition is concerned. An important Cup-tie may come on just when the club have struck a bad patch. They may be down on their luck, They may be suffering from the enforced absence — through illness or accident — of half their team, and their reputation is marred for the season. No one imagines that the club which win the English-Cup are necessarily the premier team of the season. The honour of having your club's name inscribed upon this somewhat insignificant-looking trophy is a great one indeed, and one which is highly valued, apart from the considerable financial benefit which the winning of the Cup carries with it. Nor would any sane man advocate any alteration in the conditions which at present govern Cup competitions. The English Cup struggle comes at a time when many clubs are badly in want of an attraction for the fag end of the season, and no competition can serve this purpose better. The very precarious nature of the contests incidental to it make it dear to the heart of a sensation-loving public. Huge gates are attracted by all the leading Cup engagements, and to many organisations it comes as a boon and a blessing. There is no one fonder of an exciting Cup match than I am; all that I am seeking to point out is that the English Cup competition is not, and never can be, a true test of merit.

CHAOS AND BANKRUPTCY.

At the time the League was brought into existence, something was badly wanted to give permanence and continuity to football engagements. Possibly some of my readers do not realise how unsatisfactory was the condition of football prior to the establishment of the new body. A multiplicity of local cup-ties, in which a club might figure in one, two, three, four, or five rounds, but never knew the precise number of matches in which they would be engaged, played havoc with fixture lists. Clubs never knew where they were; indeed, in 1883-4 the West Bromwich Albion club decided not to issue any card of fixtures on the ground that the playing off of cup-ties made it impossible to produce a reliable list. The Albion minute book recalls this resolution of the club; the minute concludes: "In fact, it is simply a question of making an arrangement and then cancelling it." Engagements were broken right and left. Let a club be knocked out of the English Cup competition in the first round, and out of the most attractive local cup struggle in one of its early stages, and the remainder of the season was a complete farce from a playing, and, it follows also, from a financial sense. The result of this chaotic condition of the fixture list was deplorable. In the season before the creation of the League half the leading clubs in the North and Midlands were in a state of bankruptcy. Such loose methods did not matter so much when clubs were all more or less amateur organisations, but when the weekly wage list had to be satisfied, the position became unendurable.

LEAGUE'S EFFECT ON RASH PLAY.

The League gave the affiliated clubs permanent programmes, and the matches soon began to be watched with intense interest. Spectators were no longer interested in their own team, but every engagement under the auspices of the League had a special attraction for them, and League games speedily produced a species of football different from any we have previously seen. In the past, the friendlies — often between clubs in regard to whose form there was a great disparity — created languid interest. One of the alternatives was a cup fight, in which the feeling shown was not always of the best. But in the League the opposition was always powerful enough to be respected, and good form had to be shown if the match was to be won. Then the following week would bring another League engagement, so that players felt that it behoved them to refrain from rash football, and they were also induced to take heed to their condition. Such an idea as taking heed to condition rarely entered the minds of players prior to the League being formed, except when an important English Cup tie was on the tapis.

WHAT WE OWE TO THE LEAGUE.

The improvement which the League wrought in the football of its affiliated clubs was really remarkable, and for the spectator it did even more than it did for the player. When a League match was advertised, would-be spectators knew that it would be played; they knew that the teams would be as representative as they could be made; that the ground would be as fit as human care could make it; that the game would start at a certain hour; that it would be controlled by (more or less) capable and certainly impartial officials; that the football would represent the best efforts of the men engaged in the contest. All that the League did; I doubt if spectators would care to return to the old state of things. The spectators, on their part, were not slow to respond to the earnest effort which club managers were making to put the game upon a properly organised footing. Gates grew at an extraordinary rate, and in a few years clubs were taking in a month as much as five or six years before they had taken in whole season. Finances became more healthy. Much was done for the comfort of players, spectators, and even for a race of beings who have long been left to shift as well as they could — I refer to football pressmen. I could not help thinking, as I glanced round the magnificent enclosure at Ibrox Park, at Glasgow, on Saturday — this was, of course, prior to the ghastly disaster — how happy the lot of the modern spectator was as compared with that of those who remember football in its earlier days! I am not saying that much that has been done would not have come by a natural process of evolution had the League never been established — but I am quite convinced that the organisation of football would have proceeded much more slowly but for the fillip given to it by the establishment of the League.

NOT AN UNMIXED BLESSING.

I am not contending, either, that the League has been an unmixed blessing to football. It has produced evils, but I am not by any means sure that they are evils which cannot be coped with. Indeed, I believe that during the present season an effort will be made to minimise the dread consequences which follow when a club loses its place in the Senior Division. The one and only drawback to the League system that I can see is that the penalty of failure is out of all proportion to what I will designate, in a Pickwickian sense, the offence of non-success. Still, clubs have risen superior to misfortune, notably Small Heath, West Bromwich Albion, Notts County, Stoke, Sheffield Wednesday, Burnley, and Liverpool.

CUP MATCHES AND EXCITEMENT.

League football is very thorough and systematic. A man recognises that to be of real service to his club he must retain his form throughout the whole of the season, and that is calculated to eliminate a great deal of the recklessness which one sees in cup-tie football. In a cup-tie football. In a cup struggle all is fever and excitement. Everything depends upon the success of the team that afternoon. Let that match be won, and all is brightness; let it be lost, and the future seems dark and dreary. Men get so excited in the hour of a big cup-tie that they often lose their heads, and are too prone to depart from their usual quiet, sedate, and successful methods. If teams would only play a cup-tie in the quiet, effective style that they adopt in a League encounter, they would often win where they fail to come out of the match with success. One rarely sees a really high-class exhibition of tooball in a big cup-tie. Look at the recent games between Sheffield United and Derby County; the football in these matches was of a very moderate kind. Why clubs do not realise the necessity there is for keeping their heads I am quite at a loss to know. I believe that Tottenham Hotspur owed their success in the cup last season to the fact that they kept their heads and played their ordinary club game. I am quite sure that Southampton have won their matches in the competition this season by the adoption of the same kind of tactics. Both against Bury and Notts Forest they were quietly out manoeuvring their opponents at the finish. I hear it was quite an old North End sort of game that they played.

A NOTABLE EXCEPTION.

One of the few really great games I have seen in Cup-ties was that between Aston Villa and Everton in 1897. That was a battle between giants, and although great issues were involved the rival teams kept their heads cool, and showed us football in all its perfection. I am not one who is anxious to eliminate human nature from man. If the best team always won, and the good and the bad man got their precise deserts, and the man who was worth 50 always made that number, it would be a wretched world to live in. The uncertainty of sport constitutes its greatest charm. But in Cup-tie games men do let their wild nature get the better of them. My advice to a team entering upon a Cup-tie would be: Try to play your normal game; put plenty of dash into your work; but do not be so mad-headed as to be unable to find the weak places in your opponents' tactics. That is excellent advice, I have no doubt, but I have no hope of seeing it generally adopted. A Cup-tie is not a League game, any more than a League game is a friendly; probably each will keep its particular characteristics to be and of the chapter.