Bill Nicholson. Brian Scovell
Walter Winterbottom, Joe Mercer, Ron Greenwood, Bill Nicholson, Arthur Rowe, Vic Buckingham and Jimmy Hogan loved football with a passion and wanted to improve it, to make it more entertaining. These coaches weren’t in it for the money or material goods: they never besmirched the game and they upheld the old, true Corinthian creed of fair play. Bill Nicholson typified that approach.
On 5 May 1949, the signing of Alf Ramsey was complete and Rowe, who had been appointed on 4 May, now had another strong voice in his dressing room. But there was one essential difference: Ramsey didn’t go in for coaching and had his own opinions about how the game was played.
Between 1949 and 1955, Arthur Rowe introduced a way of playing the game that transformed Tottenham into a championship side and was also copied by clubs around the world. It was called ‘push and run’. Peter Barnes, secretary of Tottenham between 1982 and 2000, observed: ‘Arsenal play that way today. They are the only club who use it and I still think they are the best footballing side in the Premiership. I love watching them.’
It came from the streets. Rowe learned his football kicking small balls against walls and kerbs and Bill Nicholson did the same, as did Alf Ramsey. Using a wall to collect a ‘pass’ became an essential part of coaching under Walter Winterbottom, although these days the tactic is rarely used, but it is a difficult art to defend against because of the speed with which it is executed. In 1949, when Ramsey was introduced to the players by his new manager Rowe gave him number 12 locker, next to Bill.
The award-winning writer Leo McKinstry, author of Sir Alf, claimed the two men had an awkward relationship and in his autobiography, Bill said: ‘He would have been a fine player in any era. As a person, he was not an outward going type. He had a history in the East End, we were led to believe, and no one asked him about it. He was eager to acquire knowledge and you had the impression he was storing it up for when he became a manager. He wasn’t the type to share it.’
Ramsey’s ‘history’ concerned the rumour – which he always strenuously denied – that he came from gypsy stock and was ashamed of his background, so he took elocution lessons.
One of the last ‘tennis ball players’ famous for his wall passing was Trevor Brooking and in his autobiography, he said: ‘I used to run along the pavement kicking a tennis ball against the garden fences, controlling the rebound. Time and time I would repeat this and I think this early training may account for why I was looked on as a fairly skilful player. I also worked on kicking with both feet.’
No one knows for sure who first used the ‘wall’ pass, which has since gone into football manuals as part of the game, but Arthur Rowe took it to a higher level. He didn’t like the phrase ‘push and run’: ‘That was the label they came to pin on our style although, quite honestly, I was never fond of it. You often saw something like our style happening in a match, a side suddenly stringing together short, quick passes and players moving intelligently to give and take them. It is as if the game suddenly got an electric shock. The thing about the Tottenham side I had was that we tried to make it happen all the time. I never told anybody how to play. I just made suggestions on playing patterns, put up ideas. I’d ask players if they had ever tried a certain move, talk it over with them, get them to talk about it themselves, then we would try it out.’
Ramsey was encouraged not to over-use his longer passes down the right and fit in with the team pattern, with Bill Nicholson covering in front of him. The longer the pass, the more likely the ball would go astray, said Rowe. Short passes tend to be more accurate. Eddie Baily, chief joker of the team, recalled: ‘Arthur had arrived at a club of natural footballers. He didn’t come in with some great system and tell us exactly what to do. He encouraged us in certain directions, got us thinking, trying things and then, when it all came together, he would say, “That’s it, that’s the way to play.” Rowe was always using phrases like “make it simple, make it quick”. He would leave notes in the dressing room about his team and how they should get maximum results from these tactics.’
Later, when Bill became manager, he copied these mini-slogans to show them to his players. ‘You have to keep reminding players what they should be doing because few of them are capable of acting instinctively,’ he said, rather critically. Another weakness of the professional player is that often they will forget their instructions in the tense minutes before kick-off. A short, snappy phrase is much more useful than a speech.
According to Bill, Eddie Baily was Alf Ramsey’s closest friend, despite being opposites. ‘They shared a room on away trips and got on well,’ he recalled. ‘Eddie was the best first-time passer of a ball I ever saw. He was a quick-witted character and I remember one match against Huddersfield in the 1951/2 season, he drove the ball against the referee from a corner, collected the rebound and chipped to the near post, where Len Duquemin headed in a goal which condemned Huddersfield to the Second Division.
‘The referee allowed the goal but Huddersfield claimed, quite rightly, that Law 17 says a player cannot touch the ball after taking a corner kick until another player has touched it. I said to our players: “There’s nothing we can do. It’s the ref’s decision, not ours.” In professional football you don’t own up as a fielder does when he admits that a “catch” hit the ground before it was completed. One day you can be on the receiving end.’
Rowe considered Eddie Baily one of the finest one-touch players he had ever seen. ‘I never saw a man who could play the moving ball either way and with either foot as quickly or as accurately,’ he said. ‘One-touch play is like hitting the highest notes in music: it cuts out the marker and enables the receiver to have extra time for his next move.’
Playing push and run meant that Tottenham nearly always had the ball more than their opponents, and seeing it zipping everywhere in tight triangles tired their opponents more than themselves. ‘It demanded maximum fitness because it was not possible to play that way unless all ten of the outfield players were 100 per cent,’ explained Bill. ‘In the 1949/50 season, when we were promoted with 61 points, we only used 13 players and we were lucky as regards injuries. I believe good players are injured far less than average or poor players. If they are playing in a good side, there is a continuity about the play and they are supported to the hilt by their colleagues – they are not left to struggle on their own. There is always someone to pass to and Liverpool used to play like that in their title championship seasons.’
Ted Ditchburn had to change his way of distributing the ball. Asked why he kept throwing the ball out (which was unusual in that era) instead of kicking it, he admitted: ‘It suits me because I’m such an awful kicker of it.’
Phil Soar, in his admirable history of Tottenham, And The Spurs Go Marching On, wrote: ‘Rowe’s push and run swept Spurs to the top and they stayed there almost the rest of the season. Nobody could have bargained for such a dramatic impact in the new manager’s first season. Ronnie Burgess and his boys powered away on an unstoppable run from the 2-0 defeat at Plymouth on August 31 until Leeds halted them on January 14, an unbeaten sequence of 22 League matches. It meant from the beginning of September until the season closed on May 6, they stood astride the Second Division.’
Indeed, they won 27 games, eight more than any other club and ended with nine points ahead of Sheffield Wednesday.
Ditchburn and centre half Harry Clarke didn’t miss a game and at the end of one victory, Harry complained to Bill: ‘I only touched the ball nine times – I didn’t get a kick or a header. You’re mopping everything up on one side and Ron Burgess on the other.’ When he was manager, Bill always wanted a very tall defender – Clarke was 6ft 3in – and Maurice Norman was his first and later, Mike England. ‘It is imperative to have one like that,’ he observed. ‘Some critics complain when they see the ball chipped into the box and say it is boring, repetitive and unproductive. I think we don’t see enough