Chapter 1. Mysteries of the Team Spirit

I want the readers of this book to get profit and pleasure from it: laughs as well as lessons. It may be that in the very act of kicking off I shall bring forth a smile or two.

'Surely', somebody will say, 'we know all about team play and the team spirit'.

Do we all really understand it, however? I doubt it. And because I doubt it, I make no apology for my choice of the starting place. At first and at last - plus all the time between - football is a team game.

When people get stuck for an explanation of the success of this or that football team, they very often pick their feet out of the mud by saying that the side plays as a team: that it has the team spirit. But when the question is asked as to what is meant by the team spirit, there is a certain amount of fumbling with the answer.

I know what is so often meant by the use of the words team spirit. Every member of the side doing his best for the side from the first kick to the last: never letting up: never holding back one ounce of energy.

It is quite unnecessary, however, to go to a first-class match, played by the most energetic stars, to see the team spirit, if that is all it means. Take a trip with me to any spare piece of ground between Land's End and John o'Groat's, where a lot of lads are playing at football. There the team spirit, in its crude sense, will be most plainly in evidence. Those lads, full of enthusiasm, are racing all over the place; where the ball goes there you will see them - in twos or threes. They are after that ball.

Moreover it is true to a certain extent that they have the right idea. Some years back I happened to be present when the late Herbert Chapman, still referred to by knowing people as the best manager the game has ever known, was having his first talk with a young player whom he had just signed on.

'What is the first thing you do?' the manager asked.

The boy knew what to do all right. He had football in his boots. So, full of confidence, he started on what would have been a long explanation of what he would do: beginning with an explanation of how he would beat his nearest opponent. That would-be long speech, however, was suddenly cut short. 'But you haven't got the ball yet,' said the famous manager. 'That is the first thing to do - get the ball'.

Yes, the footballer has to get the ball before he can do anything with it. It may well be that amid the strain and stress of even a first-class match, the ebb and flow, some players will have to go out of their way to get that ball, just as those lads on that stray piece of ground, or in the back street chasing maybe a bundle of rags, go after it.

When a team has every player trying as hard as he possibly can, we say of that side - it has the team spirit. In passing, may I mention here the thing which always annoyed me most when I read the newspapers - not at all a bad thing to do, by the way - to see what the critics thought about how I had played in any particular game. It was the use by any critic of the words: 'Hulme tried his best'.

Talk about damning with faint praise! I wanted to kick that critic a little bit harder than I had kicked the ball throughout the match. There's no place in any football team for the fellow who doesn't try his best all the time. But if behind the use 01 the words 'he did his best' is the idea that consequently everything is forgiven, then it's all wrong to use them.

The world's biggest duffer can try, but the team spirit - the real team spirit - goes much deeper than that. The team spirit calls for every man doing his job, and is quite likely to call for him doing it - in the interests of the team - in a way he is not particularly keen about.

When Alex James, one of the greatest of inside forwards of my time, first came to play in England, with Preston North End, he had the quite natural idea that the scoring of goals was part of his job. And, of course, he liked scoring goals. Don't we all? When he went to Highbury to play for Arsenal he was told, in so many words, that in this new team he wouldn't be expected to score goals. His job was to get the ball around the middle of the field: draw and beat one or two opponents, and then get that ball to Cliff Bastin on the left, to myself on the right, or even the centre-forward, if favorably placed. The honor and glory of getting the goals went to other players. In one League season Cliff Bastin scored thirty-three goals.

He was able to do this because he was a wonderful footballer. But that was reason number two why he did it. Reason number one was Alex James, who only scored once in a blue moon, but who was showing the team spirit: doing the job for the team.

I wish to goodness the newspaper men, and other people, wouldn't make so much fuss of the fellows who get the goals: shout as from the house-tops about what are called hat-tricks.

During the time I was playing for Arsenal those handshakes, the back slapping - and the kisses! -for the goal scorer, were banned. That wasn't because we weren't delighted over the success. It was because the fact was recognized that success in that direction isn't a one-man affair. Tell me, if you like, about the centre-forward who is at the head of the goal scorers, but when you tell me that you will also be telling me that on either side of him, behind him as well, are jolly good footballers who help in the making of the goals.

It's elementary to say that it doesn't matter who gets the goals so long as the goals are got. From time to time, however, it is just as well to be reminded of even elementary and obvious truths.

Last season, when Allenby Chilton was chosen to play for England at centre-half, a friend said to me: 'Why, he's nothing but a stopper.' I didn't argue with him. Rather did I stop any further argument with the reply: 'But what a stopper!'

I know some of these stopper centre-halves very well. I also know how some of them would love to go venturing far up the field, eager to show that they are something more than a mere policeman put there to arrest the opposing centre-forward. I am not - at this stage - discussing the question of whether the use of the centre-half as a stopper is a good or a bad thing. That can be gone into later. The point is that if a decision is made that the centre-half should be a third fullback, then a third full-back he must be. Whether he likes it or not is beside the point: it mustn't matter to him, because the team spirit demands that he should be a stopper.

I remember a match in which that great full-back Eddie Hapgood - who could have been almost as good as a winger -full of enthusiasm, went dribbling up the wing, beating one opponent after another. He would have finished by scoring a goal if the opposing keeper hadn't made a wonderful save. But the ball was cleared, down the right wing, and Hapgood wasn't in position to hold up that right wing.

The lecture he received after the match included the words: 'Don't do it again'. Let it not be imagined for a moment that I am now saying that each man must be tied down to his position on the field. By taking that line I should contradict myself, for I have already laid it down that no player can do anything with the ball until he gets it.

The run of the game may compel the right-winger to go back to worry the other team's outside left, and so on. There is also virtue in a surprise move which even has the effect of taking the player responsible for it out of his position. Right down at bottom, however, the team spirit calls for each man doing, first and foremost, the job which has been allotted to him, with the proviso that if a mistake has been made, or if there is something which needs to be done, then it must be done regardless of position. This game can't be played on a blackboard, because the blackboard moves don't - can't - take note of what the other fellow will do.

The team spirit, developed to its fullest, produces the most satisfactory results if each man realizes what his pals can do, and plays in a way to help them to do it. Even the players in the top flight aren't just like peas in a pod, exactly alike. The aim must be to make full use of the special direction in which the ability of this or that player lies.

It may be remembered that, after starting my first-class career at York, I joined Blackburn Rovers. While I was at Blackburn somebody called me the York Express, and the pet name stuck. The reference, of course, related to my speed on the wing. Nobody could make of me even a very thin carbon copy of Stanley Matthews. He can dribble round a three-penny-bit. I couldn't dribble round a five-shilling piece.

The most helpful of my team-mates, right through the piece, were those who succeeded in making most use of me in the York Express line. It takes all sorts of players to make the game, just as it takes all sorts of teams to make up a competition. The player who has faults will try to overcome them, just as he will struggle and practice to remedy his shortcomings. Meantime, his team-mates will make the fullest possible use of the things he can do.

Each player will encourage the other too, by play as well as by word, especially if the other is a newcomer to the team. The Cup Final of 1949 supplied us with an example, in one particular connection, of what I am now driving at. At the last minute Terry Springthorpe, who had not been a regular member of the Wolves side, was put into the team at left fullback. For him the ordeal was a specially big one.

Two or three times, quite early in the game, I was rather surprised to note that Billy Wright, left-half and captain of the Wolverhampton team, instead of working the ball up the field, according to his usual habit, slipped it back for Terry to kick it.

For a few minutes I wondered what sort of game Wright was playing. But thinking it over I tumbled to the idea - a very good one. By passing the ball back to his full-back on occasions when there wasn't the slightest danger to his own side in doing so, Billy Wright was giving his colleague the feel of the ball: letting him have a kick at it without any stress attached. By that method Wright inspired the less experienced player with confidence in himself - a bit of team spirit which had for its object the interests of the side as a whole.

If, in this chapter, I have made the words 'team play' and 'team spirit' mean more than is usually inferred when they are used in a casual way, I shall consider the effort worth while. The subject has by no means been exhausted. Team spirit isn't even confined to the ninety minutes of every match. It has to be there all through the week: in preparation: in one man helping another at practice, and so on.

The 'inquests' after a match can be so helpful, just as they can be so harmful if they are not approached in the right way. Taken in the proper spirit, these inquests, these enquiries into what went wrong, can prevent a repetition of the same sort of thing in the next match. That's what the inquests should do. They are not laid on for the purpose of fixing the blame for defeat, and the player who is apt to regard them as such should think again: ask himself if he has the real team spirit.

The time comes to all of us when our name is missing from the first eleven team-sheet. Another player is selected. That is an occasion on which the team spirit of the 'stood down' player is put to the test. What is the repercussion? A fit of the sulks? No, a thousand times no.

A certain club had a good young centre-forward concerning whose promise everybody was pleased. He didn't quite fit, however, and the name of another young centre-forward appeared on the team-sheet. On the very next day I saw those two players out on the practice pitch by themselves. The centre-forward who had been dropped was on the wing, sending the ball into the middle to the player who had taken his place in the first team. That's the spirit: the same sort of spirit as that shown by the player who asks his manager to put him into the reserves because he knows he isn't playing very well. It does happen, you know - week in and week out.

Not very mysterious after all, this team spirit. Quite simple, indeed. The team first, the individual second.