Chapter 2. Finding the Best Position

Nothing can stop the footballers of other days - those who have grown too long in the tooth - from having their moments of real enjoyment out of the game. They fix their carpet slippers: fill up the old pipe, and as the smoke curls upwards they dream of a wonderful time - somewhere in the past: when football was football, and that sort of thing. From time to time I have enjoyed myself on those lines, thinking aloud, with other former footballers around me, about how much better the game used to be than it is now.

I have finished with that idle chatter about old times, however. When I find myself among a party living in the glories of the past, I now include myself out - pretty quickly. In general I think football is as good as ever it was. In many respects it is considerably better.

That isn't to say that it can't be improved still further. One thing which delays the further improvement is the fact - and it is a fact - that in the first-class game to-day there are too many round pegs in square holes: too many fellows playing in positions other than those to which their play, their ability, is best suited.

In a way this is perhaps inevitable, and maybe nobody's fault - except the fault of those who don't produce the supply of tip-toppers to keep in tune with the demand. When the ideal can't be found the makeshift has to do. But there is a particular position in which each can give of his very best: render the greatest amount of service to his side and to the game.

The managers often give themselves a hearty pat on the back when they make what they are pleased to call a discovery. They move some player from his regular position: play him somewhere else, and he immediately shows himself completely at home. Many of these discoveries, however, have a lot of luck attached to them. Some of them are the sequel to emergency.

Not long ago Jack Froggatt was an outside left good enough to play for England. There came a day when Reg. Flewin, the Portsmouth centre-half, was off the active strength, and when the club did not have a ready-made player for the centre-half position. So Jack Froggatt was asked if he would try the switch.

I believe that Froggatt's reply was something to this effect: 'Centre-half is the place I have been wanting to play in all my football life.' Taking his chance with head and feet, he played for England at centre-half within six months of moving to the position with his club. Purely as a personal opinion I reckon this Portsmouth player to be even better as a centre-half than he was as an outside left - and that, take it from me, is saying a lot.

Yes, there is a best position on the field for at least nine footballers out of every ten. It should be somebody's business perhaps the business of the player first and foremost - to find which is that best position.

Mention of the Jack Froggatt switch serves as a reminder that there was nothing very original in his remark that he had always wanted to play at centre-half. When I was a boy - and there has been no change in this connection since I was a boy there was a natural desire to occupy a position on the field where there is usually something doing.

'I don't want to play at outside right', said a schoolboy chum of mine, with the tears very near to his eyelashes. 'I never get a kick at the ball there'.

We could pass over that impression with the trite remark that if he didn't get a kick at the ball when he was playing at outside right that was largely his own fault.

The fact does remain that in junior teams at any rate - for the lads in the learning stage - there is more glamour, there are more kicks at the ball, in playing around the middle of the field than there is about playing on the wing. At some time or other every lad has a yearning for the centre-forward position. Yet many players who have started even first-class careers there have gone on to be really brilliant in the completely opposite position - as goalkeepers. I could mention a dozen tip-top goalkeepers who once upon a time were leaders of the attack. Sam Bartram of Charlton is one of them.

Many of my readers won't remember Sam Hardy. They would have remembered him if they had tried to score goals when he was in position between the posts. This almost best of all goalkeepers also started in a first-class side as a centre-forward. I asked him once why he changed. He made this simple reply:

'I found it easier to stop the other fellows from scoring than it was for me to score'.

Those words really meant that, in due course, Sam had found his best position. It may well be that Con Martin of Aston Villa, so often and for so long a most distinguished player at centre-half and other positions, has now found his best place - in goal. The point is that the effort to find the best position is well worth while. So let me get down to it, with the idea at the back of my mind that if I relate my personal experience about finding my best position, I shall also pass on a tip or two.

When I was at school I played mostly at centre-half, and, of course, I enjoyed myself there. It's lovely to be at the heart of things. Later - perhaps because I hadn't eaten as much porridge as I ought to have done - I moved to the outside-left position. From there I had a spell at full-back. All of this, as may well be concluded, adds up to the fact that the people who chose the teams for which I played weren't quite sure which position suited me best. Perhaps they had some doubts as to whether there was any position to which I was really suited in the football sense.

Confession being good for the soul, I'll confess why, at one stage, it was decided that I should have a go at centre-half. I was inclined to funk the personal contact with my opponents: draw back when I should have gone in. A footballer can't afford to do that. In the middle he just has to go into it - or be out of the game for most of the useful purposes.

One day, when I still hadn't fully grown up - seventeen years of age and still more than a trifle skinny - I was playing at inside right with York City. A very good judge of football made a friendly approach to the York City boss after the game was over.

'For goodness sake', he said, 'move that boy Hulme on to the wing. If you keep him inside you'll be attending his funeral before very long'.

So I became an outside right, and as an outside right I stayed for practically the rest of my career. Speed was my biggest asset, and at outside right that speed was put to the most valuable use so far as the interests of the side were concerned.

The most important tip from my personal story is that it pays to experiment. It is no more than a rough and ready summary to say that a fellow gives of his best in the position he likes best. When Ronnie Burgess went to the 'Spurs he thought - and his manager thought - that with his clever ball play, and his quickness, he would make good as an inside forward. He didn't, and was on the point of going back to his native Wales, disappointed: a failure in big football.

Then they converted Burgess into a wing half-back, and as everybody knows he became in due course as great a player in that position as any we have had in our time. As he himself says, he didn't believe, until he had really tried it, how much happier he was in a position in which, for the most part, the ball was in front of him. There are players like that, not so quick on the turn may be the explanation, who are much better when the ball is coming to them from somewhere in front than from somewhere behind.

Here's a worthwhile tip which I pass on. Just recently I happened to be in the dressing-room of a First Division club on the day when the players were due to have a private practice match. The manager addressed them in words on these lines. 'I am not going to pick the teams for to-day's practice. You are going to pick them yourselves, with this one condition. No man must play in the same position as that in which he played in the real match last Saturday'.

There are two ideas to support a practice match on those lines. One is that, changing about, a player might find his best position. Equally important is that each player doing such a switch will discover the problems attached to a new position, and that he may - or should - pick up tips as to the sort of support which a player needs in any particular job.

Many of the leading wing half-backs of these days had a spell at inside forward. Just recently, Johnny Morris, who had played for England as an inside left, was switched to the left-half position in the Derby County team. It may be that as a wing-half he will eventually win equal fame. Whether that happens or not, however, this much can be said with certainty: that because Morris has been a forward himself: looking for the passes from the fellows behind him, he is all the better fitted to supply, from the wing-half position, the sort of passes which the forwards like to get and of which they can make the most effective use.

There is another thing - indeed, lots of other things - about the switching, too. One of them is that it is the very best way to cure a malady from which by far too big a proportion of players suffer. Changing positions, from one side of the field to the other, compels the use of both feet.

The footballer with one leg and a swinger doesn't go to the top of the tree. The ability to use both feet - for kicking purposes, regardless of the position in which a fellow plays - comes very near to the head of the list of essentials. Indeed, let us say it is priority number one.

Nature, or heredity, or habit - I am not quite sure what -has made us all more capable on one side than the other. We can kick a football better with one foot than the other, just as most people who can write well with the right hand, say, can't even make a show of writing with the left. They could write just as well with the left hand as with the right if they tried hard enough and long enough. They don't need to be ambidextrous as writers, but as footballers they do.

Even after all the trying, one leg may remain better than the other, and that may be the deciding factor in relation to the best position for this or that player, but the other leg and foot must be made at least useful.

There are footballers who have been so completely one-footed that the most drastic measures have been taken to get them to turn the other leg into something more than a mere dummy. That right-winger has been sent on to the field, during mid-week, to play at outside left with a football boot on his left foot, and a thin shoe - or perhaps no shoe at all - on his other foot.

My earlier bit about my own experience gives the hint that physique has something to do with the choice of the position in which he can be of most service to the side and to the game.

Tom Finney, a natural left-footer, was given a 'spare' outside right position when he was still a growing lad. The right foot was such a 'dud' for kicking purposes that whether he wanted to do so or not he had to take corner kicks from the right with his left foot. He can still play on the left wing, and has been given England caps on that side of the field. Having developed the football use of the right foot, however, I am convinced that he is a more troublesome opponent because he retains a 'natural' left. The real point is that, single-footed, Finney wouldn't have got anywhere. With two feet he has gone everywhere.

This doesn't mean - heaven forbid - that I am now even toying with the idea that in this game of football the tape measure or the scales are of prime importance in the assessment of a player. There is scarcely a first-class team playing in these days in which there isn't at least one player who gives the lie to any suggestion on that line.

'Too little!' That has been the first judgment regarding scores of fellows who now adorn the game. Of course they are not too little; if they are good enough they are big enough. Once upon a time I played for England against a Scottish side which was given the title of the little blue devils. Most of them were little fellows, too, and they were certainly devils. We never saw the way they were going as they piled on five goals. As an aside, they played the sort of game which was suited to midget footballers, with the ball on the floor. That is something a little beyond the scope of this chapter, however.

Other things being equal, physique should have a bearing on choice of position. For instance, as the game is played in these days it is certainly true that there is only one fellow better than the good little one in the centre-half position, and that is the good big fellow. Look around and you will see them - starting with Frank Brennan of Newcastle United, and not overlooking the things which he, and so many other centre half-backs built on similar lines, can do which are beyond the capacity of most of the smaller fellows. We will play a lot of this modern football in the air. That being so, how nice it must be for the centre-half- the Leslie Gomptons, the Harry Clarkes, and so on - to be able to stand with both feet more or less on the ground and yet be able to nod the ball away from a centre-forward who is jumping as high as he can get.

All the players can't give a good imitation of being jet-propelled. Speed, for example, is not so essential in a full-back as for players in some other positions. Even at that, however - and this is a note which must run through all this talk about different positions - the full-back who can move as fast as most opposing wingers, and faster than some, has an additional asset. He can play differently, for one thing, because of his powers of recovery.

When Laurie Scott was at his best and most useful for Arsenal and England he was very nearly the fastest runner, over a short distance, among the whole of the Arsenal's big staff. This meant that he could advance up the field and that if beaten he could get back into position or to overtake that wing man who had slipped past him. I am quite sure that, had circumstances been different, Laurie Scott, as well as one of his full-back predecessors, Eddie Hapgood, would have earned caps as a winger. Indeed - who knows? - Both of these players might have been even better as forwards.

The main point is that in switching: in trying himself out in different positions, the footballer may find that the one he fancies most is not necessarily his best. Even if this doesn't happen, he will be a more complete footballer - of more use to his side - by having a go in various places on the field.

We don't allow substitutes in our competitive football. This means that for all teams, sooner or later, there arises a state of emergency; when players have to change places. None of us think of Stanley Mortensen as being other than a wonderful forward in his own particular way. Yet I remember an International game with England and Wales in opposition at Villa Park, when, quite early in the contest, it was necessary for 'Morty' to fill a gap in the half-back line left vacant by a player who had to go off the field. And Mortensen played the part well.

It didn't just happen, it wasn't merely fortuitous, that not long ago a Bury half-back played what was called a 'blinder' in goal when the man who started the game in that position had to go off the field. He had fitted himself for the emergency.

I have a shrewd suspicion that some readers will accuse me of advocating that all footballers should learn to play all over the place. I am not. The Jack of all the football trades runs the risk of being master of none. There is a best position. Go around looking for it, and having found it bend nearly every effort to supply all the needs of that position.

To a large extent football is a game for specialists, but the specialist is none the worse for knowing something about positions other than the one in which he specializes. And don't forget that if you can't get a place in your team because another fellow is in possession in the position you fancy, you may get into the side by making yourself proficient elsewhere. Jackie Milburn had no great liking for the centre-forward position at one time. But Newcastle United wanted a centre-forward: so did England. Milburn 'had a go', for which Newcastle United and England have been duly thankful.

Regarding this business of switching positions, there are some changes which are perfectly natural: automatic almost. The qualifications for the various positions will be dealt with in due course. Let us imagine, however, that here is an inside forward who just can't work up to the necessary speed of thought or action, or who is in process of slowing down. A drop back to wing-half might have the effect of adding years of useful service to his football life.

I remember a Sheffield Wednesday team which won the First Division championship twice running. The half-backs played a major part in snatching those honors. Each and all of them had previously seen much service in the forward line.

The suggestion has already been thrown out that the good footballer can play in practically any and every position on the field. The point remains, of course, that the good footballer doesn't want to. But a crack centre-forward can't be any the worse player in his own particular position by taking an odd turn between the posts. He may not prove himself a world-beating goalkeeper, but he may be a better centre-forward for the experience in goal. As a last word, the player who is losing his zest, going stale, may find new inspiration and a new interest in life by switching to a different position.