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Don Davies, an old international

How many of you today still remember H D “Donny” Davies – “An Old International” – the football reporter for The Guardian or the Manchester Guardian” as it was then and BBC Sports Report, who lost his life in the Munich air disaster of 1958?

He was small in stature – a little over five foot-two – but with a huge appetite for life and for his fellow man. This joie de vivre shone through his work, which was in truth merely another hobby alongside his passion for classical music and literature, for he spent over thirty-five years on his true vocation in life, teaching the young apprentices of the Manchester engineering firm Mather and Platt.

Fortunate indeed were the young men who were introduced to industry – nay, given a grounding in life itself – by this superb sportsman who was given his nom de plume by virtue of his having represented England at amateur level shortly before the First World War put paid to his serious playing ambitions. He was a right-winger of considerable dash and panache who played for Northern Nomads. In summer when he graduated from the Bolton League to Old Trafford and Lancashire, there was no finer cover point.

Don Davies brilliantly brought football matches to life both in print and by the spoken word, none more so than when he was describing the exploits of Matt Busby’s young Manchester United Red Devils, for he felt an affinity with the methods Busby employed in overseeing the progress of these young ambassadors for English football in Europe. Here was how he ended his final ever match report in the Manchester Guardian, with United leading Red Star 3-1 in their final fateful game in Belgrade in February 1958:

…. “ the Red Star players completely lost their poise for a while; their forwards flung themselves heatedly against a defence as firm and steady as a rock; even Sekularac, after a bright beginning in which he showed his undoubted skill, lost heart visibly and stumbled repeatedly. Nevertheless there was an upsurge of the old fighting spirit when Costic scored a fine goal for Red Star two minutes after half-time. It ought to have been followed by a second one three minutes later when Secularac placed the ball perfectly. Costic’s terrific shot cleared the bar by a foot, no more Next a curious mix-up by Foulkes and Tasic, Red Star’s centre-forward, ended in Foulkes falling flat on top of Tasic, and blotting him completely from view. According to Foulkes, Tasic lost his footing, fell over and pulled Foulkes over with him, but it looked more than that and the whistle blew at once with attendant gestures, indicating a penalty. Tasic had the satisfaction of converting that one although his shot only just evaded Gregg’s fingertips.

The score was now 3-2 and the crowd broke into an uncontrolled frenzy of jubilation and excitement. So much so that when Costic failed to walk the ball into a goal that was completely unprotected – Gregg was lying hurt and helpless on the floor – a miniature repetition of the Bolton disaster seemed to occur at one corner of the arena. Down the terraces streamed a wild horde of excited spectators, eager to help Costic administer the final touch, and dozens of spectators hung limply along the concrete walls with the breath crushed out of their bodies, if indeed nothing worse had befallen them. A quarter of an hour from the end Red Star, with their confidence and self-respect restored, were wheeling, curvetting, passing and shooting in their best style and United’s defenders had to fight their way out of a regular nightmare of desperate situations. It was significant hereabouts that United’s inside-forwards were not coming back to chase the ball as they had done so effectively in the first half, and this, of course, threw added pressure on the rearguard. As soon as this fault was rectified the Red Star attacks, though frequent enough, lost something of their sting; in fact United began to pile on the pressure at the other end, and once Morgans struck the post with a glorious shot. Then we saw as brilliant and at the same time as unlucky a save as Gregg may ever experience. In dashing out and snatching the ball from Tasic’s feet on the fringe of the penalty area Gregg had the misfortune to roll forward still holding the ball and so handle it outside the area. Costic’s free-kick (according to Viollet) struck the side of Viollet’s head and gained thereby a tricky curve that Gregg could only palm the ball into the net, to make it three all. The Yugoslavians’ tails were up with a vengeance and only one goal was required to enforce the dearly sought replay. But only three minutes remained for play and Jones, Foulkes, Byrne, Edwards and Colman, who had played magnificently throughout, as had the rest, saw to it that that goal never materialised.”

Not only was Don Davies a reporter trusted by most football fans of the day, he was also a perceptive commentator on the game’s trends. If the great Herbert Chapman had had his way foreign players would have blazed a trail at Highbury long before Arsene Wenger’s tenure, for during the 1930s Chapman agreed terms with the Austrian international goalkeeper Rudi Hiden. However, the government refused to allow the player to take up employment in the United Kingdom without serving a qualification period and one of Chapman’s many new ideas was thus frustrated.

This, I understand, is what Davies intending to publish about Chapman in a book, but his work was found in his desk after Munich:

“On 15 June 1925 in London the Football Association formally adopted the new offside rule passed by FIFA in Paris two days earlier. On the same day Mr Herbert Chapman signed his first contract for Woolwich Arsenal FC. Two events which few connected at the time but which were to react strongly upon each other and profoundly influence the development of British soccer in the next twenty-five years. Herbert Chapman sat down to organise football much as a business magnate settles down to organise profits. In his view every device used by the industrialist to speed up the production of goods could be used equally well to speed up the production of goals.

Specialisation? The Arsenal team became a household word as a group of specialists whose tasks were outlined for them with a clarity never before envisaged. Functionalism? Was there ever a team where the players were more strikingly suited to the parts they had to play? Up-to-date machinery? Chapman left no stone unturned to get the best football machine brains could devise or money could buy. Salesmanship? None knew better than Chapman how to market his ideas, whether to his directors, who were cozened by his ready tongue, to his players, who had faith in his tactical insight, or to his competitors, who were only too willing to follow the lead of a manager who appeared able to harness success to his very chariot wheels. Publicity? There never was a manager either before or since who could use publicity more skilfully, or guide it more surely for his own ends.

Within three months of taking up his new post Chapman had the country buzzing with excitement and controversy over his fanciful deal with Sunderland for Charles Buchan’s transfer, £2000 down and an additional £100 to be paid to Sunderland for every goal scored by Buchan during his first season with his new club! What did this portend? An innocent essay in payment by results, a fresh approach to incentives, or some dark web of financial jiggery-pokery? The public at large seemed inclined to accept this imaginative stroke at its face value, but those in high places felt there was a catch somewhere and placed a ban on all such future transactions, but not before Chapman had got what he wanted, an inside-forward of real genius to lead his attack, and a wealth of nation-wide publicity. To him the purely financial aspect was a minor consideration. Chapman teased and cajoled the London Underground Railway Company into changing the name of the station nearest the new stadium at Highbury from “Gillespie Road” to “Arsenal”, thus enabling him to use the railway as an advertising medium as well as a transport convenience for the swelling crowds. One can imagine the reaction of the public at large “Must be a wonderful club this. Got a station of its own now. Never been known before.” By these and similar devices Chapman kept the Arsenal club constantly in the public eye.
If ever it could be said that the hour produced the man, that surely was true of 1925 when Chapman began his stewardship at Highbury. The immediate effect of the new offside rule had been to throw British soccer into the melting pot. All the existing notions of strategy and tactics had to be scrapped. Age-old dispositions in the field had to be re-considered; attacking centre half-backs, once the fiery hotspurs of any tussle were now outworn conventions. The old concept of five forwards moving upfield in line abreast with three half-backs in close support, a manoeuvre of unforgettable beauty as carried out by teams like Aston Villa or Newcastle United of the Golden Age of football, had to be discarded ruthlessly. Ca’canny, that paralysing curse of industry, was creeping into our football fields; defences henceforth must stay curiously at home separated from their own forward lines by wide stretches of no man’s land, across which new lines of communication had to be charted. A new monster, a veritable headache for centre-forwards, was slowly evolving, the stopper centre half-back or third full-back. A new orientation was being given the duties of wing-halves; these galley slaves no longer shadow their wing men but must guard the route to goal in midfield, and keep up a constant shuttle service between a withdrawn defence and a remote attack. They were in fact key men and were to need speed, resource, ball control and an iron stamina equal to that of the most accomplished forward if they were to attempt to fulfil their manifold tasks.

Behind these two must operate two full-backs big enough to resist the heaviest challenge, fast enough to overtake opposing wing-men, yet mobile enough to be always at hand when the need arose for mutual cover. The tempo of the game as a whole had quickened considerably and the speed of thought required to meet the changing contingencies had quickened also. It goes without saying that in this period of revolutionary change the acute mind of Herbert Chapman was in its element. No one foresaw more clearly than he did the glittering prizes that awaited the first manager who could evolve from the seething fermentation of new ideas some definite strategic plan. Because of the notoriety of “Policeman” Roberts as the most successful, at any rate, of the first stopper centre half-backs, Chapman is often wrongfully credited with inventing this effective device. Actually the idea was tried out by Newcastle United at Villa Park as early as September 1925, and there is reason to believe that Andrew Cunningham of Glasgow Rangers was advocating its adoption even before that. But where Chapman scored was that he was the first to realise that it was not enough to pay lip service to the new practice by making positional changes with existing playing staffs. To extract the maximum benefit from the new tactical arrangements it was essential that every single player in the team should be a specialist of his own field. Backs must be tall, fast and powerfully built like Male and Hapgood, with the stopper centre half-backs all topping the lot; wing halves too, like Crayston, must be physically well-endowed unless, like Copping, they had the bite in their tackiling, which made up for lack of inches. Win-men must be flyers and deadly shots, as Joe Hulme and Bastin; centre-forwards must be bustlers or battering rams with the shoulders of a Lambert or Drake; inside-forwards, astute and cunning, and adept at veiling impending moves. Was ever a pair more happily blended, yet more strikingly contrasted, than James and Jack? That such men were ferreted out, and, once found, were induced to throw in their lot with Arsenal, was a tribute at once to the discernment, tact and bargaining power of this Metternich among football managers. His willingness to spend with a bold prodigality also helped.

Other aspiring managers before Herbert Chapman, and since, have tried short cuts to success by spending lavishly on brilliant individualists, only to find that personal vanities, petty rivalries and unreasoning jealousies have ruled out that one indispensable requisite of team success, internal harmony. It is a measure of Chapman’s mastery of the art of handling men that his glittering assortment of richly endowed but widely diverse footballers from Wales and Scotland, Lancashire and Yorkshire, from the Home Counties and the Western Region, all blended together and played for years with the close-knit unity and the dedicated sense of a special mission that marked Cromwell’s Ironsides. It was inevitable, too, that a team so essentially the product of one mind should have a marked personality of its own; it drew crowds like a magnet. Football lovers everywhere flocked to see these cool exponents of the new strategy, experts so sure of the strength and skill of their superb defence that they deliberately and artfully fell back on the defensive, and positively invited attack for fully 80 percent of every match in which they played. Years went by before opponents rumbled that this falling back was voluntary and not compelled, that it was a vital part of an overall plan to lure opponents further and further away from the close protection of their own goal, since, as Chapman calculated, the further Arsenal’s opponent could be lured downfield the more scope there was for Hulme’s tear-away speed and Bastin’s opportunism.
How often on provincial grounds has one seen the redoubtable Arsenal apparently scrape home by a solitary winning goal after spending four-fifths of the game seemingly fighting with their backs to the wall? With what a nicely simulated air of alert watchfulness and dogged determination would Arsenal defy the headlong attempt of the “Johnnie Raws” to storm their bastions until the time was ripe and the situation apt for the crucial counter-attack! Then would come the long ball driven to the remote right wing and with a capricious swerve on it to elude the opposing back. Following a flash of Hulme’s heels, a swift low cross to the opposite wing and there would be the ice-cool Bastin leisurely picking his spot. In the 1932-33 season Arsenal scored 118 goals and of these Hulme (20) and Bastin (33) claimed 53 from the wings. This James-Hulme-Bastin crossfield manoeuvre was one of the boldest and deadliest match-winning moves of its time, and owed as much to the restraint with which it was used as to the skill and cunning with which it was executed.

It has fallen to few managers to leave as great an imprint on the football of his time as Chapman. In the nine years between signing a contract as Manager and his sudden death in 1934, Arsenal won four First Division championships and figured in three FA Cup Finals, an impressive record for a club which had not before tasted such sweets. Small wonder that legends grew up round the personality of this smiling, urbane, far-seeing Yorkshireman, who appeared to have the Midas touch in everything he did. His contemporaries fell over themselves to follow his example, which did not disturb him in the least, for he knew that without the unique specialists whom he had so shrewdly cornered in advance, his tactical plan would prove a snare and a delusion. Chapman knew that players of exceptional talent are always in short supply; how many of his rivals were likely to find another winger as fast as Hulme, another master of feint and swerve to compare with Jack another schemer as subtle as James, hiding his quick brain beneath a purposely assumed cloak of slovenliness and leaving his partner, Bastin, to fend for himself on the wing? Bastin, yes, was Kipling’s footballer “the cat that walked by himself and all places were alike to him”; without such types his rivals would find themselves clamped down under a a system far too burdensome for them, pinning their faith on the system and not on the peculiar gifts of the players who had to make it work. So Chapman could afford to sit back and watch their struggles with quiet amusement; like the skipper of the Mary Gloucester, he had sufficient confidence in his own ability and inventiveness to keep well ahead of his challengers:


“They copied all they could follow, but they couldn’t copy my mind,
And I left them sweating and stealing a year and a half behind!”

Chapman’s nine years at Highbury passed quickly in a swirl of creative activity, for he was never so happy as when experimenting with something new. But not all his brainwaves were received cordially. He must have been a thorn in the flesh to some who had to adjudicate on the merits of novel ideas (as they were then) such as floodlit football, forty-five minute clocks, goal judges, numbered jerseys, white balls, rubber pitches, limits to transfer fees, schemes to do away with the relegation bogey and so on. There seemed no end to the fellow’s interfering ways and inventiveness! Why couldn’t he let well alone? Time has shown how many of Chapman’s suggestions, spurned at first, have since been incorporated into our national winter game; the absurdities of yesterday have become the commonplace of today. When death struck him down Chapman was striving to repeat his other field triumphs and coax Arsenal along to three First Division championships in a row. Two of these had been safely garnered and the players who followed him to his grave saw to it that the third was duly gathered in. Only thus could they fittingly acknowledge the immense debt of gratitude which they owed to their lost leader, a man whose vision, enterprise and originality had given them the widest scope for their talents and had led them triumphantly from obscurity to fame.”

I am indebted to Jack Cox, the former editor of Boy’s Own Paper for the above extracts from his biography, Don Davies – An Old International.