“The men are not deviating by one hair’s breadth from the ordinary system of training. To alter that system even for a Cup final would be folly,” the Arsenal manager Herbert Chapman said, four days before the 1927 FA Cup final.
A description of that system was provided by the London Daily News. “Just before 10 each morning the players assemble and take ball practice,” it wrote. “This is varied by sprints on the track, as well as a light programme of physical jerks in the dressing room. Lunch is a modest item. An underdone steak varied with a small fillet of fried plaice or sole, plus a light vegetable ration, is the diet chiefly fancied, and fruit, raw and stewed, is popular with nearly all the men. The liquids at lunch are mainly non-intoxicants.”
But it was not exactly true that Arsenal’s training methods had gone unchanged. The first hint of this came when they moved their sessions behind closed doors a couple of days before the final, leading to “all sorts of rumours that they were training secretly with new and mysterious devices which would render them unbeatable”, according to one newspaper report. And the rumours were half true: yes, there was a mysterious device; no, it did not render them unbeatable (in fact they lost 1-0 to Cardiff).
The secret device was a largely wooden structure with one open end, a sloped floor, and internal surfaces with a variety of curves and angles. A football kicked into it would be returned in an unpredictable direction, forcing the player doing the kicking to improvise a way of controlling it. It had been installed at Highbury a couple of weeks earlier by its inventor, a Trevor Lowe of Sheffield, at a cost of about £60 excluding painting (the equivalent of about £3,000 today).
Joe Hulme played for Arsenal in the Cup final at outside right. “Roughly the idea is this: the player kicks the ball hard at some boards, which are so shaped that the ball comes back at different angles, as well as at different heights,” he wrote. “The player has to keep getting the ball as it comes back, trapping it perhaps, possibly getting it under control, or as his fancy dictates, taking another quick shot. A moment’s thought will serve to show that this sort of training should have the effect of making a player quicker on his feet, should decrease the length of time he takes to get the ball under control. It is meant to make us think and act more quickly. I may add that I believe it has benefited me personally, and the rest of the team are of the same opinion.”
The trend in British football for some time – not one that Chapman ever had much truck with – had been to avoid training with footballs altogether, largely out of a concern that players would get bored of them. As the former Tottenham and Wolves coach Elijah Morse put it: “There cannot be the slightest shadow of doubt that the trainer who gives his men too much ball practice during the week is heading for staleness at breakneck pace. As sure as fate, if fellows are given too much ball practice there comes a day when they lose their keenness. I have sometimes felt I would like to hide the ball away right through the week, because I knew full well that the fellows would be keen as mustard after it on the Saturday afternoon.”
But not only was it felt that footballs could bore footballers, they could also drain them and injure them. “When I was a member of the Aston Villa team and Joe Grierson was the trainer, we had little or no ball practice,” wrote Joe Bache, the former Villa and England striker who went on to coach in England and Germany. “After the first three practice games the ball was put away for the season. He hated the idea of members of the first team playing about with the ball, and thought it added to the possibility of injury.”
Grierson won six league titles between 1894 and 1910 and took Villa to second place on another six occasions, so clearly at the time his ideas were, at the very least, no sillier than anyone else’s. Meanwhile others just did not believe that practising with footballs made much difference to anything. “After the age of 22 a player is either a footballer or he never will be, and it is very doubtful whether practice with the ball will benefit him,” said Arsenal’s Alex James, whose technique was famously masterful, in 1929. “Personally I like to feel the touch of the ball during the week, and at the Arsenal we have it out every day. I know, however, that at some clubs the ball is rarely seen except on match days.”
Lowe happened to introduce his device just as these attitudes were starting to unravel. Still, he initially found the game slow to embrace it. “I offered my invention to the local clubs first, but they would not have it,” he said. “I then asked other clubs to give it a trial, but they declined to do so and would not even look at it. One [top-flight] club said that it did not interest them because only one man could be trained at a time. That is one of the advantages of the device, because the ball keeps coming back to the same man and he has to return it, instead of leaving it to one of the other players. It teaches the players to be quicker on the ball. The Arsenal have only had the device three weeks, but I think it has already improved their play.”
As he tried to promote his invention Lowe claimed, a little dubiously, that “in one month this device will make any player – old or young – two-fifths of a second faster in ball control”, and that “any player can improve the accuracy of both feet in ball control, kicking and shooting 100% in one month by 10 minutes’ thoughtful practice each training day”. It was advertised with a ringing endorsement from Chapman, who said that “our management and players all agree it is the best device ever known for training footballers”.
Wolves installed a training shed shortly after Arsenal and over the following years it spread around the land. A century later it is hard to know exactly which clubs bought one, but local newspapers report Lincoln City installing one in 1930, Birmingham in 1931, Manchester United the following February and Blackpool and Preston in the summer of 1932, the year the Sheffield Daily Telegraph reported it was “so popular at some grounds a time limit for practice on it has had to be fixed”. Chelsea got one in 1933 and the following year one of Lowe’s local teams, Sheffield Wednesday, finally succumbed.
At all these clubs and many more, Lowe’s training shed helped to bring balls back to training. Across the country coaches were reaching the same groundbreaking, gamechanging conclusion: players don’t become stale because they train with a football, they become stale if training is boring. At which point all sorts of crazy stuff started to happen.
It was at around this time that head tennis was first described as a training tool. Tom Griffiths of Wales and Bolton praised Lowe’s device in 1932, though his club did not have one. They did, however, include in their training regime “what might be called, for lack of a better word, compulsory golf”, as well as regular games of crown green bowling. At Wrexham they played baseball, and at Reading Billy Butler introduced games of netball, insisting “half an hour of it is the equivalent of a 10-mile run, and far more enjoyable”. At Bradford City planks of wood would be placed around the training pitch, with players penalised for hitting them with their passes.
Chelsea returned from a tour of Argentina in 1931 saying they had been astonished by the technique of their opponents and with details of how they had honed it. “They got their good ball control through training with chickens,” Chelsea’s chairman, Colonel Charles Crisp, explained. “A chicken was allowed to run in front, and a player followed it, running, as did the chicken, from side to side, thus cultivating ‘body swerve’.” It’s hard to know to what extent this caught on in England, but two years later Everton’s Warney Cresswell was enthusing about how “an excellent form of training for football would be to work for a time on a poultry farm”.
In 2000 Alex Ferguson would condense his outlook as a coach to this: “All my life I’ve felt it is my job to create an environment where players are enjoying training, they look forward to it. If you get that right and if you don’t allow the quality to drop then you will see the results on Saturday.”
It is almost exactly what Sammy Crooks, the England and Derby winger, espoused in 1930, soon after winning his fifth England cap at the age of 22. “Anyone who thinks of the matter carefully will realise that one of the snags about this training business is that it is apt to become a matter of routine,” he wrote. “And routine work, as we all know, is boring. A certain amount of running and so much ball practice must of necessity be included in the training regime. But variety is the spice of the footballer’s life when he is training, just as it is the spice of life in general.
“From what I have gathered in my talks with old players I have come to the conclusion that with the passing of the years training ideas have changed somewhat. And the changes have been directed at dodging the boredom. The player who turns up looking forward to his training will be a better footballer than the one who, going through the same routine every day, gets fed up with it all. You must train with enthusiasm to train with effect.”
This was the time when players first prioritised training with enthusiasm – and, for at least some of them, with an odd, wonky wooden shed.
