How a Scot taught the English to pass
Fascinating new TV drama reveals role of Fergus Suter in creating the beautiful game
For reasons buried in the mists of time, the Blackburn rovers club photographer once asked Fergus Suter to pose next to a huge bearskin, though, as ever, he did not seem terribly fazed.
The supremely modest beginnings of the individual who could say, with no exaggeration, that he taught the English how to pass a football included long hours crafting red Glasgow sandstone as a stonemason and rejection by rangers on the basis of one trial match, at the age of 20.
But the Scottish club’s loss was English football’s gain.
Suter, the man they came to call ‘Fergie’, gravitated to Partick Thistle and then Darwen, Lancashire, where in the words of the actor Kevin Guthrie, who plays him in a new eight-part Netflix drama which premieres tonight, he told his team-mates that there was a way to beat the rich teams from southern England who dominated the early years of the FA Cup: ‘We pass. We move. We pass again.’
There is some consternation in Scotland that the title of the new drama, written by Downton
Abbey creator Julian Fellowes, is The English Game, given the incarnation of football bequeathed by Suter was very much Scottish. The public schoolboys of Eton, Harrow and Charterhouse, who first devised the sport, created something very much like rugby — a tussle of pushing, shoving, whacking and kicking that ploughed upfield like a rolling maul, with everyone fixated on the ball.
But Scots working in the impoverished industrial communities of the Victorian era were slighter in build, so they could simply not run through a herd of people.
They developed the notion of tactics, positioning and passing the ball.
The beginnings of the ‘patternweaving’ approach is dated by author Jonathan Wilson — in his book Inverting the Pyramid — to the 1872 international between England and Scotland at Partick, in which England lined up with a 1-2-7 formation and the Scots, more than a stone per man lighter, went for a 2-2-6. Scotland were expected to be trounced but claimed a 0-0 draw.
English clubs began sending agents north to entice individuals such as Suter. Their skills saw them called the Scotch Professors, though this did not go down well locally.
When word got around that an English agent was snooping, he would be met by an angry mob and run out of town.
Suter needed little encouragement. His Partick team-mate, 31-year-old Jimmy Love, stayed behind in Darwen after the side played a friendly there in 1878 and Suter, perhaps influenced by the rangers rejection, wrote to the Lancashire side’s president Tom Hindle asking if he could get a game, too.
It was more likely a case of Darwen pursuing this two-footed player, who headed the ball strongly, had pace and passed well. Mill owner Charles Walsh financed the team so well they were challenging the aristocratic amateur southern teams who dominated the FA Cup.
Suter seems to have earned £10, cash in hand, every three weeks. He and Love were football’s first professionals.
Fellowes makes no pretence of understanding football, though the new drama paints a vivid picture of the class struggle at the heart of Suter and his team-mates’ extraordinary 1879 FA Cup quarter-final clash with old Etonians.
They reached the game by beating remnants, a team of gentlemen from Berkshire, 3-2 after extra-time — the first giant-killing in English football.
But, after three goals in the last 15 minutes saw them rescue a 5-5 draw at old Etonians, an FA committee comprised of old Etonian players denied them extra-time and forced them to travel south again for the replay.
It doesn’t make the cut of the drama but it was a second replay — also played on southern turf — which the shattered players lost 6-2. Most had jobs in cotton mills while the Etonians were rested and languid.
Blackburn rovers’ first attempts to hire Suter put the relatively modern notion of ‘tapping up’ into focus.
The new drama depicts John Cartwright, Blackburn chairman, walking calmly on to the pitch before a match to invite Suter to sign — ‘£100 up front and we’ll double your salary,’ Cartwright tells him, a full six years before professionalism was legalised.
The drama presents a highly watchable depiction of Suter’s invidious position as one of only two players being paid by a mill owner who is being forced to cut mill wages and close the factory, against the backdrop of plummeting cotton prices.
The other protagonist is old Etonian captain Arthur Kinnaird (Edward Holcroft) who, having cheated past Suter’s Darwen in the FA Cup, begins to realise the complacency of the ruling class.
Suter made that big move to Blackburn — a controversial development in a sport already attracting a mass following.
He played in four FA Cup finals for the club, winning three.
By the time he was contributing strongly to Blackburn’s defeat of
West Bromwich Albion in the 1885 final replay, the game had been wrenched from the aristocrats’ grip. Dozens of Scots were following his route south. When Liverpool FC were founded, ten Scots were in the team. Preston North End, who won the first league title, contained seven. Suter’s career was in its closing stages when the Football League was formed in 1888. He made one appearance, deputising in goal. There was a handsome testimonial for him before he became landlord of Blackburn’s Bay Horse Hotel. With Lancashire mills closing, the original Darwen FC were bankrupt 20 years after the miracle season of 1879. Suter died in 1916. His 1885 winners’ medal fetched £6,500 at Sotheby’s in August 2000. ‘He knew in every dressing room he was the best player in the team,’ said Guthrie, who plays him. ‘If we equate him to someone in England, he’s Paul Scholes, ryan Giggs. ‘An entire social movement was borne of his decision to come down to England, take wages and play.’
The English Game premieres on Netflix tonight at 8pm
Best player in the team... he was the Giggs or Scholes of his day