The Vets, the Gunners and the Caledonians
Third in a series looking at the history of the game in a growing city
During the 1920 soccer season, Peterborough enjoyed the revival of a pastime that had been part of the local scene since the 1880s, but had been dormant for nearly five years because so many soccer players became soldiers in World War I. The season was well-organized by the Peterborough Soccer Association, whose executive and team representatives met fortnightly at Fred Sutcliffe’s barber shop at 228 Charlotte Street near Aylmer.
Some of the early problems had been recruiting teams for the Peterborough City League. This had been lightly successful as teams were created around workers at some of the city’s leading works: Canadian General Electric, De Laval, Canadian Woolens. As well, the Scottish Caledonian Society fielded a team, known as the Caledonians or Caleys for short. The Great War Veterans Association, the forerunner of the Canadian Legion which was founded in 1926 at a Peterborough convention. The Vets proved to be a strong team in the new league. The sixth team was the Gunners, drawn from the local militia.
Each team was supposed to have a home field, but all the matches for the 1920 season, which ran until July, were held at Nicholls Oval (usually Thursday night) and Saturday afternoons at the Exhibition Grounds. The PSA had difficulties with both sites as they depended on the good will of the park owners and of other teams, such as lacrosse and baseball, which were more established.
The executive recognized that teams needed good opponents, good officials and good and knowledgeable fans. Fred Sutcliffe drew up the schedule as the season went on, and some exhibition games were added, and practice sessions were encouraged. The executive also had a roster of referees and linesmen, some of whom were veterans of earlier soccer days. It is not clear from the newspaper coverage how these were selected, but there were occasional criticisms from the Examiner reporter that they needed to learn the rules about offside. There was some criticism from the newspaper and from fans about some of the calls, and there were times when the fans seemed particularly vocal.
The strategy to ensure knowledgeable fans was two-fold. Fans were admitted free throughout the season when small fees were charged for the playoffs, even though there was no plan for playoffs until the eleventh hour. The Examiner coverage was designed to build up a knowledgeable fan base. The coverage of the games was exceptional and captured the central fact about soccer: each of the ten players was crucial, and each could imagine their positions as central to the action and to the outcome.
The recently published book by a Duke University history professor, Laurent Dubois, The Language of the Game: how to understand soccer, provides a good standard against which to judge the quality of the Examiner coverage. Dubois’s book is organized around the players, both on and off the field.
As noted earlier, the goalies easily saw themselves as crucial. The scoring of goals defined the games, and defined some of the purpose of the fans, the officials and the other players. The goalies were the only players who could use their hands, and over the years there were changes made on how freely the goalie could move. Rule changes defined the size of the areas in front of the goal.
The defenders likewise and rightly saw themselves as central. They were the last line of defense. In 1920, the defenders were called backs. Skillful use of the offside rule allowed them to control effectively the playing area and to confine the freedom of the attackers.
Dubois says “defense is at the very core of soccer.” Defenders constantly work to reconfigure space or to buy time. They pass the ball to the goalie, they try to open up the wings for moving forward, they constrain the field when the focus is defending the goal. Over the years from 1863 tactics developed, ever-changing.
In the early years, players put their heads down and charged. Some of this style was still evident in 1920 in Peterborough. On June 20, in a game moved from Nicholls Oval to the Exhibition Grounds, DeLaval tied with the Gunners, 5-5, in a game described as a “Kick and rush football match”.
However, even in Peterborough by 1920, the formation of players on the field consisted of two backs, three half-backs and five forwards, which is a 2-3-5 formation. Around 1872, smaller Scottish players began passing when playing bigger English players, and the passing style proved popular. Passing was less work for the players, and it allowed the ball to move down the field faster. While defenders were important for defending the goal, they could also promote their own team’s mobility to shift to offence. Defence is always part of soccer tactics.
As Dubois ably discusses, the offside rule constrains the shapes of where players can be on the field. “It is perhaps the most influential and important rule in the game.” (page 71) The rule prevents opponents from getting too close to the goal. “A player is offside when she has moved too far toward the opposing goal, ahead of either the ball or the defensive players from the other team.
” In the 2018 the rule means that an attacking player with the ball behind must have at least two players – the goalie and the last defender – between him and the goal. Because of the rule both the attacker and the defender fight for position. An offside player is unable to touch the ball, and in the military analogy, is no longer part of the team.
The basics of this rule were in place by the 1870s and variations developed over the years. However, in Peterborough in 1920 the Examiner reporter several times stressed the need for referees to understand the offside rule.
Dubois with similar thoroughness also discussed the ways in which midfielders (known as half-backs in 1920) and forwards could be central to the tactics of soccer.
As the 1920 season in Peterborough headed into its last six weeks during June and July, there were surprising developments. The reporter often credited goalies with brilliant goal keeping even when they lost. Walter Flowers dropped the ball after saving it in a game that his Gunners lost to the Vets 4-0: the Examiner observed it was an “unusual thing for him.”
Sometimes, the CGE team had difficulty assembling a team because of work schedules. Some players changed teams; the teams had to provide rosters for the game 48 hours in advance. In one instance, CGE fielded a player named Flanders who had not been registered. The PSA executive took the two points from CGE and gave them to their opponents, the Gunners. The CGE team appealed the decision but lost. The referees were not to start any game if there were unregistered players.
The first draw, 0-0, of the season occurred in June in a game between CGE and the Gunners.
NEXT WEEK: Part 4