Of the dribble and the pass

#13, October 24, 2003

It is a common misconception that, in soccer, the dribble and the pass are antithetical, and that the one is done at the expense of the other. This is absolutely not the case, and it is instructive to know that the histories of both are inextricably linked. The two came into the game of soccer at about the same time and as part of the same strategy to wrest control away from the dominant teams in the Football Association, and to improve the standing of teams that had previously been trampled under foot by the game’s founders.

Early soccer actually looked very much like the kind of game that is played by kids of about five and six years of age. There would be two teams made up of attackers and defenders. The best attackers would be big and fast, the best defenders would be big but not so fast. The attackers would be individualists who would merely get the ball and try to push their way down the field, getting as far as they could toward the goal before they were stopped. They would be backed up by the other attackers who would take the ball on when their teammate was stopped. Both teams would use this style of play, hacking at the ball, merely hoping to use their weight advantage (or some other form of intimidation) to beat down their opponents. If you think of the game of American Football and take out all the stopping for downs, then you have what early soccer looked like.

This style of play worked wonderfully until 1883. It worked wonderfully at least for the English aristocracy (the two best teams in the country were the Old-Etonians and Old-Harrovians – ex-schoolboys from Eton and Harrow, the two most elite schools in the country to this day; and, in fact, the FA Cup had developed from an intramural competition played at Harrow). The style worked so well because these aristocrats played against working-class people who were much smaller than themselves. The English elite had diets that were so much better than “their inferiors” that they looked very different from those who were the descendents of impoverished workers who often could barely feed their children. And one of the reasons that these aristocrats were even willing to rub shoulders on the soccer pitch with these “dirty plebians” was that every time they did so they confirmed their own physical superiority.

By 1883, however, teams from the North of England, made up of sons of workers, some of whom were now being paid to play the game, had devised tactics to defeat the snooty aristocrats. Blackburn Rovers came pretty close to winning the FA Cup in 1882, but in the final of 1883, Blackburn Olympic pulled off a startling victory that changed the game forever. What the Olympic had developed was a combination of dribble and pass. Instead of booting the ball down the field and chasing after it, they used intricate movements to pull the ball away from the beefy aristocrats. Once they were in space they looked up and made a pass to someone who was open. Generally, this person would be on the wing, since the old tactics had been designed for full frontal assault and so all defenders were placed in the middle to stop it. Once down the wing, with the defense in disarray wondering what was going on, the ball would be crossed into the middle in front of the goal and a little player would sneak in to put the ball between the posts.

It is important to remember, though, that the workers (who quickly became renowned for their dribbling skills and close control) never relied on the dribble alone. They would have been stomped under foot and pushed off the ball. Besides, they needed to get the ball to the open space to a place where they weren’t going to be pushed around. They quickly realized that “modern scientific football” would require “letting the ball do the work.” (“Scientific” baseball was taking off at the same time in America with some of the same principles being used to defeat the beefy sluggers then dominant.)

Blackburn Olympic won the final and the Old-Etonians were so angry that they accused the team of cheating. The Olympic players had practiced and trained in a way that was clearly inappropriate, and which was beneath the dignity of an aristocrat – for whom the idea of preparing for a game was inconsistent with the notion that they were already perfect. Never again would there be another FA Cup championship team made up of aristocrats, and in fact the game became entirely professional almost overnight (Blackburn Rovers won the next three** years in a row). The aristocrats now decided that they should rule the game, and not play it any longer (a fact that helps explain why the game spread so slowly in the United States early in the last century, because making profit from sport was also beneath the dignity of aristocrats who had inherited all their wealth).

So there you have it. The moral of the story is that dribbling and passing have to be seen together. The dribble has always been used to set up the pass, and vice versa, and it is only on rare occasions that the single player is able to dribble past several players and score a goal. When he or she does this, it is usually because the defenders are anticipating the pass.

And a final historical note. You can imagine that workers had not liked being stomped on for so long. They were beaten down in the pit or in the factory, and then when they came onto the pitch, they were beaten down again. “Workers of the world unite, you have nothing to lose but your chains” (K.Marx) made a lot of sense to them, and “revolution was in the air” (B.Dylan). But in 1885, the slogan changed to “Workers of the world make a pass, you have nothing to lose but the game,” and the world was a much happier place.

** I had previously written four instead of three, thus depriving Aston Villa of the title in 1887 -- for which my apologies to to them. Thanks for the correction from an aol correspondent -- MesterLoyal, October 2005.