An English Centre- Forward
By JOHN ARLOTT 0 kick an inflated leather sphere the size of a man's head, is a simple urge. But football, the sport which springs from that instinct, is, in all but its simplest forms, something of an artificial sport. The spontaneous kick- about is not all of football. Attendances prove that " friendly " matches fall below the competition of two elevens shouted on by crowds to whom only winning matters.
The cricket ground is part of English landscape, so integral that the passer-by barely notices it. It is again, and newly, a complete picture when its players are there , it needs no more. The spectators at a cricket match are demanded by economics, they are not essential to the character of the game. • Lord's under snow or with its great terraces empty, is not the less a great cricket ground. The football ground is different. Its gaunt, draughty iron stands bulk starkly in the landscape, so that the passer-by reacts at once with " Whose ground is that ? " Even when he knows, the picture in his mind is not a satisfactory one. Give him players at practice and still the result is incomplete. The picture is full only when the roaring, swaying thousands of the. Saturday afternoon release fill the ground with their fear, delight, anger, anxiety, triumph, and drive the players on with their voices and their wooden rattles.
There is the challenge, to manager or director—to make this alternate Saturday afternoon epic, make it, above all, successful. Go out and find as boys—or, with a five-figure cheque book, buy in the strange, rumour-ridden transfer market—the great of the game. Build another " Team of all the Talents," a fresh eleven of " Invincibles." The planner of cricket teams is shackled by birth or residential qualifications, by sheer shortage of materials, the difficulty of obtaining complete balance. For the football manager, however, the ideal is real, if' rarely attained. In their great periods, Preston North End, Aston Villa, Sunderland, Huddersfield Town and Arsenal did build football elevens which could face the selected of the rest of the football world with some confidence. Did not seven of the theft Arsenal team represent England in one match in the 'thirties, when the remaining four members of their eleven included a Scot, a Welshman and another English international player ? Now again, Arsenal have brought another of the few abso- lutely great football players to their prosperous and solid stadium at Finsbury Park. Lawton—Tommy Lawton to the popular press and the football followers of the British Isles— is no longer the first choice as centre-forward for England. He is, however, still the master craftsman, still capable, with flick of head or boot, even by a single motion of his body without actual possession of the ball—of deceiving a massed and ordered defence to create a goal. In fact, as his personal powers of scoring goals have decreased, his power of creating them for others has increased.
He is heavily built ; fairly tall but thick of chest and trunk, with thighs like cannon. His hair is greased down, which gives his head an almost rabbit-sharp line—and allows a football to skid from it along any course he chooses.
Then, indeed, he is the supreme master of a football. When the long kick is lofted down the middle of the field, he rises from a lounging ease to the height of what footballers call " the climb," high above any man who ever sought to mark him. Seeming to possess a strange power to hover there, at the peak of his leap, he will coolly, with forehead or side of head, flick or drive the ball away with a precision incredible to those whose heads are hurt by contact with a sodden, leaden football. There he haS been the master, not necessarily from choice, but because the football of his time has chosen that much of the game shall be Played in the air. That nineteenth-century Cap- tain of the Royal Engineers who first astonished the crowds at amateur football seventy years ago by butting the ball, began one of the major skills of the game. Lawton is equally the master when it is played where the' old Scottish masters of ball-play and the classical tenets of the game demanded it—close to the wet turf. The professional takes his football boots a full two sins too small, to mould them by wearing them in a hot footbath, by dubbin or. just by wear, until they cling tightly to his foot, leaving it as sensitive to the ball as a thinly gloved hand. Such boots, the tools of his craft, studded to his choice and balance, carry Lawton certain-footed over sun-hardened, slimy or frozen ground, where he will cut tight circles, revolving as if in a waltz, the ball cuddled in his instep.
Then, in possession, he is the footballing genius. The skill is not intelleCtital, it is felt, a craft-shrewdness by which be feels—when be cannot see—a gap opeOing in the defence behind him, so that he Will suddenly sw."ng and, without need to look, steer the ball into it. Not all of those with whom lie has played have been of similar understanding, and he has come to rest to watch the creation fade away for lack of appreciation. It is hard for the joucneytnan footballer to play alongside Lawton, often impossible for him to seize the oppor- tunity the centre-forward has created --one only to be taken by such another as himself.
Given the goal opening himself. Lawton's timing is the reflex of the conjurer who catches bullets in a plate, an automatic adjustment made on sight as by nature. He will take the ball as it comes, and, dependent upon his angle and the point of his foot most conveniently -brought to bear,. will flick, glide, hook, push, steer, jab or drive the ball home with an accuracy which is textbook perfect. Rarely indeed does he send a ball more than fractionally high or wide of the goal, for his balance, the bringing of his body over the ball for its minute direction, is part of his action in shooting.
Most impressively of all, he will shoot a ball, with a free- looking, swing of his leg which has the effect of some giant Rail, meeting the ball in mid-air to crash it tearingly at goal. For ten years, nO other centre-forward in the country—nor, indeed, in the world—could challenge Tommy Lawton at his best. It is long now since 'he has played with a full eleven of his own 'kind, and his age now denies him the dash of his 'teens. -Nevertheless, merely to see him sling a pass casually, yet with utter precision, to the wing or, seemingly poised in mid-air, select his spot and throw his forehead at the ball to direct it there with the force of many a man's kick, is to recognise greatness within the limits of the game at which Englishmen excel. Now, at Highbury, there is the skill about him to challenge his emulation : he is not, I fancy, the man to ignore such a challenge nor, accepting it, to fall short of meeting it.
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