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goal. The FA came up with two possible solutions - either to require only two players to be in advance of the forward, or to add a line in each half 40 yards from goal behind which a forward could not be offside - and set about testing them in a series of exhibition games, with one half being played under one alternative, and the other under the other.
    At a meeting in London in June, the FA decided they preferred the version requiring only two defending players to play a forward onside. The Scottish FA soon adopted the amendment as well, and it was they who presented the proposed rule change to the International Board, the new variant being implemented ahead of the 1925-26 season. Previously a side looking to play the offside trap had been able to retain one full-back as cover as his partner stepped up to try to catch the forward; the new legislation meant that a misjudgement risked leaving the forward through one-on-one with the goalkeeper.
    On the face of it, the amendment was an immediate success, with the average number of goals per game shooting up to 3.69 the following season, but it brought about significant changes in the way the game was played, and led directly to Herbert Chapman’s development of the ‘third back’ or W-M formation. And that, it is widely held, was what precipitated the decline and increasing negativity of English football.
    The argument is put most strongly by Willy Meisl, the younger brother of Hugo, in Soccer Revolution , which was written in horrified response to England’s 6-3 defeat at home to Hungary in 1953. Meisl, it should be said, had been a devout Anglophile even before he fled rising anti-Semitism in Austria to settle in London, and his book reads as a lament for a past he experienced only second-hand and probably idealised. He became a respected figure in sports journalism, writing mainly on English football for foreign publications, but Soccer Revolution , for all its fine phrase-making, is, to modern eyes at least, a strikingly eccentric work. For him, the change in the offside rule was football’s version of the Fall; the moment at which innocence was lost and commercialism won out. Perhaps it was, but it was the very thin end of what is now a gargantuan wedge.
    As he saw it, for he was no less a romantic than his brother, blinkered directors looking no further than their balance sheets had blamed the laws for football’s failings without ever considering that they may be ‘guilty of a wrong approach to the game’. And so they pressed ahead with a policy that ‘might have appeared to the layman a slight revision in the Laws of the Game’ but which ‘turned out to be the crack of a shot that started an avalanche’.
    And here again the divide is reached between those who seek to win, and those who wish simply to play well. These days the debate often feels perfunctory, but in the twenties it was sufficiently alive that the notion of a league itself - ‘an incubus’ roared Brian Glanville - began to be questioned. ‘The average standard of play would go up remarkably if the result were not the all-important end of matches,’ Chapman admitted. ‘Fear of defeat and the loss of points eat into the confidence of players… What it comes to is that when circumstances are favourable, the professionals are far more capable than may be believed, and it seems that, if we would have better football, we must find some way of minimising the importance of winning and the value of points…’ Winning and losing in football, though, is not about morality any more than it is in life. Even those who agree most wholeheartedly with Danny Blanchflower’s dictum that ‘the great fallacy is that the game is first and last about winning; it is … about glory, it is about doing things in style and with a flourish’ would surely not have it decided in the manner of figure-skating, by a panel of judges awarding marks out of ten. It is a simple but unfortunate fact that eventually those