An extract from ‘Arthur Rowe’, the latest in the Spurs Shots series of ebooks by Martin Cloake and Adam Powley, gives a flavour of the man who quietly brought an early version of Total Football to England, in N17.
When the great managers of football are listed these days, Arthur Rowe rarely gets a mention. He comes from an age of football that predates television’s grip on the game, from an age where personality had not yet elbowed its way to the fore. True, the game was a mass obsession and Rowe was revered in his time. But he seems to have slipped from the collective memory. If the absence of mass media and the cult of the sporting personality is to blame for this, how come Stanley Matthews and Nat Lofthouse are still names that could trip off the lips of the most cursory student of football? Maybe it is because players have greater status in the collective consciousness than managers. But if this is so, how can the status of Herbert Chapman and Stan Cullis be explained? Rowe was never a man to court the limelight or make extravagant claims for what he did. Like the greatest of the greats, he genuinely saw what he did as simply the best way to do the job. And he got on with it with the minimum of fuss as if it was the most natural thing in the world. Which to him it was.
Not only was Rowe a great manager in the English game, he was a great manager for the English game. Because arguably, without Rowe the English game would have stayed constrained and oblivious inside its self-satisfied cocoon of assumed superiority for far longer than it did. And maybe Rowe is not afforded the status he deserves because the game does not fully understand what it is he did. Continue reading…
