Frank Buckley

Frank Buckley
Personnel
Surname	Franklin Charles Buckley
birthday	October 3, 1882
place of birth	Urmston ,  England
date of death	December 21, 1964
Place of death	Walsall ,  England
position	Middle runner
Men's
Years	station	Games (goals) 1
1902-1904	Aston Villa	0 (0)
1904-1905	Brighton & Hove Albion
1905-1907	Manchester United	3 (0)
1907-1908	Manchester City	11 (0)
1909-1913	Birmingham FC	55 (4)
1913-1914	Derby County	92 (3)
1914	Bradford City	4 (0)
1919-1920	Norwich City	1 (0)
National team
Years	selection	Games (goals)
1914	England	1 (0)
Stations as a trainer
Years	station
1919-1920	Norwich City
1923-1927	Blackpool FC
1927-1944	Wolverhampton Wanderers
1944-1946	Notts County
1946-1948	Hull City
1948-1953	Leeds United
1953-1955	Walsall FC
1 Only league games are given.

Franklin Charles "Frank" Buckley , better known as Major Frank Buckley (born October 3, 1882 in Urmston , † December 21, 1964 in Walsall ) was an English football player and coach .

The veteran of the Second Boer and First World War was active as a long-time coach in English football between 1919 and 1955 after an average footballing career . With military-style methods, he stood for an authoritarian style of leadership and celebrated his greatest successes in his 17-year tenure with Wolverhampton Wanderers by winning two English runner-up titles.

Career as a soccer player

Buckley was born in Urmston, southwest of Manchester . At a young age, he joined the British Army in 1898. He fought in South Africa in the Second Boer War and upon his return he decided to become a professional footballer.

At his first station Aston Villa Buckley did not appear in the first team in two years and the next two stages Brighton & Hove Albion and Manchester United remained transit stations, although he came to three league appearances for "United" between September 1906 and March 1907 (two draws, one defeat). At local rivals Manchester City , the central defender was a bit more permanent with eleven championship games; However, he only celebrated his breakthrough from 1909 at the second division club FC Birmingham , as today's "Birmingham City" was called earlier. This was followed by a return to the English top division, where he made a name for himself as a first division player at Derby County from 1913 , which even helped him to his only international match for England against the all-Irish selection on April 14, 1914 (the game ended with a 0-3 defeat). His stay at the follow-up club Bradford City was short-lived due to the looming First World War .

Coaching career

First experience

Buckley went to war and commanded the so-called "Football Battalion " within the 17th Middlesex Regiment . There he suffered lung and shoulder wounds in the Battle of the Somme and was later promoted to the rank of major . After returning home, Buckley took up his first coaching activity at Norwich City . The future of the over-indebted "canaries" hung by a thread; the creditors, however, were convinced of a new start after an extraordinary general meeting. So Buckley took up his work in February 1919 and led the club straight away in the Southern League . In September 1919, the war veteran, who was also employed as the club's secretary, was once again on the square himself. Due to the ongoing economic problems in the club, Buckley fell victim to a complete new staffing in July 1920. For three years he was then without any connection to football and so instead he traveled through the country as a traveling salesman for confectionery manufacturers. During one of these trips, he met a director of Blackpool FC on the train , who in turn arranged a meeting with club president Linsay Parkinson.

That Buckley's engagement - as with his later engagements - represents a turning point for the respective club, it quickly became apparent in the coastal town of Blackpool . From the redesign of the jersey to the composition of the team to a military-style training regime, Buckley ushered in a “new era”. He paid special attention to the fitness of his "subordinates" and prescribed them both a strict nutrition plan and early bed rest on the two days before a game. He also attached particular importance to the field of physiotherapy , and Buckley earned a reputation for being able to recover quickly convalescent players. In terms of sport, the four-year-long era of the major in the second division was mixed; after a good fourth place in the first season 1923/24, the "Tangerines" crashed to 17th in the following year. After two more years, Buckley left the club, whose ambitions at that time had remained limited due to limited economic resources, in the direction of Wolverhampton .

Wolverhampton Wanderers

In July 1927, Buckley was coach of the Wolverhampton Wanderers . He quickly introduced his famous paperback to the Wolves, too, in which he explained to each player in detail what was expected of him. Buckley also made these rules public and even asked the townspeople to contact him if one of his protégés violated them. In addition, he built up a close-knit talent scouting network and appealed to his employer - as in Norwich and Blackpool - by hiring promising young players at reasonable prices.

After a two-year start-up, his development work slowly began to bear fruit. With the help of the new goalscorer Billy Hartill , whom Buckley had committed in one of his first official acts in 1927, the relegation candidate became a midfield team in the 1929/30 season and only a year later with 4th place a serious aspirant for promotion. The team had internalized Buckley's philosophy by now - it was mostly (simply) that defenders get the ball forward as quickly as possible, midfielders devote themselves more to passing than dribbling , the central strikers get the ball into the goal and the wingers both ensure the appropriate flanks and take over the guarding of the opposing defenders. The rise to the first division succeeded in 1932 by winning the second division championship. Billy Hartill contributed again 30 hits and in the title team were only players that Buckley had brought to the Wolves.

In the First Division Buckley's team managed to stay in the league for four consecutive years, although the permanent placements in the lower half of the table did not yet bring the "big leap". Rather, special attention was paid to promoting a long-term perspective; In addition, Buckley was often amazed at his own attachment with the sale of top performers - the sale of Hartill to Everton FC in 1935 was particularly spectacular - and the new signing of inexpensive talent, including Stan Cullis in 1934 , who later became team captain and, after his active career, a long-standing successful Was a trainer with the Wolves. A pleasant side effect was the stabilization of the club's finances due to the constant transfer plus. When the season 1936/37 began to grow, the patience of the appendix was for the time being exhausted; After a 1: 2 home defeat against Chelsea , fans of the south stand stormed the home Molineux Stadium and demanded the removal of the coach. Buckley turned down the offer to be brought home under police protection, and along with the club's board of directors he continued to stick to his line by selling the popular winger Billy Wrigglesworth to Manchester United in January 1937 . After this "steel bath" the team swung up to good results shortly before the turn of the year 1936/37 and ended the season on a surprisingly successful fifth place in the table.

In the summer of 1937 Buckley began a collaboration with the chemist Menzies Sharp, who, on the basis of the experiments of the Frenchman Serge Voronoff, promised to be able to induce increased performance in football players with injections of monkey testicle extracts. The initially skeptical Buckley carried out a self-test on himself within three to four months before he started treating his players - the experienced Dicky Dorsett, on the other hand, refused to participate and thus provoked occasional arguments with the coach. These events aroused displeasure among the competition, especially since the Wolves won the runner-up in the 1937/38 season. Tommy Lawton spoke after the 7-0 defeat of his Everton FC that Cullis had walked past him with "glassy eyes" and especially the 10-1 record win over Leicester City led to public investigations by the Football League . The controversy ended with an information bulletin being posted in the players' booths; there was no ban. The topic remained in public discussion for a long time, although the contents of the injections later turned out to be simple vaccines against colds. One of the other “tricks” Buckley used was the habit of flooding one's place before home games. While the coach emphasized that it would be better to play on soft surfaces, opponents saw it as a measure that should make it more difficult for more technically gifted teams to combine. Buckley also set new priorities in the field of psychology . Buckley's team was notorious with the opponents at the time and the national football association ( Football Association ) denied the Wolves a trip abroad with reference to "numerous reports of misconduct on the part of the Wolverhampton Wanderers players", which primarily meant the seven suspensions that Buckley's men had bought during official games.

The coach's liaison with the club was so intense that Buckley signed a 10-year deal in 1938. Again he won the English runner-up with the team, which was also in the final of the FA Cup ; However, this was lost with 1: 4 against Portsmouth FC . With the new goalscorer Dennis Westcott , who scored just as many goals in 43 competitive games, and Stan Cullis, allegedly the best English central defender this season, Buckley had put together a promising team himself, which also included the talents Billy Wright and Jimmy Mullen who developed into "superstars" in the 1950s. When the Second World War interrupted the official game operation of the Football League, Buckley initially intended to be a soldier a third time. However, since he was considered too old, he instead commanded a homeland security unit in Wolverhampton. He strongly encouraged his clubmates to join the army - a Chronicle of the Football Association recorded in 1945 that by the end of the fighting, 91 Wolves club members had gone to war. In the remaining war league games Buckley remained active in a responsible position; In addition, he used the training opportunity in the club to exercise the home guard subordinate to him. On February 8, 1944, the long-time coach surprisingly resigned from his position after the club chairman (and "confidante" of Buckley) Ben Matthews had previously retired.

From Nottingham to Leeds

Buckley then trained Notts County . This club was only third-rate, but it was ready to pay the major an annual salary of then unimaginable £ 4,000. However, he did not succeed and so he moved in 1946 - just hours after his resignation - to Hull City , another third division club. The greatest achievement there was that in March 1948 he was able to commit the old international Raich Carter from the first division club Derby County . Carter played himself for some time, also acted as a kotrainer next to Buckley and was his successor a short time later.

Buckley found a new challenge in the second division Leeds United . As in Wolverhampton, he also showed his flair for talent in Leeds and found in the young John Charles a football player who would become one of the top British players in the 1950s. Once again he set new standards and completely rebuilt youth work; numerous veteran players had to leave the club. With Tommy Burden he signed an old friend from Wolverhampton from Chester City and made him his captain and mouthpiece in the team. In the midst of another financially difficult environment, Buckley managed to always bring a competitive team onto the pitch according to the principle of "buy cheap, sell high" and shaped Leeds United long beyond his own work with the requirement of an extremely physical game - quite a few saw in him the intellectual originator of the robust championship team from 1969 and 1974, which was noticeable less for the joy of playing than for the often borderline physical effort.

Buckley's greatest sporting success in Leeds was in the 1949/50 season reaching the quarter-finals in the FA Cup, which was lost 1-0 at Arsenal . The longed-for rise in the first class did not materialize until the end of his tenure in 1953; instead, Buckley steadily sold top performers such as national players Con Martin and Aubrey Powell and discovered later top players at a young age, including Jack Charlton in 1952 , who became world champion fourteen years later . After two last years at FC Walsall , Buckley, who also regularly participated in training in old age, finally retired from football at the age of almost 72 years.

Major Buckley, who had five brothers ( Chris Buckley was also a successful footballer and chairman of Aston Villa between 1955 and 1966), died in December 1964 at the age of 82.

literature

• Matthews, Tony: Wolverhampton Wanderers - The Complete Record . Breedon Books, 2008, ISBN 978-1-85983-632-3 , pp. 166-167 .

Web links

• Profile on englandfootballonline.com