{"id":8014,"date":"2023-07-08T14:34:27","date_gmt":"2023-07-08T13:34:27","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.goonerholicsforever.com\/?p=8014"},"modified":"2023-07-17T09:59:47","modified_gmt":"2023-07-17T08:59:47","slug":"boy-bastin-the-boy-wonder-on-the-wing","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.goonerholicsforever.com\/?p=8014","title":{"rendered":"Boy Bastin: The Boy Wonder on the Wing"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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TTG’s recent piece on the most impactful transfers of his lifetime made me think about where the \u00a32,000 Herbert Chapman paid for Cliff ‘Boy’ Bastin in the summer of 1929 would rank. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Less than seven months earlier, Chapman had shattered the British transfer record by buying David Jack from Bolton Wanderers for \u00a310,647, making him the first five-figure player. However, Jack was in his late twenties, a proven First Division goalscorer and an England international. Bastin had barely turned 17, with just six goals in 17 Third Division South appearances for his hometown club, Exeter City. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Spending \u00a32,000 on a teenager \u2014 worth \u00a3163,000 in today’s money but upwards of \u00a320 million in the inflated currency of football transfers \u2014 raised eyebrows.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The story goes that in April 1929, Chapman ‘discovered’ Bastin when scouting a Watford player but was so impressed by the young inside left playing for Watford’s opponents that he signed him the next day. Bastin was likely more of a known entity than that story implies. First, he had turned professional and made his league debut at the notably young age of 16 and second; he had played representative football, including for England Schoolboys against Wales in 1926 when he was 14.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The meticulously well-informed Chapman would likely have been aware of that. Wherever the truth lies, Bastin became an Arsenal player in June 1929, making his debut nine games into the new season on October 5 in a 1-1 draw against Everton at Goodison Park. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

He played the next game, another draw, against Derby County at Highbury, but not again until the Boxing Day visit to Portsmouth. There, he was switched from inside to outside left. Chapman had finally found the player to fill the winger’s role the way he saw it. After that, Bastin was rarely out of a team that would dominate the 1930s, playing at least 35 games a season until injury restricted his appearances in 1938\u201339.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

By then, Bastin was an Arsenal legend, collecting five First Division title winners medals, two FA Cup winners medals and 21 England caps. When England picked him in November 1931, still only 19, he was the youngest player to have won an England cap, a League title (1930-31) and the FA Cup (1930).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Proto-Pires<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Moving Bastin to the left wing was the final piece in the puzzle that completed Chapman’s first trophy-winning side. Wingers then were typically mazy dribblers who hugged the touchline, beat their full-back on the outside and swung over crosses aimed at the forehead of a battering-ram centre-forward who would bundle ball, keeper and anyone or anything else in the way into the back of the net. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Chapman wanted his wingers to score goals, not just provide them. He moved them in from the touchline into what we now call the half-spaces, ready to latch onto the long passes that Alex James and the underrated Bob John threaded inside the full-backs. They then used their pace to cut in directly on goal. Whether or not Chapman invented the role or, as with his WM formation, refined to perfection ideas being experimented with by others, it was key to his unorthodox counterattacking game that brought Arsenal its first sustained run of silverware. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

It also let Chapman deploy an additional player in midfield to give the overload needed for his system of covering that was key to Arsenal’s renowned defence. Exceptionally, Alex James played more like a 6 than the 10 that inside lefts of the day were numerically and positionally.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In Bastin on the left and Joe Hulme on the right, Chapman had two of the first inverted wingers \u2014 although not in the modern sense; Bastin was left-footed, and Hulme right-footed, so both played on their ‘natural’ wing. Hulme was famed for his blistering pace, but Bastin was quick and had the composure in front of goal to perfectly play this new role. His tally of 178 goals in 396 games stood as the club record until 1997 when Ian Wright surpassed it. His club record of 150 league goals lasted until 2006, when Thierry Henry topped it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Bastin was only 27 when the Second World War broke out, and the Football League was suspended. Had the war and leg injuries that sidelined him for nearly half the 1938-39 season, in which he scored just four goals, not denied him several more years at his peak, he would almost certainly have added the eight goals to his tally needed to push Wrighty down a notch and possibly the 51 to do the same to TH14. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

His place as Arsenal’s third-highest goalscorer will be secure for a while. Our current career highest scorer, Starboy Saka, will have to score more than 20 goals a season for the next seven seasons to catch up.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The war years<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Bastin spent the war as an ARP Warden. The Army rejected him for active duty because of his worsening deafness. There are stories that he had such trouble hearing teammates’ shouts against the crowd noise that Alex James would flash him hand signals to indicate where he was going to pass the ball. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The war also brought a cameo in the classic 1942 propaganda film One of Our Aircraft is Missing, Bastin’s second film role after a part in the Arsenal Stadium Mystery shot in 1939.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

More bizarrely, in 1941, an Italian radio broadcast said that he had been captured during the Battle of Crete \u2014 claiming the demise of prominent Allied personalities was a practice of Axis propaganda broadcasters seeking to weaken civilian morale. However, this fake news was undermined by the fact that Bastin was on duty on the roof of Highbury along with his fellow ARP Warden Arsenal physio, Tom Whittaker. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The broadcast might also have been payback for Bastin’s participation in the ‘Battle of Highbury’ in 1934. An England XI with seven Arsenal players beat the Italian national side that had just won the second FIFA World Cup in what is regarded as one of the most violent games ever.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Bastin played some wartime games for the club and was still an Arsenal player when the Football League resumed. However, deep into his thirties and a shadow of the winger he was because of his injuries, he played only seven more times without scoring. His final competitive Arsenal goal had come six and a half years earlier, against Sunderland at Highbury in February 1939.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

His final match was a 5-2 defeat by Manchester United at Maine Road (Old Trafford was unusable because of war damage) in September 1946. He formally retired the following January and went to run a cafe on the North Circular Road with his wife, Joan. There, a teenage Brian Granville interviewed him for a ghostwritten autobiography published in 1950. While far from a ‘kiss-and-tell’, it became controversial because of Bastin’s forthright opinions on some teammates’ shortcomings and those of Chapman’s successor, George Allison, whom Bastin accused of losing ‘the Chapman way’. In 1938, Allison had told Bastin to take a month off ‘to recover his appetite for the game’.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Bastin subsequently returned to Exeter, where he became the landlord of the Horse and Groom pub. He died in 1991 at the age of 79.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Legacy<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

In an age when young men generally looked older than they were, the Boy Wonder, as Whitaker had called him, was the opposite. His youthful looks and slight frame \u2014 5’8″ and weighing barely 150 pounds throughout his career \u2014 famously earned him the soubriquet, ‘Boy’ Bastin. Even in his wedding photographs \u2014 he married in the summer of 1939 in the same church in Hendon where Chapman lay buried \u2014 he looks younger than his 27 years and even than his bride, four years his junior. As you will hear in the stilted interviews in the Pathe News film below, shot ahead of the 1932 Cup Final, even Bastin called himself Boy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Len Shackleton, the great Sunderland and England inside forward in the late 1940s and 1950s, wrote in his autobiography that growing up in Yorkshire, he and his schoolmates all wanted to be Bastin in their playground games. Yet the quiet, almost introverted Bastin’s legacy is not to be Arsenal’s first superstar. Alex James, who joined the club at the same time as Bastin, would outrank him in that crowded firmament, and the accolade probably belongs to Andy Ducat, who played for the club three decades earlier. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Bastin’s career achieved so much so early and ended too soon. He said the 1930-31 side that delivered Arsenal’s first title was the finest he played in. Your correspondent would contend that assertion, but Bastin’s prodigious and particular talents — speed, clinical finishing and a sharp football brain — were the key to Arsenal’s innovative counterattacking football that swept all before it in the 1930s. Without that, none of the Chapman-era teams would have been as great and successful as they were\u2014two thousand pounds shrewdly spent. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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