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How 'Fergie' taught the English to pass: New Netflix television drama shows Scotsman Fergus Suter creating the beautiful game

For reasons buried in the mists of time, the Blackburn Rovers club photographer once asked Fergus Suter to pose next to a huge bearskin, though, as ever, he did not seem terribly fazed.

The supremely modest beginnings of the individual who could say, with no exaggeration, that he taught the English how to pass a football included long hours crafting red Glasgow sandstone as a stonemason and rejection by Rangers on the basis of one trial match, at the age of 20.

But the Scottish club’s loss was English football’s gain.

New Netflix series The English Game shows how Fergus Suter taught the English passing
Scots developed the notion of tactics, positioning, and passing the ball in the late 1880s

Suter, the man they came to call ‘Fergie’, gravitated to Partick Thistle and then Darwen, Lancashire, where in the words of the actor Kevin Guthrie, who plays him in a new eight-part Netflix drama which premieres on Friday, he told his team-mates that there was a way to beat the rich teams from southern England who dominated the early years of the FA Cup: ‘We pass.